Blog

What we are working on for 2011

By Rien | January 14th, 2011 | 18 Comments

After two years of hard work, collecting feedback from our users, and taking a good look at the market, we’ve learned a lot. Many things happened on the web as well; the release of the iPhone and iPad, the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, etcetera. All good motives for us to work on our strategy during the last summer. This resulted in a clear vision about how we are going forward with our company and product. We’re presenting this vision early this year with the release of a completely new Viewbook website, and identity that tells our story much better. I can already say it looks and feels great!

iPad portfolio app
We’re also really excited about the release of our iPad portfolio app, also early this year. To everyone without an iPad, get one! This app truly transforms your iPad into a beautiful, digital portfolio.

New features and website editor
‘What about all the existing feature requests?’ I hear you ask? Our next adventure and largest project until now has already started; we’re designing and building a completely new website editor, from the ground up. Adding many new features you’ve requested: video page formats, social media integration, many new design options, custom fonts and more flexible layouts. Many of your requests will be integrated into this release. Of course we’ll keep you posted through our blog along the way. Keep an eye out!

It has now been two years since we’ve started our company in 2009. We grew extensively and have won several awards, a huge motivator to keep putting more time and energy into continually improving our product. We’re also very happy with all the feedback we’ve received from our users both positive and negative, feature requests and all the other ideas. Many thanks for your input, it truly does make Viewbook better.

Thank you again for all the support and for choosing Viewbook.

New Album Styling Features

By Alrik | January 14th, 2011 | 1 Comment

We just released some new features and enhancements for the album styling, to help you style your albums more visually and faster and give you some extra options. Read more in the step by step tutorial.

New styling panel design
The new styling panel gives you an overview of the different aspects that you can style, in stead of showing you all detailed options at once, like it was before. You can now click on one of the options, it opens up and gives you the specific options to edit. Click again and voila! It closes.

Album style presets
Saving page designs as presets was already possible, but now you can create style presets for your albums as well. Saving an album style preset for your client presentations and another one for the albums that you embed elsewhere and another for the albums that you tweet, saves you a lot of time. Every new album that you create you can apply the saved preset to in just a few clicks.

Album credit link
You can now add a credit link in the footer of your albums, which brings visitors to your main site. So for all albums that you send to people via e-mail or share via Twitter, Facebook or any other place, they see the link to your main website, or any other site that you like them to go to. This little text field can also be nice to mention credits and copyrights.

Simpler URL’s for your Sites and Pages

By Alrik | January 14th, 2011 | 1 Comment

A much requested feature. We’ve skipped the “/portfolio” part in your Page URL’s. This makes links to your Pages much simpler.

Page URL’s
Before, page URL’s were in the form of:
username.viewbook.com/portfolio/work
Or when on a custom domain: yourname.com/portfolio/work

The new page URL will have this form:
username.viewbook.com/work
or yourname.com/work

When you create a second website the name of the site will be included in the URL, for example:
username.viewbook.com/commercial/work
or yourname.com/commercial/work

You can create as many sites as you like and all sites will have more logical URL forms this way.

Album URL’s
By making the page URL’s simpler we had to make the Album URL’s a bit more complicated. The URL’s to your albums now include an “/album” part.

Before, album URL’s were in the form of:
username.viewbook.com/fashion

Now, album URL’s will be in the form of:
username.viewbook.com/album/fashion

Naturally, all your current URL’s will stay fully functional. However, there is one but. If a new page has the same URL as an old album, the page will be displayed, not the album. In this case, use the new album URL.