While visiting with Sara Kelley of Sara Kelley Photography at ImagingUSA, she shared with me on how she is publishing a preview of her album designs on her blog. I was fascinated and asked her to write up this post for all of you! Thank you Sara! We appreciate you!
Embedding your album and book designs on your branded website.
I am so excited to tell you about a new feature that was recently released for ApproveMyAlbum.com. The new feature, embedding, allows you to share your album and book designs with your clients on your own branded website instead of sending your clients to review their design at ApproveMyAlbum.com. As you all know, consistent branding is a HUGE part of the image you portray to your clients, so it’s so important to brand everything in your business to match your image, this includes your website, Facebook page, slideshows, business cards and flyers, proof sites, and now even your album designs.
I prefer to integrate my album and book designs as part of my blogsite. My blogsite is a WordPress based site run by ProPhoto blogs. Below is a little “how-to†guide on posting your album designs to your WordPress blogsite. This will work with any WordPress template if the site hosted on your domain.
You can also use this same concept if you want to share your designs in some other form of website or other form of blog. The code used to embed the album preview is a simple HTML code that can be copied and pasted into the source of just about any website to fit your brand and style.
Here are the steps to posting an album or book design to your WordPress blog.
1.     Build your album or book design in Cascade, Black River Imaging’s album software. Once you have finished your design in Cascade, click the Publish Preview button.
2.     Follow the steps to upload a preview to Approve My Album. Do NOT set a password for the preview in this step. The password will be set at a later step. If you do set a password here, you won’t be able to share your preview on Facebook or embed your preview in your website.
3.     Once you receive an email stating that your preview is ready, go towww.ApproveMyAlbum.com and locate the preview.
4.     Click the button below the preview that says “Embedâ€.
5.     On the pop-up dialog, click the button that says “Copy to Clipboard†under the section for Websites, Forums, and other Blogs.
6.     Next, open a new browser window and log into your WordPress website’s admin console and start a new blog post. (Remember, this is for WordPress based sites that are hosted on your own domain. WordPress.org hosted sites use the other form of the Embed code, and would be a different process to post and password protect the design preview to your website).
7.     Once you fill in the title of the post, click the button for the HTML source of the post. Then paste the code into the source of the post.
8.     To password protect the post, click the Edit button next to Visibility, and select Password-Protected. Then type in a case-sensitive password in the box provided.
9.     I’ve created a category for my design previews so that they are easy to find on my website. So before I publish the post, I make sure to select that category for the post.
10.     Lastly, publish your post. You’re all done! YAY!
Check out Sara’s sample post! The password is pass.
If you have any questions for Sara, send her an email at sara@sarakelley.net.
