FAQ2018-07-29T14:14:52-07:00

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get started?2021-10-26T06:42:41-07:00

Only Minutes Away

To get started, sign up for our services.

After the sign up form is submitted, you’ll receive an automated email in just a few minutes with information about where you can log in and start building your new Good Gallery website.

Is Good Gallery hard to set up?2018-11-29T08:49:13-08:00

Easy Peasy

Are you a techie or a luddite? Creating a new website using Good Gallery is easy or difficult depending on your comfort working with technology. Most photographers think it’s super easy to create incredible websites using Good Gallery. But for your own website build, it’s going to depend on how easily you pick up new software.

You Like Computers

If you’re familiar with similar content management systems like WordPress or other website builders, you’ll probably find Good Gallery easier to use than anything you’ve tried in the past.

You’re Computer Challenged

If you consider yourself computer challenged, you might have some difficulty with the initial configuration of your website. But if setting up a new website sounds intimidating or time-consuming, we can take that pain away and build your website for you. Just select our Basic Configuration Service and we’ll build your new website for you.

Is Good Gallery a WordPress theme or a website builder?2018-08-20T18:36:29-07:00

Website Builder

Good Gallery a website builder and content management system designed to showcase artist portfolios. It’s not a WordPress theme. WordPress is a separate content management system designed for hosting recent news and frequently updated anecdotal content.

WordPress Included

Although Good Gallery isn’t a WordPress theme, if you’d like to use a WordPress blog, we include free WordPress hosting along with your paid Good Gallery hosting. You can install your WordPress blog in a subdirectory alongside your Good Gallery website with a single click of your mouse.

On your WordPress website, you can install plugins and themes and change the appearance and behaviors of your blog. If you already have a blog, you can transfer your existing content to the installation on our servers.

Can you help me build my website?2018-08-20T18:36:15-07:00

We Can Help

If setting up a new website sounds intimidating or time-consuming, we can build your website for you. Just select our Basic Configuration Service.

This is a great option if you’re too busy to figure out the nuts and bolts of creating a new website. This is also a smart move if you’d rather be working on your art or making more money.

To get started, provide us with the basic building blocks we need to create your website we do the rest.

Will my search engine position change when I switch?2018-08-20T18:36:00-07:00

Scary Proposition

There are no guarantees in SEO and it’s admittedly a scary thing to change platforms when some things might be working for you. However, if you follow our recommended best-practices when you switch to Good Gallery, you can maintain or even improve your previous search engine positions.

Ranking Fluctuations

There’s sometimes a ranking fluctuation as search engines revise their index with your new page structure and content, but those changes typically settle quite quickly.

To provide you with some real-world examples, we’ve had countless customers who’ve held first-page positions for keyword phrases prior to switching to Good Gallery. We’re happy to report that customer feedback indicates that they maintained or elevated their positions after switching to our platform.

SEO Documentation

To help you with your transition to Good Gallery, we’ve developed comprehensive SEO documentation freely available in our User Manual. Follow those recommendations for best results.

Why are your sites better for SEO?2018-07-12T16:29:13-07:00

More Capabilities

To put it plainly, Good Gallery offers more built-in SEO capabilities than any other platform. Our continuing and singular attention to this highly technical and rapidly changing area of website marketing is one of our primary differentiators.

Primary Focus

Since 2011, optimizing our websites for search engines has been our primary focus. That has led us to provide our customers with both enhanced functionality and unprecedented innovation in photographer SEO.

SEO Features

Don’t miss our Features where we describe some of the built-in functionality we offer to help you improve your SEO.

What happens when search engines make algorithm changes?2018-08-21T15:30:54-07:00

Daily Research

Our team pours over dozens of SEO articles and interviews weekly looking for clues as to the future of search. Using this information, we employ or invent the most cutting-edge SEO strategies available anywhere and create tools long before many companies even realize that something new is happening with search engines.

Planning for the Future

We’re always thinking about how search engines will change tomorrow and next year. Our theories about the future of search revolve around improving the user experience and serving relevant content to visitors. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, search engines will become more powerful. However, by focusing on helping you create a popular, unique, relevant, valuable, and trustworthy website, we help you future-proof your SEO efforts.

Always Adding New Features

Our engineers are continuously developing or refining SEO-related features. In fact, if you checked our to-do list today, you’d find dozens of SEO features in our queue.

Only Use Best Practices

Since we only use white hat practices, when Google makes an algorithmic change, our customers are unaffected by technical ranking factors. If anything, our customers sometimes realize a benefit due to the way we’ve optimized our systems.

Will switching to Good Gallery automatically help my SEO?2018-10-02T18:04:34-07:00

Highly Optimized

Good Gallery is the most SEO-optimized platform available to photographers. We typically explain this differentiation with this general example; if you create two identical photographer websites—one on Good Gallery and one on a different platform—the website on our platform will likely rank higher in search results. And our platform includes tools that make it much easier for you to enter the kind of content that will help your website rank higher faster.

Never Complicated

Nothing in search engine optimization ever happens automatically. Regardless of what you may have read or seen, there are no wizards or auto SEO features that will magically help you rank on the first page of search engines for competitive keywords. If that was true, every photographer using those tools would rank first. And you would have heard about that phenomenon, right?

However, Good Gallery does offer you more built-in features that help you optimize your content for SEO than any other platform. More importantly, we make it easier for you to rank. We do this by going beyond the empty promises offered by other website builders and SEO “experts” by providing easy-to-use tools that make a difference.

Be Deserving

Your website must deserve to rank on the first page of Google. To be deserving of that first-page position, your website must be popular, unique, reliable, valuable, and trustworthy. And to achieve that goal, your content must be better than what is offered by your competitors.

We Provide Tools

Although we provide tools that automatically optimize your content for search engines, you still need to create great content.  To help you create great content, our User Manual includes a comprehensive SEO guide that helps you get started.

Will you assign my site a dedicated IP address?2018-07-12T16:28:16-07:00

Shared IP Addresses

Good Gallery customers are assigned one of several shared server IP addresses.

SEO Myth

It was once believed that websites with a dedicated IP address would receive an SEO benefit. This myth was born in 2003 when Craig Silverstein, then Director of Technology at Google, stated that using a dedicated IP address would provide a significant benefit to SEO efforts.

However, Gary Illyes of Google recently stated that the use of shared servers versus a dedicated IP does not affect SEO rankings. Google’s John Mueller also supported this correction in a 2018 tweet.

How is your approach to SEO different?2018-07-12T16:27:56-07:00

Our Approach

There are two ways to address search engine optimization on websites. You can optimize the content and you can optimize technical factors that influence SEO. We help you do both.

Technical Capabilities

When speaking to technical capabilities, we’ve included the kitchen sink when it comes to adding features and tools related to optimizing your Good Gallery website for search engines. A partial list of our automated and activated features include structured data, canonicals, sitemaps, breadcrumbs, automatic 301s, image pagination, reactive link pages, speed enhancements, and an automated report that lists hundreds of recommended SEO improvements.

Optimizing Content

From a content perspective, in addition to general tools you might expect that help you create optimized content, we also offer several SEO innovations not available on any other platform. One of the most notable is how we associate content with images in galleries.

First, every gallery image operates as an individual page on your website. Therefore, each image can be optimized individually to target separate keyword phrases. Or if you don’t have time to optimize every image in a gallery, you can selectively hide any image from search engines. We give you the tools to pursue your own ideal path to SEO greatness.

When associating content with images, you’re presented with a standard WYSIWYG editor that allows you to attach any type of content with any image. Examples include text, images, videos, calls to action, and even forms.

Although including SEO content for each image is an option you can address or ignore, if you’re focused on creating incredible visitor content that helps you rank for the most competitive keyword phrases in your market, no other platform offers you this kind of capability.

Where can I add SEO content on your websites?2018-07-12T16:27:35-07:00

SEO Everywhere

Search engines use artificial intelligence and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve become more powerful. However, their understanding of images is still relatively limited. And so, as photographers, we need to create textual content alongside our images if we hope to remain competitive for SEO.

That’s why every area of Good Gallery includes options to include textual content. Whether you need to add text to your home page, your forms, your galleries, your thumbnails, or even individual images, we have you covered.

To make our content features more powerful, text field areas support an unlimited amount of content—or no content at all. We offer you many choices for your SEO roadmap.

Can you help me write website content?2018-07-12T16:27:19-07:00

Freelance Writers

If you need help writing content for your website, consider hiring a freelance writer. You can use a search engine to look for freelance copywriting services.

Pricing Info

From a pricing perspective, less experienced writers will charge around $5 – $10 per 100 words. Most good freelance writers will charge around $10 to $12 per 100 words. Great freelance writers who have extensive SEO copywriting experience will charge more.

Why do photos look better on Good Gallery?2018-08-22T14:08:36-07:00

Incredible Fidelity

Good Gallery websites present images in higher fidelity at smaller file sizes than what’s available on other website platforms.

Full-Size Images

One differentiator is that we start with full-size images. This means that you’ll upload the best versions of your original images without any special preparation beyond what you’d normally do on a portfolio-quality image.

This step saves you incalculable time. You’ll never need to manually resize your website photos.

Automatic Resizing

Next, we use a highly optimized resizing process that creates the smallest file sizes possible while maintaining image fidelity. This means that the overall color and appearance of the images is maintained while the file size is reduced to the maximum extent available.

Multiple Sizes

We also create multiple resized versions of every image. This helps ensure that our sites serve images optimized for the exact browser viewport used by each visitor. As part of this process, we create 130 resized versions of every image you upload.

We store those additional images outside your allotted storage, so there’s no additional charge for these extra sizes.

Retina + 4K + 5K

This means that your photos will look great whether they’re being viewed on a tiny smartphone, a retina device, a 4K monitor, or on 27” 5K displays—or on any monitor anywhere.

Do I need to resize photos?2018-08-22T15:02:33-07:00

Never Resize Photos Again

Resizing isn’t required. With Good Gallery, you’ll upload full-size photos. It’s that easy.

We automatically create multiple resized versions of every image you upload. This helps ensure that our sites serve images optimized for the exact browser viewport used by each visitor. As part of this process, we create 130 resized versions of every image you upload.

You might be thinking that’s a lot of storage. And it’s true. But we store those additional images outside your allotted hosting storage, and there’s no additional charge for those extra sizes we maintain for you.

Website Speeds

We’ve also worked hard to make sure that large files won’t impact the speed of your website. So don’t worry. You can upload an unlimited number of photos to any gallery and never worry of slowing down the visitor experience.

Are your websites fast?2018-10-02T18:05:46-07:00

Fastest Anywhere

Good Gallery websites are the fastest portfolio sites in the world. Our load times are twice as fast as most of our closest competitors and up to 4-5 times faster than WordPress websites—particularly those using themes designed for photographers.

Blazing Speeds

Visitors have little patience and seldom wait long to view the information they seek. Our blazing-fast speeds translate to improved visitor retention and greater overall satisfaction—and that can lead to better conversions for your business.

Preventing Abandonment

Visitors begin to abandon websites after only 3 seconds. Typically, you’ll lose 7% of your visitors for every second over 3 seconds. This scary math is one of the best reasons to switch to Good Gallery.

Architecture

Our systems are architected to perform better than other website builders. Whether its bandwidth, servers, or our content delivery network, we go to extremes to provide the best to our customers.

Technical Capabilities

We use the latest technical best practices to ensure that our websites perform at amazing speeds. We use file aggregation, minification, image compression, text compression, lazy loading, and a host of other techniques to make sure your site is blazing fast.

First Impressions

Fast websites are thought to be reliable, efficient, and trustworthy. In other words, if your site is fast, it’s professional.  In other word, faster websites help build confidence in your brand.

User Experience

Why causes you to abandon websites? Are you frustrated with a slow experience—even if the delay is only a few seconds? Fast websites from Good Gallery help differentiate you from competitors who are running on slower website builders or on WordPress.

Attention Span

The human attention span is only 8.25 seconds. To put that in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds. For visitors, every second spent waiting is one more reason to abandon their exploration. Good Gallery helps keep users happy and on your website.

Increased Referrals

Visitors are more likely to refer friends to your fast website than your slow website. Would you want your fans to say, “Go check out this cool website. It’s slow, but worth it.”

This also applies to social networks like Facebook. Did you know that faster sites are more likely to be promoted than slower websites?

SEO

Search engines only penalize particularly slow sites, so if your site is moderately fast, search engines won’t remove you from their results pages. However, although the direct relationship is probably limited, website speed has a huge indirect effect on SEO.

First, website speeds affect visitor behaviors. For example, when accessing a slow website, visitors are prone to access fewer photos, fewer pages, and spend less time on your website.

Additionally, website speed impacts search engine crawl behavior. When your website doesn’t respond instantly to queries, search engines will reduce the number of pages crawled on your site. And if pages aren’t crawled, you won’t show up in the search engine index.

When visitors click their back button and return to the search results, search engines know it and make a note of that behavior.

We also think that speed will be the next major focus for Google now that they’ve successfully realized their HTTPS initiative. In other words, we think that speed will become an even more important ranking factor than it is today.

Can I add PayPal purchase options?2018-08-21T16:35:30-07:00

PayPal Support

PayPal is an online payment system that supports credit card transactions. Good Gallery supports many PayPal features including payment buttons.

Payment Buttons

PayPal payment buttons offer an easy online payment solution. Visitors can use credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal payments using their desktop or mobile device. You can use these buttons to accept payment for products or services.

Embedding Code

Once you’ve used PayPal tools to generate the button code, you can use our text editor and embed their code anywhere on your website. This means you can attach payment options to service pages, product pages, or even individual photographs.

Can I link to other websites?2018-07-12T16:42:26-07:00

External Links

Good Gallery supports the ability to link to external websites, either through the menu on your website or from hyperlinks on individual pages.

Common Examples

Many of our photographer customers link to proofing sites like ShootProof, Pixiset, Zenfolio, or SmugMug directly from their website menus.

Can I create custom forms?2018-08-28T16:40:29-07:00

Powerful Forms

Good Gallery offers powerful built-in form tools that can create custom-designed forms that gather information from website visitors.

Our form capabilities are also some of most advanced available anywhere and all those capabilities are included for free with every Good Gallery installation.

We’ve designed our form tools with one goal in mind—improving your completion rates. When used as intended, our forms can help you have a better conversation with your visitors.

Having a conversation means that it isn’t about the having the fanciest or the cutest form. Instead, it’s about helping them complete the form quickly and without frustration or hesitation.

Here are some specific form capabilities that explain why Good Gallery forms offer a superior user experience for visitors.

Available Anywhere

Forms are typically included on contact pages, but our forms can also be inserted in any text area anywhere on your website.

With this tool you can create an unlimited number of forms and each form can contain any number of unique fields. Additionally, you can receive and store an unlimited number of responses.

Responsive

Perhaps most importantly, the forms all offer advanced responsive characteristics that make them incredibly well-suited for completion on any mobile device.

Based on extensive research and testing, our forms capabilities are carefully crafted to take advantage of the absolute best practices in user experience.

These advanced features are certain to promote greater understanding by your visitors and improve your overall form completion rates when compared to other systems.

Labels

Labels are top aligned to form fields. This method allows visitors to read both labels and input values with a single eye movement. Studies have shown that this results in the fastest completion times and results fewer cases of visitor abandonment.

As an additional benefit, this label position is also preferred on mobile devices where horizontal space is at a premium.

Validation

Form validation is the process by which a web-based form checks the information provided by a visitor and ensures it is complete and correct.

Good Gallery forms employ inline validation instead validating information after the form has been submitted. This means that validation signals and messages are displayed immediately after a visitor types information into a form field and that reduces friction in forms.

For example, if a visitor successfully enters the correct information in a field, the border around that field is instantly set to green indicating success.

Alternatively, if the information is incorrect, then the border around the field is immediately set to red and a warning message is provided informing the visitor that they have entered incorrect information.

Required Field Legend

When required fields are present in a form, a legend is displayed above the form showing that a red asterisk indicates a required field. All required fields are presented with a red asterisk. This highly visible indicator of required fields aids users in form completion and reduces form friction.

Polite Communication

Any form errors are communicated using positive language. In other words, error messages aren’t presented using a negative tone. Instead, all messages offer helpful advice on what the user needs to do to fix the error.

Helpful Suggestions

Many of our form fields offer visitors helpful suggestions. For example, if visitor enters an email address with what appears to be a misspelled domain, then the form will automatically suggest the recommended correction.

Better Captchas

Instead of presenting visitors with images of slightly illegible letters and digits that must be manually decoded, Good Gallery forms employ the much easier-to-use reCAPTCHA.

Google reCAPTCHA is a service that uses adaptive intelligence to detect and prevent automated software from submitting information through forms. Trivia: CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

Easy to Read

When a visitor submits a form, the content of that submission is sent to you in an easy-to-read HTML email message. Those emails are formatted to display both the questions on your form and the visitor supplied answers. Questions are displayed in a bold font while answers are displayed in a standard font.

The form name is displayed as a heading of the submission. As the form heading can be changed, that heading can also be changed to allow for easy identification of form data if multiple forms are employed on your website.

Text Only Version

If you prefer text-only emails, our forms offer the ability to change submission from the default HTML email version to a text-only version.

Dozens of Fields

Choose from text fields, checkboxes, dates fields, user-defined dropdowns, numeric dropdowns, radio buttons, memo fields, names (first, last, or full), phone numbers, time or timeframe, and yes/no options.

You can also add blank spaces, horizontal rules, section labels, or descriptive text between form elements. And every field label is customizable.

Defined Destinations

Upon form completion, you can define the destination for visitors. After the visitor completes the form, either keep the visitor on the same page or send them to any other page on your website—whether it’s a thank you page or pricing page or a photo gallery—the choice is yours.

Multiple Delivery

You can assign multiple email addresses to forms. This feature allows you to send responses to your primary address and to an unlimited number of backup addresses or studio employees.

Archived Submissions

When a visitor submits form information on your website, an email containing that information is sent automatically. The contents of that message are also permanently stored in your administrative tools allowing you to access that information at any time—even if your emails are lost.

Return Receipts

Send automated emails to visitors who complete your form. When activated, simply type and you’re your message and your comments will be sent to visitors who contact you via the form tool.

Other Forms

Alternatively, you can embed forms from most customer management systems including Wufoo Form Builder, ShootQ, Tave, Pixiset, and others.

Can I post videos?2018-08-24T10:46:53-07:00

Presentation Options

There are several options for hosting videos on your Good Gallery website. You can choose the one that works best for you.

Full Screen

You can present your movies in a full-screen format. Simply create a new page, provide the link to your YouTube or Vimeo video, and that page will appear in your menu system.

When a visitor views a video page, they’ll see your video as a full screen presentation surrounded by your website menu.

When you create one of these video pages, you can control autoplay, branding, looping, controls, and related videos for each page added.

Embedded

All pages on your website can feature embedded video. You’ll use the text editor found on every page and insert the link to your YouTube or Vimeo video. That video will then appear inline on your page.

When you’re embedding video, you can include multiple videos on a single page.

Do you support international customers?2018-08-20T18:35:12-07:00

Worldwide Hosting

Many of our customers are based in Asia, Europe, and South America. Good Gallery websites are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), an expanding global infrastructure designed to help our customers achieve incredible speeds in all areas around the world.

Sever Locations

Our national and international server locations include:

North America: Ashburn, VA (3); Atlanta GA (3); Boston, MA; Chicago, IL (2); Dallas/Fort Worth, TX (4); Denver, CO; Hayward, CA; Jacksonville, FL; Los Angeles, CA (3); Miami, FL (2); Minneapolis, MN; Montreal, QC; New York, NY (3); Newark, NJ (2); Palo Alto, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Philadelphia, PA; San Jose, CA; Seattle, WA (3); South Bend, IN; St. Louis, MO; Toronto, ON

South America: Rio de Janeiro (2), Brazil; São Paulo, Brazil (2)

Europe / Middle East / Africa: Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2); Berlin, Germany; Dublin, Ireland; Frankfurt, Germany (6); Helsinki, Finland; London, England (5); Madrid, Spain (2); Manchester, England; Marseille, France; Milan, Italy; Munich, Germany; Palermo, Italy; Paris, France (3); Prague, Czech Republic; Stockholm, Sweden (3); Vienna, Austria; Warsaw, Poland; and Zurich, Switzerland.

Asia Pacific: Chennai, India (2); Hong Kong, China (3); Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Manila, the Philippines; Melbourne, Australia; Mumbai, India (2); New Delhi, India; Osaka, Japan; Perth, Australia; Seoul, Korea (4); Singapore (3); Sydney, Australia; Taipei, Taiwan (2); Tokyo, Japan (8)

What happens while my website is under construction?2018-07-12T16:23:52-07:00

Pre-Launch Sandbox

When you sign up for a Good Gallery website, you’ll choose a custom name that you’ll use as your temporary “getting started” address while you build your new website (e.g. example.goodgallery.com).

This temporary address allows you to keep your old website live while you get your new site ready. Once you’re ready to go live with your new Good Gallery website, you’ll use the instructions we provide to point your domain (e.g. example.com) to your new website.

Your temporary address allows you to keep your old website running while you get started on your new Good Gallery website. That temporary address is also hidden from search engines. And, unless you share your temporary address with someone else, that address is publicly unavailable.

After Launch

After you go live, you can access your website using your own domain (e.g. example.com) or you can continue to access your site using your temporary address (e.g. example.goodgallery.com).

Do you offer online proofing or photo sales?2018-08-26T15:06:13-07:00

For Portfolio Websites

Good Gallery isn’t a proofing platform. If you have thousands and thousands (and thousands) of photos that you need to sell or share with clients, then you should use Good Gallery for your branded portfolio website and use a separate photo hosting service for bulk storage, online sales, and client downloads.

Recommendations

We typically recommend ShootProof as one of the best solutions for online proofing. Their tools are some of the most advanced and versatile available anywhere. If you’re a new ShootProof customer, you can save 25% off your first year by entering GOODGALLERY as your promo code. For more information, visit the ShootProof website. Other options include Pixiset, SmugMug, and Zenfolio.

Can you help me move my domain?2018-08-20T18:34:57-07:00

Self Service

The domain associated with your website is purchased and managed through a domain hosting service provided by companies like GoDaddy, HostGator, 1to1, or Network Solutions. Those companies offer you the ability to manage your own domain settings using their tools.\

Go Live

Once your new website is complete and you’re ready to go live, you can refer to the detailed instructions in our User Manual that explain how to change your domain settings. Once you make those changes, your domain will stop pointing at your old web server location and start pointing to your new website on Good Gallery servers.

Do you offer free trials, demo areas, or sample websites?2018-07-12T16:22:37-07:00

Money-Back Guarantee

We don’t offer free trial periods. Instead, we offer a 100% 30-day money-back guarantee. If you sign up and you’re not completely satisfied, we’ll refund your fees—no questions asked. In other words, there’s no risk when you sign up for Good Gallery. Give us a try today!

Why are your example sites similar?2018-07-12T16:22:18-07:00

Popularity

Our examples showcase real photographer websites. And most of our customers don’t choose options that are very far away from our recommended defaults. Those options are simply most popular with most photographers.

Your Options

However, we don’t limit your creativity. You can change those default settings to meet any configuration. Instead of presenting you with templates or themes, you have access to thousands of settings that independently control every aspect of your website’s behavior and design.

For example, by changing a single drop-down option, you can change the position of your logo and menu to appear at the top, right, bottom, or left side of the page (left is the default option). You can also use those drop-down options to change your brand colors, use any combination of popular fonts, or even change the way your photos are displayed in hundreds of different ways.

Default Layout

When you sign up for Good Gallery, you’ll start with our popular default layout. Your logo and menu appear in the top left corner. Starting there, you can customize your website to an almost infinite degree.

You can configure your website to look like any one of our Sample Websites or you can choose a completely different direction and design a site to meet your unique brand requirements and limited only by your imagination.

How many templates do you offer?2018-08-20T18:19:49-07:00

Templates & Settings

With Good Gallery, we don’t limit your creativity with templates or themes. Instead, we offer thousands of settings that independently control every aspect of your website’s behavior and design.

Options Galore

By changing a single drop-down option, you can change the position of your logo and menu, change your brand colors, use any combination of popular fonts, or even change the way your photos are displayed in hundreds of different ways.

If you can think of it, we’ve probably got a setting for it.

Default Layout

When you sign up for Good Gallery, you’ll start with our popular default layout. Your logo and menu appear in the top left corner. Starting there, you can customize your website to an almost infinite degree.

You can configure your website to look like any one of our example websites or you can choose a completely different direction and design a site to meet your unique brand requirements and limited only by your imagination.

Do you have documentation available?2018-08-24T11:03:28-07:00

User Manual

Good Gallery customers have access to our helpful and comprehensive User Manual. This PDF document covers every aspect of our software. Search for the information you need or read the document before bedtime each night to help you fall asleep.

Contextual Help

Contextual help is also available for every setting, field, and button. Contextual help is documentation presented directly within the software near the feature, setting, or button.

To access that context-sensitive help, you can click the easily accessed question mark icon located next to every field and setting.

Do you host email?2018-08-20T18:34:32-07:00

Use Your Previous Provider

We don’t offer email hosting. When you switch to Good Gallery, you’ll continue to use the email service you’ve used previously.

Want to Switch?

If you’re looking to switch email providers, we recommend G Suite by Google Cloud.

With G Suite by Google Cloud, you can connect your domain to Gmail and manage your business email for less than $5 per month. And if you need tutorials, phone support, or email support, the team at Google does a great job of walking you through migrating to their systems.

Is 10GB enough storage?2018-10-01T15:05:53-07:00

Plenty of Storage

If you’re like most photographers, you won’t need much space for your Good Gallery website. Storage needs for most portfolio websites are typically limited. As an example, you’re able to host more than 450 full-size photos on your Good Gallery website without reaching your hosting limit.

Making Space

In order to gain back unused WordPress space, we often recommend that you remove extraneous posts, images, themes, plugins, and old backups from your blog. You can optimize your WordPress installation further by downloading the Imagify Image Optimizer plugin for WordPress. When you run that plugin, it significantly reduces the size of your blog images. In addition to making more space, your posts will load much faster improving the user experience for blog visitors.

Exceptions

Fewer than 3% of our clients purchase additional storage beyond the 10GB included with every Good Gallery account. However, if you need more space, you can purchase additional storage at any time. For more storage, just send your request to info@goodgallery.com.

Fees for additional storage are:

$5.00 for 5GB additional per month [15GB total]
$10.00 for 10GB additional per month [20GB total]
$12.50 for 15GB additional per month [25GB total]
$15.00 for 20GB additional per month [30GB total]
$17.50 for 25GB additional per month [35GB total]
$20.00 for 30GB additional per month [40GB total]
$22.50 for 35GB additional per month [45GB total]
$25.00 for 40GB additional per month [50GB total]
$27.50 for 45GB additional per month [55GB total]
$30.00 for 50GB additional per month [60GB total]

Do you offer WordPress themes?2018-08-20T12:19:31-07:00

Theme Support

We include free installation and free hosting for your WordPress blog. However, you’re responsible for selecting and managing your own themes. Our servers support modern themes including themes that are commonly popular with photographers. Simply choose the theme that works best for you and your brand.

Recommended Themes

If you’re looking for a new theme complementary to your Good Gallery website, many of our clients love the clean appearance of Divi. It’s lightweight and relatively-fast compared to other WordPress themes—particularly those that are typically targeted at photographers.

Can I move my WordPress blog to your servers?2021-08-19T15:09:43-07:00

Self Help

One option is to use the import and export tools built into WordPress to move your content. Alternatively, you can use a backup and restore plugin freely available through WordPress.org. Additional instructions related to migrating your own information are available in our User Manual.

Can you help me move my Squarespace blog to WordPress?2018-07-12T16:13:05-07:00

Squarespace Migration

You can move your Squarespace blog content to WordPress if desired. We include free WordPress hosting along with your paid Good Gallery hosting. And since WordPress isn’t proprietary, you can move your blog content at any time and anywhere.

Move Your Content

If you have a blog running on Squarespace’s proprietary blogging system, you can move your content to WordPress.

If you’d like to migrate that information yourself, follow these external instructions:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-properly-move-from-squarespace-to-wordpress/

Alternatively, if you only have a few active blog posts, you can use copy and paste to manually recreate those blog posts in WordPress using your old Squarespace content.

Additional Help

If you need more hands-on help, you might want to consider a reasonably priced freelance WordPress consultant (and photographer) who has worked with many Good Gallery clients and who has a great working relationship with our engineering team.

Here’s his contact information:

Chris Mann
Phone, Email, and Skype Support
+44 1483 600412
[London GMT Time – Check Before Calling]
chris@cjmann.com

Do you allow WordPress blogs?2021-08-19T15:08:33-07:00

Free WordPress Hosting

If you’d like your WordPress blog to run alongside your Good Gallery website, we offer free WordPress hosting on our servers. This service is included with your Good Gallery hosting fee.

Non-Proprietary

WordPress is the most popular and portable blogging system in the world. This means that you won’t be tied to a proprietary system if you ever move your blog to other servers.

Installation

With just a few easy clicks, you can install WordPress at any time. If this is your first blog, after you initiate your installation, you can start creating new posts right away. You can install themes and plugins as well as create your own personalized pages and posts.

Migration

If you already have a blog, you can move your content from your current location and host it on our servers alongside your Good Gallery website.

Servers

We’ll provide you with a robust server hosting environment where you can reliably host your WordPress blog. And our engineering team constantly monitors, tests, updates, and backs up our blog servers.

Support

Your WordPress installation with Good Gallery is an unmanaged, self-service application. This means that our support doesn’t include assistance with WordPress organization, designs, themes, plugins, optimization, or configuration. However, this limitation of service is no different than support offered with similar hosting plans from companies like GoDaddy, Hostgator, and Bluehost.

Can you help with WordPress settings, plugins, or themes?2018-07-12T16:12:08-07:00

WordPress Support

Although we include WordPress hosting with your Good Gallery installation, we don’t offer blog support services beyond any issues associated with your hosting.

In other words, if one of our servers is having problems, we’ll certainly address those issues. However, if you need help making changes to your WordPress blog, then you’ll probably want to refer to WordPress tutorials readily available from a wide variety of online sources.

Hands-On Help

If you need more hands-on help, you might want to consider a reasonably priced freelance WordPress consultant (and photographer) who has worked with many Good Gallery clients and who has a great working relationship with our engineering team.

Here’s his contact information:

Chris Mann
Phone, Email, and Skype Support
+44 1483 600412
[London GMT Time – Check Before Calling]
chris@cjmann.com

Are your websites responsive?2018-08-22T13:15:51-07:00

Responsive + Adaptive

Good Gallery websites use both responsive and adaptive technologies to deliver incredible performance across all platforms.

In both responsive and adaptive design, mobile users are presented with the same content across all devices. However, the technical approach for determining the type of device is managed differently under a responsive architecture versus an adaptive architecture.

Comparison

With responsive design, visitors download bits of code that detect the kind of device being used and the viewport available. The browser then uses that data to determine how to display that information on that device.

With adaptive technologies, instead of downloading and processing code on the visitor’s computer or device, the server determines the device being used prior to downloading any information and then provides only the information needed by that device.

By detecting the type of device prior to the download, Good Gallery realizes much better website performance than what can be achieved by responsive sites because a responsive design downloads and processes code that is not relevant to mobile devices.

Performance Benefit

One reason why adaptive mobile sites are arguably superior to responsive sites relates to visitor experience. With a responsive design, programmers and designers are often forced to make compromises in website design so that their websites can work equally well across all devices.

Although making compromises within a responsive architecture can admittedly still yield a website that looks good on all devices, responsive developers can’t achieve the same level of precise control afforded by a company working with an adaptive architecture.

SEO

In terms of SEO, there is no difference between adaptive and responsive design. Search engines strive to ensure that their search results endorse only those websites that share the same information across all devices. And they also want to make sure that that visitors will have a good overall experience while using that device.

With that in mind, search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo all recognize both adaptive and responsive architectures and do not give ranking priority to one architectural approach over the other.

Conclusion

For many companies, a responsive website is certainly good enough to meet the needs of their customers. However, for our team, good enough is never good enough.

Although an adaptive architecture is more complicated to architect and takes longer for us to develop than similar responsive designs, our team believes that the performance benefits and functional superiority of an adaptive website architecture outweigh those associated our additional development costs.

Do you provide domain name support?2018-10-01T11:44:52-07:00

Domain Documentation

If you need help, we provide extensive information about managing your domain settings. Our User Manual includes step-by-step information is enough guidance for most people switching to Good Gallery.

Registrar Support

However, if you need extra help with your domain name settings, you can contact domain registrar. They help customers just like you change domain settings every single day.

Last Resort

If you’ve reviewed the documentation we provide and you’re unable to get help from your registrar, then we offer a Domain Administration Service where we’ll configure your domain for you.

Can I host Good Gallery on my own server?2019-01-08T09:41:05-08:00

Managed Servers

Good Gallery is hosted on internationally distributed, professionally managed servers allowing our software to operate effectively and with superior reliability and performance. These complex and interconnected servers are uniquely configured and optimized to work together. Since that those optimizations aren’t possible on servers offered by traditional hosting providers, Good Gallery software can only be hosted on our servers.

Benefits

With Good Gallery as your hosting provider, you’re freed from the technical aspects of managing the security, availability, and performance of your website. As an added benefit, you’ll share the same program code as all customers which means that your website is always running on the latest, most-optimized, and secure version of our software.

By hosting your Good Gallery website on our servers, your website will be less expensive to operate, better maintained, and more secure than if you were to host your website on other platforms.

Do you have the font I need?2023-06-12T13:01:14-07:00

Font Support

Good Gallery supports over 175 different fonts. These fonts can be applied separately to menus, headings, and body text.

Currently Available

Here’s a list of fonts currently available:

Abel, Abril Fatface, Actor, Alef, Alegreya, Alegreya Sans, Alice, Allura, Amaranth, Amatic SC, Anonymous Pro, Archivo Black, Archivo Narrow, Arial, Arimo, Arvo, Average, Average Sans, AW Conqueror Didot-Light, AW Conqueror Sans-Light, Baskerville Old Face, Bentham, Bevan, Bitter, Bodoni MT, BonvenoCF Light, Book Antiqua, Butler Black, Butler Black Stencil, Butler Bold, Butler Bold Stencil, Butler Extra Bold, Butler Extra Bold Stencil, Butler Light, Butler Light Stencil, Butler Medium, Butler Medium Stencil, Butler Regular, Butler Regular Stencil, Butler Ultra Light, Butler Ultra Light Stencil, Cabin, Calibri, Calisto MT, Calluna Sans, Cambria, Cantarell, Cardo, Castle T Light Regular, Century Gothic, Chivo, Clicker Script, Consolas, Copperplate Gothic Light, Courier New, Crete Round, Crimson Text, Cutive, Cutive Mono, Dancing Script, Domine, Dosis, Droid Sans, EB Garamond, Esteban, Existence Light, Exo, Exo 2, Fjalla One, Fjord One, Forum, Franklin Gothic Medium, Futura (Light), Futura Extended, Futura Extra Bold, Futura Extra Bold Italic, Futura Koyu, Futura Koyu Italic, Futura Oblique, Garamond, Gentium Basic, Geo Sans Light, Georgia, Gill Sans MT, Goudy Old Style, Grand Hotel, Gravitas One, Homemade Apple, IM Fell DW Pica, Impact, Inconsolata, Istok Web, Italiana, Josefin Sans, Josefin Slab, Julius Sans One, Jura, Karla, Kreon, Lato, Ledger, Libre Baskerville, Lobster, Lobster Two, Lora, Lucida Bright, Lucida Console, Lucida Sans Typewriter, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lustria, Maven Pro, Medula One, Merriweather, Merriweather Sans, Monsieur La Doulaise, Montez, Montserrat, Montserrat Alternates, Muli, Nobile, Nunito, Old Standard TT, Open Sans, Open Sans Condensed, Open Sans Light, Oswald, Oswald Bold, Oswald Light, Oxygen, Palatino Linotype, Permanent Marker, Perpetua, Philosopher, Playfair Display, Playfair Display SC, Poly, Pontano Sans, PT Mono, PT Sans, PT Serif, Questrial, Raleway, Raleway Thin, Roboto, Roboto Slab, Rockwell Extra Bold, Rockwell, Rufina, Satisfy, Segoe UI, Shadows Into Light, Shadows Into Light Two, Signika, Sintony, Six Caps, Skia, Sorts Mill Goudy, Source Sans Pro, Stalemate, Stephanie Marie JF Regular, Stint Ultra Expanded, Syncopate, Tahoma, TeX Gyre Adventor, Theano Didot, Times New Roman, Titillium Web, Trajan Pro, Trebuchet MS, Ubuntu, Varela Round, Verdana, Vollkorn, Y2K Neophyte, Yanone Kafeesatz, yeahfree by Alterdeco, Zona Pro Bold, and Zona Pro Thin.

Can I stop paying my current website host when I switch?2018-07-12T16:09:45-07:00

Other Hosting Payments

Once your website is live on Good Gallery, you won’t need to pay your current website host for hosting services. However, you should continue paying domain name renewal fees and any fees related to your email hosting.

What if your servers fail?2018-08-20T16:01:55-07:00

Reliable & Distributed

Our server hardware is incredibly reliable and distributed. But we perform backups to guard against the possibility of catastrophic server failures or malicious attacks.

Backups

Good Gallery websites and WordPress websites hosted on our servers are backed up hourly and those copies are stored for 3 days. Daily backups are also created, and those backups are stored for 3 weeks. We also create weekly backups that are stored for 3 months.

Tested Frequently

We don’t just backup our servers and then assume that the backups are good. Instead, we perform frequent testing of our backups to ensure the long-term viability of our data.

Rollback Capable

Given the nature of our disaster recovery systems, in the case of an emergency or catastrophic failure, we can immediately rollback to backups.

Do your sites support music?2018-07-12T16:43:16-07:00

Video Soundtracks Are Supported

When you embed YouTube or Vimeo videos on your Good Gallery website, audio from those videos is fully supported. However, we don’t support other forms of music on Good Gallery websites.

Sitewide Music Options

We don’t don’t offer sitewide music because:

  1. Offering music in the background can interrupt audio already being played on visitor computers. In other words, many visitors will already be playing other music or watching videos when they visit a website. If music starts playing automatically on a website, then the website’s audio stream will clash with the visitor’s music. In some cases, website music will interrupt the visitor’s preferred audio source. And that kind of behavior won’t engender goodwill among visitors.
  2. Although some website owners feel that their music choices are ideal, some visitors won’t share those same musical tastes. And since those impressions may negatively affect conversions, it’s much safer to offer silence in lieu of music.
  3. Many people will visit websites using work computers that might be within earshot of co-workers. If working professionals visit websites and music is playing, that visitor may scramble to find a way to mute the audio. Or in extreme situations, the visitor may leave the website or close their browser to prevent the music from continuing. None of those actions will offer a positive experience or outcome for an online business.
  4. Some visitors may simultaneously open many sites in multiple browser tabs. When that happens, and unwanted music starts playing, the visitor will either close the offending tab or will be unable to locate the tab and will close their browser window.
  5. Even compressed audio files require bandwidth. And that means that websites with music load slower than websites without music.
  6. Offering background music on a website was once ground-breaking and unique. However, as technology moved forward, most visitors view website music as dated.
  7. Converting visitors to customers is the goal of most websites. Website owners must ask themselves if music is going to positively influence purchase decisions for EVERY customer. If that answer is no, then offering music on a website may work against site owners focused on improving customer conversions.
How do your websites compare to other website builders?2018-09-03T09:06:24-07:00

Apples to Apples

We’d love to answer your question directly, but we avoid critiques or comparisons to competitors. Instead, we’d invite you to view our Features page and our Examples page. We hope that information will help you identify our differences.

Why are your websites relatively simple?2018-08-24T10:33:28-07:00

Simple Is Good

Good Gallery websites follow a minimalist design aesthetic. There are several reasons to embrace this creative philosophy. Some benefits include faster websites, better search engine performance, improved cognitive fluency, more conversions, greater focus, and mobile friendliness.

Simple Websites Load Faster

With fewer design elements, minimal JavaScript programming, and less downloadable data, our websites can load faster than websites that are heavily designed.

Think about the last time you visited a website that wasn’t very fast. What did you do?

Search Engine Friendly

When websites incorporate too many creative elements, the technical presentation of that information can interfere with search engines and their ability to recognize and index important textual content and photos.

Cognitive Fluency

Cognitive fluency refers to perceptions relative to difficulties visitors may encounter on websites. When websites include clutter, they increase cognitive load for visitors. However, a reduced cognitive load means that visitors can quickly complete their desired task.

When you consider your own experiences online, do you prefer a simple website that provides you with quick and easy access to the information you seek or a website that hides their goodies behind an over-designed interface?

Improved Conversions

We contend that for most photographers, first-time visitors want to perform three critical tasks. Those potential customers want to:

  1. See your photographs.
  2. Know how much you charge.
  3. Contact you to determine availability.

What do you think is the best way to design a website to help visitors meet those goals? You might also want to learn more about our overall design philosophy.

Focus on Important Content

When a website features a menu that’s nearly invisible when not in use and simple design elements, visitors pay closer attention to your most important content—whether that’s your photographs or textual information.

Those potential customers aren’t distracted by visual elements that don’t further their path to conversion. In other words, simple websites are easier to read and scan.

Mobile Friendly

Simple websites tend to be friendlier on mobile devices. With the reduced screen real estate available to visitors, it’s even more important that websites present the most important information quickly and simply.

Timeless

We have all seen photography trends come and go. And as they go, we sometimes say to ourselves, “What were we thinking!” The same concept applies to website designs.

Popular past design trends include parallax scrolling and single-page websites. That means that once you launch most new websites, your design only has a few years of shelf life (at best) before it starts to look dated.

However, with Good Gallery’s simple design aesthetic, you can be assured that your website will appear more timeless—just like your best photographs.

Less Salesy

Have you ever met a salesperson who is cheesy, aggressive and superficial? Did that turn you off?

When you offer an over designed website, visitors can sometimes feel that they’re overburdened with your presentation. Simple designs like ours are different in that they don’t make the visitor feel like your website is just a sales tool.

Beautiful

Based on separate research studies by noted psychologists Helmut Leder, Daniel Berlyne, and Alexandre N. Tuch, it was determined that more complex websites are perceived as being less beautiful than less complex websites.

This theory was also explored more recently in a study by Google/YouTube User Experience Research in Zurich, Switzerland.

What if I need more than one website?2023-06-12T13:03:49-07:00

Multiple Websites

We welcome photographers who have more than one website. Simply sign up for as many websites as you require.

Do you discourage visitors from stealing my photos?2018-08-24T10:16:41-07:00

Photo Theft

It’s impossible to prevent image theft online. But we’ve added lots of features to discourage the practice and make it much more difficult for people who want to infringe on your copyright.

Hidden Watermarks

When you upload photos to Good Gallery, your logo is automatically applied to an area below the bottom edge of each image. Although your logo is present on every photograph, that area of each image is programmatically hidden from viewers who browse your website.

However, since your logo is attached to that photo, when the image is shared apps, search engines, and social media or if the original file path is accessed by the visitor, your logo is present on the photo.

If the visitor then removes your logo from the image, they may be liable for increased statutory damages than they would if they had downloaded a photo that wasn’t similarly watermarked.

Visible Watermarks

Since the hidden watermarks aren’t visible when copyright infringers use screen captures, you can include a text watermark on every image that features your studio name or other information like your domain name or contact info.

This text information is displayed discretely in the corner of each image and allows for formatting customizations based on your brand and your presentation preferences.

Brand Protection

Indexed images in search engines results include the entire photo from the original file. With the Hidden Watermark feature, that means your logo will be visible on the images presented in search results.

This feature helps discourage potential copyright infringers from copying photos directly from image search results and then using those photos without permission or attribution.

Image Search

When you’re logged into your Good Gallery administrative tools, we you view one of your photos on your website, you can click the camera icon to see all other appearances of that photo on the Internet.

This feature allows you to more easily and conveniently track down people who may have infringed on your copyright.

Pinterest Watermarks

When photos are pinned from your Good Gallery website, your logo is automatically attached and visible on that visitors Pinterest board (or your board).

This means that when your photos are repinned, your brand stays attached to that photo even if the source text and links are removed.

Right Click Protection

The ability to right click and download photos is automatically disabled discouraging easy downloads. However, if we do offer an option to enable right click downloads if desired.

Drag Protection

On many sites, visitors can select an image and drag it directly from their browser to their desktop. This kind of functionality is disabled in Good Gallery.

Can you prevent visitors from stealing my website text?2018-08-20T18:20:37-07:00

Text Theft

It’s impossible to prevent determined visitors from copying your website text. However, we include features to discourage that practice by making it much more difficult.

You can allow people to copy your website text or you can apply one of several restrictions to any page or all pages on your website. Those restrictions are Copy Allowed with Citation, Copy Allowed with Warning, Copy Prevented with Warning, and Copy Disabled.

Copy Allowed with Citation

With Copy Allowed with Citation enabled, visitors can select and copy text, but when a visitor pastes the text from their clipboard, the copied text is surrounded by quotation mark symbols and citation information identifying your studio as the source of that content.

Copy Allowed with Warning

With Copy Allowed with Warning enabled, visitors can copy text, but they’re presented with a pop-up warning.

The warning text states, “The information you have attempted to copy is protected by International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized use of this copyrighted material is strictly prohibited.”

You can edit the warning text if desired.

Copy Prevented with Warning

With Copy Prevented with Warning enabled, visitors can select text and select the copy option, but a pop-up warning is displayed.

The default text for the pop-up warning is “The information you have attempted to copy is protected by International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized use of this copyrighted material is strictly prohibited.” The text that was selected by the visitor is not copied and is not available in memory.

You can edit the warning text if desired.

Copy Disabled

The Copy Disabled option indicates that visitors are prevented from selecting or copying text.

How many photos can I include in a gallery?2018-08-21T15:33:57-07:00

Unlimited Photos

You can include an unlimited number of photos in any gallery.

Download speeds aren’t affected by the number of photos you include in a gallery. Your images are only loaded when visitors reach that location in your gallery allowing for progressive lazy loading and thus ensuring speedy downloads.

Also, original photo file sizes don’t affect gallery display speeds. Good Gallery automatically resizes your photos and displays them at the optimal size based on the visitor’s browser viewport—whether they’re using a desktop, tablet, or phone.

This means that Good Gallery won’t restrict the size of your galleries.

Unlimited Galleries

You can create an unlimited number of galleries.

Whether your have a single featured gallery or dozens, you can make your site work like you want it to work.

Unlimited Pages

You can create an unlimited number of pages.

When you’re creating text pages, you’ll never be limited. Create whatever you need to make your website amazing.

Where are your servers located?2018-07-12T16:05:33-07:00

Amazon Web Services

Good Gallery servers are provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). With their networked services, your Good Gallery website is on servers located around the world.

Cloud-Based

AWS is a cloud-based platform that offers the best computing power, storage, and content delivery available anywhere.

We chose this platform because of our ability to have the fastest servers anywhere and offer incredibly reliable bandwidth. We use the most powerful configurations they offer to ensure your websites load quickly and reliably.

Are your servers fast?2018-08-22T14:34:32-07:00

Screaming Fast Servers

Good Gallery contracts with Amazon Web Services (AWS) providing you with access to the best cloud-based website hosting platform.

AWS offers various levels of availability and different server configurations based on the budgets of their customers. Good Gallery uses R3 instances—the latest generation of Amazon EC2 memory-optimized servers.

One of the things that sets Good Gallery apart from similar companies hosting on AWS is that we’ve chosen the most robust hardware configurations available. This means that we don’t compromise on our hardware to save money on our monthly hosting bills.

Hosting providers like Good Gallery can save money by reducing processing power. However, that kind of thinking is contrary to our primary mission of providing the fastest photographer websites available anywhere.

With that in mind, we invest thoughtfully in hardware and select the optimal configurations that will best help visitors see your website faster.

Robust configurations mean that our application servers can process requests at incredible speeds while our database servers are able to serve dynamic content almost instantly.

EBS

We use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to provide you with SSD access and capacity that delivers superior results for high-performance websites. These volumes also allow us to quickly increase capacity on demand.

ElastiCache

Amazon’s ElastiCache is a memory tool that provides us with sub-millisecond response times for blazing-fast performance on many of our operations. This tool also manages our server clusters and allows us to scale on demand. This means that we can easily grow our systems as demands grow.

Lambda

Some of our processes are managed by AWS Lambda. This means that we can run process-intensive code without impacting our web servers. This helps ensure that we can scale to any demands on our systems almost instantly.

Distributed Systems

Good Gallery content is distributed by servers located all over the world.

What photo formats do you support?2018-08-22T15:07:32-07:00

Supported Photo Formats

For visitors who use the Chrome browser, we present photos in WebP format. All other visitors are presented with size-optimized JPG photos. This is part of our dynamic serving strategy and why our websites are crazy fast.

WebP

WebP is an image format that offers incredible compression characteristics. In other words, those files are smaller than JPG files. That means that downloading WebP files will require less bandwidth and thus our websites load faster than sites that only offer JPG photos.

Developed by Google, this format is supported on the Chrome and Opera browsers. More than 50% of your website visitors will use the Chrome browser when viewing your website.

JPG

If a visitor isn’t using Chrome or Opera, then they’ll download optimized JPG files. Those files are size-optimized based on the visitor’s browser viewport. That means your photos are only as large as is needed, and that makes your website faster.

Do your sites support HTTP/2?2018-08-22T15:04:07-07:00

Protocol Support

HTTP/2 is a new version of the HTTP network protocol. The new protocol helps our websites load faster and use fewer server resources. Good Gallery supports HTTP/2.

Benefits

The HTTP/2 technology was developed to offer a faster way to deliver website content. Given our focus on speed and performance, it’s only natural that we offer support for this technology on all Good Gallery websites.

What does bloat control mean?2018-08-22T14:52:28-07:00

Web Pages Are Getting Bigger

In 2011, most web pages were smaller than 1MB. In 2016, the average size grew to 2.2MB. And in 2018, the average size was 3MB.

With the availability of greater bandwidth across all devices, websites around the world have taken advantage of those improved speeds by adding more content to their sites.

We Believe in Skinny Websites

We have fought against the trend of creating heavier websites. In fact, we’ve gone in the other way. Even as visitors have more bandwidth available , our websites continue grow smaller as we constantly optimize our platform.

We work continuously to reduce the amount of bandwidth we need to deliver our websites. Because faster websites are better.

Bloated Themes

One of the things we’ve noticed is that WordPress themes continue to add features and tools without regard for how those additions impact the performance of websites—particularly those themes that are most popular with photographers.

Development and feature priorities drive this inexorable movement toward website bloat. But since our priority is speed, we find ways to deliver incredible features with minimal impacts on website performance.

Full Disclosure

Although we believe in skinny websites, we don’t have skinny employees.

Do you work out?2018-08-21T15:28:09-07:00

Sad Story

We’re sad to say that we don’t work out. Most of us are chubby and pale. But that’s because we spend all our free time in front of computers working on Good Gallery.

Even though we don’t have six-pack abs, we’re a crazy-dedicated team working to create the best website builder anywhere.

This is great news for you, but it’s not so great for our waistlines.

Are you truly committed to Good Gallery?2023-06-12T13:02:36-07:00

Eating Our Own Dog Food

In 1988, a Microsoft employee sent an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood” that challenged other employees to increase the internal usage of Microsoft’s own products. That phrase has gone on to be a popular way to refer to companies that use their own products. It’s also known as “dogfooding.”

It’s what we do at Good Gallery too. Our employees are also photographers and all have Good Gallery websites.

Rob Greer Photography

Our founder is Rob Greer. In addition to managing Good Gallery, he’s also a Houston photographer who runs a busy 6-figure photography studio. Rob Greer Photography ranks on the first page of Google for some of the most challenging and competitive keywords for photographers including houston photographer, Houston event photographer, Houston portrait photographer, and a host of others.

His annual salary is directly tied to the performance of his website as most of his business comes from people who found him online. And with that in mind, Rob takes a no-compromise attitude toward making sure that Good Gallery is the best platform available anywhere.

Is Good Gallery an American company?2020-01-02T12:04:01-08:00

Made in the USA

Good Gallery is a Texas company. All our source code is written by programmers located in the United States. We never use offshore programmers. Additionally, our entire support team is located in USA.

We’re doing our part to help the economy by creating local jobs. We also contribute to society by paying lots of taxes. Yay, taxes.

How much bandwidth is available for my website?2018-08-22T14:40:07-07:00

Big Pipes

We use the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) to serve your website from servers located in 59 cities across 29 countries. With this system we’re able to transfer up to 40 gigabits per second and respond to 100,000 requests per second.

Our system is optimized for low latency and high data transfer speeds. To help this along, we use intelligent routing based on real-world latency measurements.

Also, our network backbone is directly connected with hundreds of servers worldwide. That helps accelerate content delivery to your visitors.

Crazy Fast

We also use intelligent routing accelerate and cache information to deliver content faster than many other systems—especially those provided under inexpensive hosting plans. This opportunity allows us to consistently deliver an incredibly robust bandwidth profile across our entire worldwide network.

AWS

This features are included with our highly reliable Amazon Web Services hosting.

How do your websites perform on old browsers?2018-08-21T16:11:55-07:00

Compatibility

We work hard to make sure that our websites look great on modern browsers and old browsers too. We know that your visitors don’t always have access to the latest browsers.

Progressive Enhancement

We use progressive enhancement techniques to serve content differently based on the browser used. When visitors use older browsers, they might not see all the bells and whistles and advanced animations that we can present to visitors using modern browsers. But even if visitors are using an old browser, they’ll still be able to see all your photos and content—because that’s what’s most important.

Modern Browsers

Our website features are fully supported on the most popular modern browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Older Browsers

We also support older browsers like Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera although some advanced display functionality may not be available due to limitations inherent to those platforms.

Who controls my domain name?2018-08-21T16:18:00-07:00

Registrars

Your domain registrar is the company that manages your domain name settings. Some website builders offer domain registrar services and host your website. We’re not that kind of company.

We believe that domains should be managed by a company other than your website host. For that reason, Good Gallery recommends that you register your domain with companies like GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and Bluehost and keep your domain name registration separate from your website host.

Domain Isolation

One reason to keep your domain separate is that if you ever have issues with your website host, and if your domain is managed by that same company, then moving your domain can be time consuming and add technical difficulties to your move.

As an example, we’re aware of one website builder that has registered their client domains under their own name. In other words, the client domains actually belong to the website builder. Although that company’s evil practice is an edge case, it’s an example of how bad things can happen to good people.

Regardless of the potential risk with keeping those eggs in the same basket, maintaining domains and websites separately means that your overall website security is improved in case either of your accounts are compromised.

Can I request new features?2018-08-21T17:22:33-07:00

Feature Requests

We love customer requests for new features or functionality. We encourage you to share your ideas via email.

In may cases, we’ll add your feature request to our product roadmap immediately. We’ll even try to provide you with a general timeframe as when you might expect to see your feature appear in Good Gallery.

Customizations

If you need that new feature sooner rather than later, you can always request a customization. Through customization, we can add the features you want right away—often within just a few days. If you can dream it, we can build it.

Do I ever have to pay for upgrades?2018-08-22T11:47:26-07:00

Free Upgrades & Updates

We don’t have versioned software. That means that you’ll never need to pay for system upgrades. And we don’t charge you for new or updated templates.

That means you’ll never be forced or tempted to pay more for new features. That’s because with Good Gallery, all your updates and upgrades are included.

Do I need to scrap my site when you make updates?2018-08-22T11:50:11-07:00

Never Be Forced To Change Again

You might have heard tales about website builders who force photographers to ditch their websites and start over when that company changes their architecture or when they stop supporting old designs.

Good Gallery clients have never been inconvenienced in this way. And they never will be. Our system is architected so that even when we add new functionality (or change things entirely), your images and text are completely portable.

No Worries

You’ll never be forced to change or scrap your website when we update our software.

Whether we add new features, new templates, or new technology, you can rest easy knowing that your life won’t be thrown into a marketing or redesign whirlwind because of our software changes.

Do you have experience building websites?2018-08-21T17:06:54-07:00

More Experience

We started building websites in 1995. And in case you’re familiar with the history of the Internet, that was first year websites were commercially available.

With more than 20 years of experience under our belts, there’s nothing we haven’t seen And that fact helps us create the best websites for photographers.

Programming Expertise

We have programmers on our team who started working for our founder in 2001. This means that our platform is being enhanced daily by a cohesive team who works well together  and wastes no time with petty politics or bias. We have a singular focus—creating a better website builder for photographers.

Do you understand my needs?2018-08-22T07:51:56-07:00

Professional Photographers

Our founder is a professional photographer. Our CIO is a professional photographer. Every member of our original programming team was a photographer or videographer.

We Understand

We understand the needs of working photographers. We’ve made millions of dollars as professional photographers and we know the marketing pain you feel week after week.

Our goal is to make things easier for you and help you become more profitable by providing you with an incredible website builder specifically designed for photographers like you.

Are your sites websites affordable?2018-08-21T16:59:48-07:00

Affordable, But Not Cheap

We’re not the least expensive, but we’re one of the most affordable website builders when you examine all the features our platform offers. If you’re looking for ways to gain maximum value for your budget, we think you’ll discover that Good Gallery is the perfect choice.

As John Ruskin once said, “It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that’s all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.”

Do you offer premium designs?2018-08-21T16:53:47-07:00

Exceptional Designs

The word “premium” refers to something of exceptional quality or greater value than similar items. Synonyms include choice, prime, select, and exceptional. Rest assured that all our settings templates are “premium designs.”

But we don’t charge more money for them. Other website builders charge an introductory fee and then an additional fee when you want to use their best designs. With Good Gallery, our hosting fee provides you with access to the best of everything we offer.

Will I need design help?2018-08-21T16:22:35-07:00

Everybody Needs Help

Everybody who has ever designed a website could have probably used advice from someone. However, you won’t need to hire a special designer to help you with your Good Galley website.

Save Thousands

You might know another photographer who has spent thousands of dollars paying for someone to design their website. And it may look great. But with Good Gallery, you can do it yourself. Save that money and invest it in other marketing areas, because it’s going to be easy to get you up and running on our platform.

Website Design

However, if you just need a bit of help getting started, you do offer a Basic Configuration Service. Although we don’t offer design advice as part of that service, you can provide us with direction by mentioned Good Gallery websites you really like. Then, when we create your new site, we can incorporate those design elements in your website.

Are your sites GDPR compliant?2018-07-13T15:18:42-07:00

GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) presents guidelines for the use of personal information for people in the European Union (EU).

Cookie Warnings

We provide JavaScript code that notifies website visitors that their information may be collected. This is likely a requirement for photographers who collect information about people in the European Union.

Do you use browser caching?2018-08-22T14:27:41-07:00

Superior Browser Caching

Browser cache is temporary computer storage for files downloaded by your browser. For your website, we cache many files including photos, buttons, multimedia, html, CSS, and JavaScript.

Simply said, we use browser caching to make your website faster.

Highly Optimized Transactions

Our optimized caching reduces the number of transactions between servers and visitors improving overall performance while maintaining certain display functions.

Our engineering team has worked tirelessly to improve our caching to provide the speediest response alongside an unparalleled user experience.

How do you ensure that photo galleries load quickly?2018-08-22T13:39:39-07:00

Lazy Loading

We use a design strategy that delays the loading of photos until they’re needed by visitors. This means that pages load faster since thumbnails are only loaded when visitors move to that part of the page.

This is done using a technique called lazy loading. With lazy loading, instead of loading every image in a gallery, we only load information when a visitor reaches the area of the page where that content is found.

For example, we first load all the photographs located above the fold. As visitors scroll down, we continuously load additional photos—but only as necessary.

SEO Optimized

Although a few other website builders offer lazy loading designs, our code is optimized so that search engines are able also view textual content located anywhere on the page—even when that textual content is located in areas where images haven’t yet been loaded.

As a result, our highly-optimized lazy-loading thumbnail galleries perform extraordinarily well in search results.

Are your websites psychic?2018-08-22T13:54:35-07:00

Preloading Content

Our websites anticipate visitor behavior. For example, when visitors pause while looking at your gallery photos, we begin preloading the next three photos in your gallery anticipating that the visitor is going to continue viewing additional images.

This behavior improves the perceived speed of your site and helps encourage visitors to spend more time viewing your photographs.

We invented this technology and we’re the only website builder that offers this innovation.

In addition to preloading your content to improved performance, we also employ lazy loading for gallery thumbnails.

How do you handle Exif data?2018-08-22T13:50:09-07:00

Exif

Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif) data is embedded in most image files. It contains date and time information, camera settings, and additional meta information like titles, descriptions, and copyright details.

Imported Info

When you upload your images, we import the Exif information associated with your files and store it in our database. If you’ve included titles, descriptions, or geographical information in your Exif, we automatically associate that data with your photos and can make that information visible to both search engines and visitors.

Stripped Info

To improve download performance, we then strip that Exif data from the 130 resized images we create from your original photo. That Exif information within the image file isn’t used by search engines or browsers. More importantly, that data makes your file sizes larger than necessary.

Removing that unnecessary information helps ensure that your images load quickly in every browser viewport.

How do you improve back-end performance?2018-08-22T13:31:51-07:00

Combining Files

On most modern websites, there can be hundreds of pieces of information used to define how a page should be displayed. That information includes images, text, JavaScript, CSS, and a host of other data.

We’ve carefully evaluated all these data and combined them where possible so that fewer files are downloaded when a page is requested. This is called file aggregation.

Every data request requires a round trip to the server. By reducing the number of back-and-forth exchanges between our servers and your visitors improves your website performance.

How do you optimize text and supporting files?2018-08-22T13:17:33-07:00

Space Optimization

We use several methods to improve performance on Good Gallery websites. One of those important methods is stripping unnecessary information and dynamically compressing information.

Minification

Through a process called minification, we remove all unnecessary characters from some of our source code. Examples of unnecessary information include programmer comments, new line characters, and whitespace characters. Those tiny information components can impact website performance and we remove them before they’re downloaded.

Text Compression

Our servers use compression technologies that reduce the size of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files to help browsers download our content faster. This means your websites will load faster for your visitors.

How do you improve perceived download speed?2018-07-19T11:47:45-07:00

Prioritizing Content

We use several methods to improve perceived download speeds. One of those methods is content prioritization. We prioritize the resources needed to present the page to visitors.

Above the Fold

Content that appears above the fold is always loaded first. The term above the fold comes from the days of printed newspapers when the most important stories were always presented on the top half of the page. Now that means the information displayed in the browser viewport when a page initially loads.

Content Order

In most cases, your logo is displayed first to establish your brand. Next, we load menu information to allow visitors to begin navigating immediately if desired. Next, we load photos because that’s what we sell—our photography. And finally, we load everything else needed for page content.

Do auto seo tools or seo wizards exist?2018-07-19T11:47:18-07:00

We Speak the Truth

Most photographers are working on SEO. Very few photographers are doing it well. And fewer still understand the nuances of what they’re supposed to be doing. There are no magical auto seo or seo wizards out there that will put you on the first page of search results for competitive keywords.

Photographer Analogies

Have you ever heard “spray and pray” advice given to beginner photographers? Or have you read that beginner photographers should set their cameras to program mode instead of aperture mode, or priority mode, or manual mode?

Sometimes those spray and pray photographers get lucky and capture an amazing photo. And sometimes beginner photographers using program mode create amazing images too. But those are exceptions and not the rule.

These are perfect analogies to SEO. If you content strategy is spray and pray or if you’re depending on tools that claim to offer auto SEO, then your chances of being featured in the top 10 search results for competitive keywords are not good.

What We Provide

Although there are no automatic tools out there destined to provide you with a perfectly easy path to SEO goodness, Good Gallery does provide you with a host of powerful features that make the SEO strategies and best practices you employ more effective and faster to implement. And we have more of those features than any other website builder.

Do you provide SEO guidance?2018-07-19T11:46:59-07:00

User Manual

Our User Manual includes a comprehensive SEO guide that helps you get started. This document outlines fundamentals like titles, headings, keywords, and content. For keyword content, it provides you with samples and recommendations specific to photographers.

Perhaps most importantly, our User Manual provides you with easy-to-read instructions on how to use our most advanced SEO features.

One-on-One Help

If you need one-on-one SEO help, our founder Rob Greer offers personalized SEO help and evaluations vis Skype.

Do you have a mobile-first strategy?2018-07-19T11:46:48-07:00

Mobile First

The phrase mobile-first refers to both user experience in general and Google’s latest ranking strategy.

When mobile-first is referenced in relation to user experience, it typically means that designers prioritize a visitor’s mobile experience over their desktop experience.

More recently, Google uses the term mobile-first to refer to their shift of using mobile websites and mobile content instead of desktop content as the basis for determining ranking in search engine results.

Mobile Experience

Since 2011, Good Gallery has focused on providing the incredible mobile experiences.

We’ve always known that as more visitors use mobile websites to interact with photographers and their websites, the quality of information presentation would be key. With that in mind, our websites have always been mobile friendly.

In 2015, Google announced their initiative to reward sites that were mobile friendly with improved search result positions. Facing Mobilegeddon, many photographers raced to fix their websites. But photographers using Good Gallery were already ready. We didn’t need to change our mobile websites to meet the stringent Google guidelines.

Our commitment to a mobile-first user experience is the same today.

Google Results

In 2016, Google announced their new “mobile-first” indexing strategy. In addition to expanding their mobile friendly test, they are also using the content from the mobile version of websites to determine rankings. Previously, ranking was based on the content found on the desktop versions of websites.

As before, Good Gallery websites are already ready to meet this new ranking hurdle. Our ability to predict these changes isn’t special. It’s simply our desire to make sure our visitors have the best possible experience on all devices.

With our design strategy in place, it’s not surprising that when Google announces new initiatives, our photographer clients are already ready for anything.

Can I hide pages from search engines?2018-08-26T10:07:36-07:00

Hide from Search

Using simple settings, you can let search engines know that single image pages, entire galleries, or other any website page shouldn’t be indexed. When these features are activated, instructions are provided in the HTML to let search engines know that your content shouldn’t be indexed.

Intelligently Hidden

In Good Gallery, every page in every gallery is treated as a separate page. This feature allows you to optimize every image for highly targeted search terms by associating headings, textual content, photos, and even video with individual images.

If you haven’t had time to assign content to some photos and you’re worried about thin content, Good Gallery can be configured to notify search engines that incomplete photo pages shouldn’t be indexed. This means that if titles and content aren’t present for an image, search engines are instructed to ignore those photos. Additionally, those excluded photos aren’t included in the sitemap file.

When you finally get a chance to associate content with those images, then those photo pages automatically become available for search engine indexing.

And even though those photo pages won’t be indexed, your visitors will still see be able to view your photography.

This feature was added to appease folks who were worried about thin content—although our data shows that search engines don’t view image pages without text negatively. But it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?

Before You Go Live

When you’re developing your new website under your temporary URL (example.goodgallery.com), your content is automatically hidden to prevent search engines from prematurely indexing your content.

Do you use schema markup or structured data?2018-08-22T15:25:06-07:00

Schema

Schema refers to code used by search engines to help them understand your content. Good Gallery websites include schema information. That information is created dynamically and automatically using data you already provide.

Because we use schema information in our code, that in turn improves the way your website information is displayed in search engine results.

Scheme information is also known as structured data. We also provide Open Graph data.

SEO

Although schema information and structured data don’t directly affect rankings, the improved characteristics of the way your information in search engines does affect clickthroughs and that in turn can positively affect your rankings and conversions.

Are your sites search-engine friendly?2018-08-23T11:29:58-07:00

Building Friendly Websites

Although search engines are supposed to understand your website content, website design requirements can sometimes outpace search engine capabilities. Or worse yet, some themes and website builders ignore search engine limitations.

Old Technology

Search engines often use old technology to gather information for their index. Unfortunately, that older technology may not consider modern design techniques.

For example, Googlebot uses Chrome 41 (launched March 2015) to index website content. And lots of things have changed in website design. In fact, content in many modern designs can’t be indexed by Googlebot.

At Good Gallery, our engineers are familiar with the limitations of indexing technologies. So before we add the latest, niftiest design element, we first determine if that element is going to be recognized by indexing technologies or worse, block indexing technologies.

You’d probably be surprised to learn of the many website builders and theme designs that are working against your search engine optimization efforts.

Why is your photo SEO better?2018-08-23T11:22:23-07:00

We Do More

Every aspect of our website builder is based on how to make it easier for you to succeed in SEO. Our SEO-first approach is which translates to better results for our photographer customers. That commitment is easily seen in our extensive list of features.

Although our websites are beautifully simple and crazy fast, when someone talks about Good Gallery, the letters S – E – O are almost sure to follow.

We Did It First

Good Gallery is the only platform in the world that treats every photo in every gallery as an individual page on your website. That’s a unique innovation and it’s important to our clients.

Sometimes Copied, Never Duplicated

A few website builders have tried to follow us by creating emulations that present gallery photos with surface page characteristics. However, Good Gallery is still the only platform that separates photo pages at the code level and presents focused, highly relevant, image-specific content to search engines.

Unique URLs

Every photo in every gallery has a unique URL. And every one of those URLs can be optimized and targeted separately for competitive keywords—both for organic results and for image search.

How do you prevent penalties for duplicate images?2018-08-23T11:24:17-07:00

Duplicate Photos

Search engines don’t like duplicate content—whether text or images. Good Gallery uses innovative technology to prevent search engines from penalizing you if you use the same image more than once in a gallery.

Automatic Canonical References

Canonical link elements help prevent duplicate content issues by providing search engines with a link to preferred information. This helps search engines immediately understand which piece of content is most important on your website.

When you use the same image in more than one gallery on your website, our systems automatically create a canonical reference that points to the image in your most prominent gallery. This feature helps prevent duplicate content issues on your website.

Learn more about how canonicals work in Good Gallery.

Are self-referential canonical tags supported?2018-08-22T19:48:42-07:00

Canonical Elements

If two pages on your website feature similar content, search engines may have trouble determining which page is most important.  Canonical elements (aka canonical tags) help search engines understand which page is most important.

Canonical tags are included in the page HTML. That tag includes a link pointing to your preferred website content. Search engines use that information to help them determine the best URL for their index. This tag also helps prevent duplicate content issues.

In Good Gallery, you can include the same photo in more than one gallery. If you choose to display photos in more than one gallery, you would normally have a duplicate content issue. However, our software can recognizes this issue and automatically create a canonical entry that points to your most important photo based on your menu hierarchy.

Simply said, canonical tags help search engines understand the relative importance of similar content on your website.

Self-Referential Canonicals

Most pages of your website won’t include duplicate content. But search engines can never be sure that duplicate content might exist. For that reason, Good Gallery includes self-referencing canonical link tags. In other words, our software includes self-referencing canonical link tags on most pages.

There are several benefits to self-referencing canonical link tags.

First, Google recommends using self-referencing canonicals. Including that information makes it explicitly clear which URL should be used as the official content. Sometimes external links to your pages may include special parameters, upper or lowercase letters, and www or non-www subdomains. Using self-referencing canonicals prevents these variants from becoming issues for you.

Second, self-referencing canonicals help prevent lazy screen scrapers from taking a page of HTML code from your website and using it elsewhere. When that’s done, canonical information is also included and any benefit the screen scraping site owner might have is negated since the canonical reference would point back to your site.

Do you provide sitemaps?2018-08-22T19:54:28-07:00

XML Sitemaps

In early 2005, Google introduced the XML sitemap protocol. The XML sitemap is a link list that’s used to help inform search engines about website structures.

The XML portion of the sitemap name refers to eXtensible Markup Language. To put it simply, XML is a consistent way to format information so that it’s easily understood by programs and devices.

XML sitemaps are automatically created for your Good Gallery website. And when you make changes to your site, your XML sitemap is instantly updated. This helps ensure that search engines are aware of every public page on your website.

Image Sitemaps

Although some platforms include an XML sitemap feature, Good Gallery is the only website builders to also include image information in the XML sitemap.

Since we cater exclusively to photographers, we felt it was important to also include detailed photo information in our sitemaps to help search engines understand your content.

Visitor Sitemaps

Menu systems were relatively crude on early websites. To help visitors quickly locate content, designers created a single content area that provided links to every page on a website. Those early link lists were called sitemaps.

As today’s menu systems are typically robust, few designers include visitor sitemaps that simply provide links to all available content. However, since search engines often use that kind of internal link information as a ranking factor, Good Gallery websites include detailed page sitemaps on every page featuring subpages.

For example, if you have a page called Portfolio and under that page you have 3 galleries called Weddings, Portraits, and Events, then Good Gallery automatically creates a sitemap on the Portfolio page to those three subpages—even though that Portfolio page isn’t directly linked in the main menu system.

This is yet another example of the extraordinary and innovative SEO features that are only present in Good Gallery.

Can you tag photos for SEO?2018-08-22T19:13:13-07:00

Keyword Feature

Good Gallery offers an innovative feature allowing you to link related images and display them in custom gallery pages.

These groups of images can be shared with clients directly via email using their unique URL or visitors can discover these collections of images naturally as they browse your website.

Our website builder is the only platform in the world that offers this kind of gallery functionality.

Using Keywords

To use the feature, you first associate one or more keywords or keyword phrases with a photograph.  Once added, those keywords appear alongside any content descriptions you’ve included for that image.

Visitors who click on the keywords or keyword phrases are then presented with a gallery of all photos sharing that keyword or keyword phrase.

Dynamic Galleries

You can use this feature to create dynamic galleries.

For example, if you’re a food photographer, you might use the keywords appetizer, soups, salads, main course, and dessert. Alternatively, if you’re a wedding photographer, you might create image keywords that include venue names or city names. Or if you’re a portrait photographer, you might use studio and natural light as your keyword categories.

SEO Benefits

Connecting photos using these dynamic internal links helps inform search engines about the relationship between images and enhances your SEO. These kinds of relevancy signals are particularly important when the photos share common information relevant to visitor queries.

 

Do you support meta descriptions?2018-07-19T11:44:14-07:00

Meta Descriptions

The meta description tag provides search engines with text descriptions of pages. Those descriptions appear on search engine results pages.

Keywords or information entered in the meta description aren’t used by search engines to determine your ranking position. However, your meta description text can significantly influence whether visitors will click on your link when they see your page appear in their search results.

For that reason, we’ve provided several advanced tools that help you easily manage meta description information. Good Gallery tools make that sometimes daunting content task easier.

Are Good Gallery URLs optimized for SEO?2018-08-22T16:05:52-07:00

URL Info

Website URLs refer to the path to pages or images on your website. The text that appears in those URL paths is used by search engines as a SEO ranking factor.

Title Matching

When you add a title to a photo or a page, we automatically create an SEO-friendly URL that matches your content. If you’ve used keywords in your title, that means those keywords will automatically appear in your URL.

This means that the tedious task of sculpting your URLs is made easy.

Stop Words

Common words that search engines don’t always index are called stop words. When you include stop words in your title, then those words aren’t included in your dynamically generated URL.

This feature helps keep your URL short and concise. It also means that you don’t need to remove stop words manually.

Custom URLs

You can modify dynamically generated URLs manually on any page or image. This means you can create custom URLs as required, and that you’re not forced to accept any URL that might have been generated automatically.

How do you fight SEO myths?2018-08-22T15:49:57-07:00

Myth Busters

Some plugins, themes, and website builders offer “features” that no longer offer you any SEO benefit. But we don’t believe in perpetuating SEO myths. We therefore don’t offer features that we know won’t help you with your website or SEO.

Meta Keywords & Authorship

For example, using the meta keywords tag was once believed to be an effective SEO strategy. That belief was quashed more than a decade ago. And yet some plugins and website builders still offer the ability to enter that information.

Likewise, the authorship tag was once believed to be a ranking factor and that was disproven.

Cutting Edge SEO

At Good Gallery, our team is on the cutting edge of SEO. And our software is too. We not only follow industry best-practices, but we also forecast SEO changes to help you get in front of them.

Character Count Example

Google recently changed the number of characters that appear in meta descriptions. For years, they supported 150 – 160 characters. For that reason, our content tools include a character counter for that field with a recommendation to include up to 155 characters.

When Google began supporting over 300 characters in meta descriptions, we didn’t increase our recommended word count. Other systems like the Yoast plugin for WordPress quickly changed their recommendations to recognize that change.

However, we decided to keep our recommendations the same. First, we made that decision because Bing didn’t change their word count, and that search engine accounts for 20% of searches in the US market. Perhaps more importantly, we knew that Google often tests ideas and then returns to their original functionality.

Sure enough, within just a few months Google returned to their 150 – 160 average character count for meta descriptions. And then photographers using other systems had to scramble to re-adjust their overly long meta descriptions because of ill-advised recommendations from their website provider or SEO plugin.

Can I create 301 redirects?2018-08-22T15:58:46-07:00

301 Redirects

301 Redirects are used to notify browsers and search engines when a page on your website has moved to a new location. In other words, 301 Redirects are a permanent forwarding address for old URLs.

Creating a 301 Redirect is like submitting a change of address card to the post office when you move to ensure that your postal mail is forwarded correctly. These are forwarding addresses for your website.

Manual 301s

Good Gallery includes a feature that allows you to manually define 301 redirects. You simply list the original URL alongside the destination URL, and any traffic is automatically redirected.

Automatic 301s

Since manually creating 301 redirects can be tedious, we include a feature that automatically creates a 301 redirect when you change the URL for any page. URLs typically change when you modify page titles or optimize keywords in URLs. When that happens, 301 redirects are created automatically.

We are the only website builder who has developed this innovative feature. This feature will save you time and effort while also removing common errors that happen when  you try to keep up with this information manually.

Image 301s

If you rename photo, the filename and the URL for that image will also change—if you allow it. When that happens, a 301 redirect is automatically created. This ensures that you to maintain optimal SEO for the image in question as visitors and search engines visiting your old URL are automatically moved to your new URL.

Just like Automatic 301s, this is another innovative feature you’ll only find in Good Gallery.

Is geocoding supported?2018-08-22T15:48:16-07:00

Local Addresses

You can assign a street address to any photograph using our image tools or we can import that information automatically if it’s provided with the image Exif data.

Good Gallery uses location information to automatically geocode the image. We also create a direct hypertext link to that address in Google Maps.

This is a unique feature to our website builder that directly helps your local SEO when you’re optimizing for geographical or regional keyword phrases.

Are footer menus available?2018-08-22T15:45:55-07:00

Bottom Navigation

The page footer appears below your main body text. We include a feature in Good Gallery that automatically adds a dynamic menu at the bottom of every page where text is present.

Although visitors can view your main menu located near the top of every page, they may look for navigation elements when they consume your content and the reach the bottom of a page. These footer menus therefore help reduce your bounce rates.

Footer menus also increase the amount of internal linking information provided to search engines. That in turn can positively affect your SEO.

Can I add photo captions?2018-08-22T15:30:32-07:00

Summarized Photo Info

When you add a photo or illustration to page or image content, captions are supported on those images. Typically, these short text elements of a few words used to describe an image in text areas.

This caption text is often used by search engines to help them determine the relevancy of an image thus affecting your SEO. Our text editor tools make adding this caption content easy and helps it remain consistent with the rest of your keyword strategy.

Detailed Photo Info

In Good Gallery, image info refers to detailed information associated with individual gallery images. That information can include text, images, video, location data, and even exif details.

Both visitors and search engines can view this information. Visitors access these details by clicking on the Image Info button on the control bar. Search engines consume that content just as they discover content naturally on text pages or blog posts.

And if you add informative, detailed, and compelling information that describes your photos, you’ll encourage search engines to display the pages associated with those images in search results.

How are image headings managed?2018-08-22T15:37:09-07:00

Photo Headings

For websites, a page heading is the text that appears at the top of a page above the body text.

When you add a title to a photo, you can also add detailed textual content that educates visitors and is appealing to search engines. Within that content area, you can include headings.

You can have these headings appear automatically based on the title of the photo. Or you can add them manually.

When added automatically, the page title and the page heading with both presumably include targeted keywords. And if that content isn’t added manually, the automation can help you create SEO content more quickly and easily.

Alternatively, you can manage the headings manually. This option allows you to optimize photo titles and photo headings separately if you want to provide more targeted guidance to search engines.

Do your SEO tools slow down your websites?2018-08-22T15:26:24-07:00

No SEO Speed Penalty

WordPress SEO plugins can have a dramatic negative effect on website speed. More often than not, the more features you use in WordPress SEO tools, the slower your website. This can mean a loss in visitors and reduced conversions.

With Good Gallery, you won’t see any speed reductions even if you’re using every SEO feature we offer.

Are SEO reports available?2018-08-20T18:22:18-07:00

SEO Reports

Good Gallery reports on hundreds of details that can help you optimize your SEO efforts and improve your rankings.

Link Issues

Both internal and external links can affect your SEO. Our reports provide information about internal links totals, external link totals, nofollow internal links, total nofollow links, links pointing to 301 redirects, links that point to pages not found, and other details.

This information helps you quickly correct issues you might have otherwise miss.

Orphan Tracking

Pages are considered orphans when no internal links point to those pages. Although orphan pages are sometimes configured this way intentionally, in many cases these orphans accidental.

Since search engines seldom rank content found on orphan pages, you can use this information to change your internal link structure to support these pages.

Unique Words

Our reports provide you with a count of the number of unique words you use in your content. Diverse content is one way to ensure the information you’re sharing with search engines is unique. Therefore, the breadth of your content vocabulary can become a prime indicator as to your diversity of content.

Title & Descriptions

Reporting options for titles include total word count, word count for titles, pages missing titles, pages with duplicate titles, titles over 55 characters, and titles under 10 characters. Similar information is also provided for meta descriptions.

This information is all vital to website owners who are interested in addressing some of the most important search engine ranking signals.

Missing Headings

Headings often contain important keywords and keyword phrases in SEO optimized content. With that in mind, our reporting tools provide information about missing headings, missing subheadings, and duplicate headings and subheadings.

Unoptimized Photos

Our SEO reporting information for photos includes information about the total number of photos available, photos that are actively displayed, photos that aren’t displayed anywhere, photos without titles, photos without associated content, and word counts associated with photo content.

Recommended Lengths

Most data entry tools in Good Gallery provide minimum and maximum recommendations for content length. Our reports take that one step further and inform you if you’ve gone over or under and then points you directly to the locations where you need to fix them.

Word Counts

Providing you with a metric by which you can judge your progress is one way our word count reporting keeps you on track. You can monitor your progress in content optimization by page type (images, text, galleries) or view your overall progress.

Leaderboard

The Leaderboard is a Good Gallery innovation. See the top SEO content producers on our website builder. And if you feel up to it, perhaps you too will one day find yourself on that list of wordsmiths.

Unused Photos

Sometimes you may upload photos that never get used. Other times, you may upload photos that you though you had included in a gallery, but they weren’t. Our reports help you find those unused photos and either remove them or put them in the right place.

How do your sites work on desktops vs notebooks vs tablets vs phones?2018-08-24T09:58:41-07:00

Flexible Displays

Our websites were designed to perform equally well on desktops, notebooks, tablets, and phones.

Each device has different requirements as do the visitors using those devices. And we’ve optimized the user experience so that the presentation of your photos across those devices is ideal for each device.

Because of the way we’ve designed our system, photos and content are always sized correctly and presented appropriately to the visitor viewport.

Can photos be displayed full screen?2018-08-24T09:57:01-07:00

Full-Screen Photos

Within any gallery, you and your visitors have the choice of displaying photos singly or in grids. When displayed singly, your photos can be displayed so that they fill the entire screen, or you can configure the padding around the image to include white space.

That white space reduces the size of the photo within the browser viewport, but it creates balance in your presentation of images.

Is aspect ratio control available?2018-07-30T14:00:19-07:00

Aspect Ratios

Most photographers using Good Gallery display their thumbnail photos in their original aspect ratio. In other words, the full photo is displayed—regardless of the photographer cropped the image.

Other photographers prefer to display their photos squares. When a visitor clicks on a square thumbnail, then the entire image is displayed in the original aspect ratio.

And other photographers pick from one of the other aspect ratios we offer for a unique presentation of consistently shaped images in their galleries. Some of the additional available aspect ratios include 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, 9:16, 9:21, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 21:9, 1.618:1, 1.85:1, 2.39:1, and 4:1

Can I change thumbnail shapes?2018-08-24T09:59:48-07:00

Rounding Corners

Creating unique thumbnail shapes in galleries is another way you can differentiate your visual website brand.

Using a simple setting, you can retain original square corners for your photos or you can round them to various degrees—from slightly rounded corners to making thumbnail images completely round.

Are hover effects available?2018-08-20T18:14:21-07:00

Hover Animation

Hover effect animations are activated when visitors hover their cursors over various website features. These animations can help visitors connect with your website and add life to buttons, menus, and images.

Thumbnail Features

Using simple settings, you control thumbnail borders and behavior when visitors hover their cursor over your photos. You can adjust the size of borders, border colors, and change the transparencies of photos, borders, and backgrounds when a hover event occurs.

Are 3D photo effects supported?2018-08-24T09:59:18-07:00

Drop Shadows Explained

Shadows (aka drop shadows) are visual effects where a shadow design element is added behind an object to provide visitors with an impression that the element is floating on the page.

Thumbnail Effects

You can add subtle or obvious shadows to your thumbnails to help create dimensionality on gallery pages. If you also add borders to your thumbnail photos to enhance the shadow effect.

How do I upload photos?2018-08-20T18:13:58-07:00

Upload Your Photos

You can upload your photos using our drag-and-drop uploader tool or you can use our built-in file chooser to pick photos from your local machine or network.

One of the benefits to a drag-and-drop uploader include going directly to the folder where your images are located and using your standard computer tools to move the files to your website.

With our uploader, you can upload an unlimited number of file. You can also add files from multiple folders, using a “stacking” method of adding photos to your upload queue.

Can I display slideshows?2018-08-24T09:54:05-07:00

Gallery Slideshows

Slideshows refer to photographs in a series that advance automatically.

Using a single setting, you can enable gallery slideshows. You can also control the cadence of the slideshow by defining the frame delay.

Visitor Controls

If you’ve enabled slideshows for every gallery, visitors can interrupt the slideshow by clicking on any of the rotating images. The slideshow is then disengaged, and visitors can then click through the images at their own speed.

Alternatively, if you haven’t enabled slideshows for your galleries, visitors can activate a slideshow on their own using the optional Slideshow button located on the control bar.

Other Slideshows

Beyond the slideshow features present in Good Gallery, you can also create slideshows in third-party software, upload the resulting output to YouTube or Vimeo, and then include that on your website.

Can I decide what to show on square thumbnails?2018-08-24T10:02:24-07:00

Square Cropping

Many photographers love our square thumbnail galleries. If you’d like to display thumbnails with a 1:1 aspect ratio (squares), then you can use our Square Crop tool to define the area of your photo that you want to display within those square thumbnails.

In other words, you’ll use the handles of a familiar cropping tool to define the square area that should be displayed. Visitors who click on the square thumbnail will then view your entire photo.

Can my photos fill the entire screen?2018-07-30T14:16:01-07:00

Full Screen Photos

With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can enable a feature where your images fill the entire browser viewport.

Dynamic Cropping

Viewport dimensions are different for every visitor. If you want full-screen photos, but you don’t want some areas of your image hidden beyond the page margins, you can use our Safe Area Tool to define image areas that should never be cropped when displayed in galleries.

Safe Area Tool

Good Gallery was the first website builder to allow you to define the most important areas of your images—areas that should not ever be hidden regardless of the browser dimensions.

Every visitor to your website will be using a different device with different screen resolutions and browser viewport sizes.

Using the Safe Area Tool means that your website dynamically determines the optimal way to crop your images so that image fills the entire viewable image area without hiding important information.

This feature lets you present full-bleed photos to visitors—meaning that the edges of each image expand to all sides of the viewing area.

Although full-bleed image functionality can be handled automatically, important areas of the image might be inadvertently hidden as the image is automatically cropped to fill the entire screen. That’s where the Safe Area Tool really shines.

Can I manually change the photo order in galleries?2018-08-24T10:06:05-07:00

Drag-and-Drop Sorting

You can drag-and-drop photos to any location. Simply click on the photo to select it, and then move your mouse cursor to the desired destination in a gallery.

You can also use CTRL + Click or SHIFT + Click to select contiguous or isolated groups of photos and move them to any location in a gallery.

The way you select photos on your computer is the same way you’ll select photos in your online folders.

Alternatively, If you want to make fast changes to your sort order, you can also sort photos automatically.

Can I automatically sort gallery photos?2018-08-24T10:06:48-07:00

Sorting Photos Automatically

When you upload gallery photos, they’re sorted by upload date in descending order. However, you can choose any sort order for any gallery.

Sort Options

Options include sorting by date added, date modified, date taken, date uploaded, description, file size, filename, image size, and title in ascending or descending order.

If you need more control, you can also sort photos manually.

How are photo filenames managed?2018-07-30T14:10:21-07:00

Renamed Files

Your original image filenames aren’t visible to visitors or search engines.

When photos are uploaded, we generate new public filenames for every image. Those new filenames are shown as a string of random numbers and letters (i.e. 4qnvkdz3x2r). This feature ensures that any file naming methods you use internally aren’t ever visible publicly.

SEO Optimized Filenames

Using keywords in photo filenames is a known ranking factor. But it’s rarely done because it’s admittedly a tedious task to manually change filenames to include important keywords.

But Good Gallery solves this problem. We were the first website builder to include a feature that automatically renames photos. When you add a keyword-rich title to any photo, the photo is renamed, and important keywords are automatically included in your filename—simply and easily.

How many ways can I display thumbnail galleries?2018-08-24T09:57:48-07:00

Thumbnails

Thumbnails refer to small photographs commonly displayed in a grid format that help visitors to quickly review groups of photos. In Good Gallery, clicking on a thumbnail will display a large-sized version of that photo.

Gallery Options Galore

There are literally hundreds of ways you can display thumbnail photos in galleries—millions of ways if you include the minor settings we make available.

Just a few of the things you can control include the aspect ratio, thumbnail shapes, borders, shadows, padding, size, and columns.

Grid Layouts

Using our simple administrative settings, you can change photo thumbnail grids to display one column, or three columns, or twenty columns, or anything in between.

You can choose to display photos in their original aspect ratio or in more than a dozen other fixed aspect ratios.

You can also choose the size of your thumbnail images or even the amount of padding to display between images or surrounding all the images.

The customization opportunities are virtually limitless!

What do visitors see when they visit galleries?2018-08-24T10:13:11-07:00

Define Your Gallery Behavior

When visitors access a gallery, you can choose to present a grid of photos or you can highlight individual photos.

If you’re displaying a grid of photos, there are hundreds of ways you can display those thumbnail photos by controlling the aspect ratio, thumbnail shapes, borders, shadows, padding, size, and columns. Visitors that click on any thumbnail photo are then presented with the individual photo highlight view.

If you’re highlighting an individual photo, you you can choose to display a single photo, multiple photos that scroll horizontally (with a single photo highlighted in that row), or you can display stacked photos that create a 3D gallery effect.

Do you have a Pinterest-style display?2018-08-24T10:13:45-07:00

Card Style Gallery

We offer an optional Pinterest-style display that shows photo thumbnails alongside descriptive text. This text-driven grid of thumbnails is a popular way to display short descriptive text alongside a broad presentation of photos.

Can visitors use zoom for a closer view?2018-08-24T10:15:26-07:00

Zoom Capable

The Zoom tools display an enlarged view of the selected image. Available on both desktop and mobile browsers, this control bar feature allows visitors to closely examine photo details.

Good Gallery is the only website builder that offers a zoom feature for desktop browsers. When visitors view a photo and then click the zoom icon, they’re presented with a close-up view of the selected image.

For photographers who include lots of details in their photos, this capability is amazing.

Photographers who don’t want to provide visitors with a close-in view can disable this feature just a few mouse clicks.

What’s your design philosophy?2018-08-03T13:47:02-07:00

Our Design Philosophy

We believe that clients who hire photographers want to view photographs first. They probably don’t want to read about how you got your start or how much you love photography or how you’ll provide them with an amazing experience.

Visitors come to your website because they want to know if you can create photographs that will meet their needs. Most Good Gallery customers present their photography at the forefront because that’s what most first-time visitors will want to see first.

On our list of example websites, you’ll see that most sites feature a single photo, a grid of photographs, or several thumbnail photos linking to separate galleries. That’s because those 3 options meet the needs of most first-time visitors.

Alternative Approach

Some photographers are adopting a different approach to selling their services. This new tactic is based on the idea of providing an unparalleled experience to clients.

In this approach, how the photography makes clients feel is given the highest priority. This experiential approach is often coupled with in-person sales (IPS).

Under this sales philosophy, photographers are selling an experience and emotional connection—and the photographs themselves take a back seat to those considerations.

Good Gallery photographers who choose this sales approach may adopt website designs that feature fewer photos and more text, videos, calls to action, and tools like chat to move visitors toward active, in-person engagement more quickly.

You can take this approach in Good Gallery by adding content above or below galleries using our easy-to-use text editor. You can also create informational pages based on our standard text pages or by using tools available on Visual Navigation pages. And of course, you can add third-party embedded tools designed to connect you directly to your visitors.

Using these various options, you can create a balanced mix of text and images focused on experiential sales with highly targeted calls to action. In other words, if you want your website to work this way, you can have it that way.

You Decide

In the end, we want you to decide on what works best for you and your business. But we challenge you to think about what you would want to see on a website if you were a potential client and you were hiring a photographer.

Although your personal preferences may not always match your visitor’s preferences, you’re certainly qualified to think about how your opinions and your visitor’s opinions might be connected.

Do you support Google Analytics?2018-08-22T13:11:30-07:00

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service that tracks and reports website traffic. Good Gallery fully supports Google Analytics and we make it easy to insert your tracking code so you can get started right away.

Local Hosting for Better Performance

When your website uses code hosted elsewhere, visitors must wait for that external information to download before your page is loaded. That can slow down their experience.

Since most photographers use Google Analytics to track visitors, we’ve moved that code from Google’s servers to our servers to help speed up downloads for everyone.

To make sure we have the latest code, we automatically check for code updates daily to keep our code library in sync with Google.

Do I need to know code to customize my site?2018-08-24T10:25:04-07:00

No Coding Required

You don’t need to know a single line of code to build and customize an amazing Good Gallery website. With our easy-to-use settings, you can change the look and behavior of your new website by clicking a few checkboxes or selecting options from simple dropdown fields.

This means that even if you’ve never created a website on your own, you can still create an amazing website with Good Gallery.

Custom Code Supported

Although custom coding isn’t required, if you’re a website geek and you like to tinker, you can add your own CSS or JavaScript using our easily accessed custom settings.

How can I find the setting I need?2018-08-24T10:25:35-07:00

Organized Settings

All our settings are organized under intuitively named categories. For example, all settings related to logos are found under the Logo heading. Likewise, all settings related to fonts, font colors, text spacing, and line spacing are found under the Typography heading.

Search Settings

With thousands of settings available, even though our settings well-organized, you may not always be able to immediately find what you need. With that in mind, we include a powerful search engine that’s dedicated to searching settings.

Simply enter your keyword or keywords and a list of all related settings is displayed. You can make your changes right there on the results screen, save your choices, and your website is updated immediately.

Are loading animations available?2018-08-20T20:02:33-07:00

Loading Animations

Loaders, preloaders, and loading animations all refer to simple and entertaining animations displayed while photos are downloading from our servers.

Even when loading animations are enabled, they’re rarely visible on our websites since our photos download very quickly.

However, for any visitors with limited bandwidth, you can choose from more than thirty loading animations. Once a loader is selected, you can change the size, color, speed, transparency, and background of the animation using our easy-to-use settings.

Can I customize gallery navigation?2018-08-24T10:26:30-07:00

Amazing Arrows

You can create a unique gallery navigation experience by changing how your arrows look and operate in photography portfolios. This means that visitors can interact with your photos in unique ways.

Shapes + Shapes

You can choose from more than 200 different arrow shapes for your galleries. You can also change arrow size and arrow colors to coordinate more closely with your brand. From standard to curly to blocky arrows, pick the style that works best for you.

Innovative Auto Hide Features

By default, gallery arrows disappear as visitors navigate through the gallery. In other words, when a cursor is motionless, and the visitor is clicking to advance in the gallery, the arrows disappear to present an uncluttered view of your photos.

When visitors move their cursors, the arrows appear again. But you can customize this behavior for each arrow to meet your own user experience preferences.

Alternative Navigation

You can also use your keyboard arrows, page up, page down, home, end, and escape keys to navigate images and image info.

How do I manage my website color scheme?2018-08-24T10:27:07-07:00

Color Customization

There are more than 100 color settings you can customize. Or you can choose a few defaults and let Good Gallery do the rest.

Picker Tool

Good Gallery provides color choices from a named list of over 140 web-safe colors.

Alternatively, you can choose a custom color. After selecting the custom color option, you can enter any hexadecimal color value or use the integrated color picker tool to select from any point in the color spectrum.

Most color-related settings also include transparency options where you can control the opacity of select items.

Can I add background images to my website?2018-08-20T20:02:03-07:00

Custom Backgrounds

You can upload any image or graphic and assign it as your website background. From that point, you can choose to fill the background or tile the background with your image.

Pattern Library

If you don’t have an image you’d prefer, but you still want a graphical background, Good Gallery offers more than 100 vector background patterns that have a minimal file footprint and that download almost instantly for most visitors.

Do you support landing pages?2018-08-20T18:10:06-07:00

Landing Pages

Landing pages market to visitors who have been targeted by online advertising. These pages are designed to convert visitors by having them perform a specific action.

Fewer Links

One of the tenants of landing pages is that visitors should only be presented with the conversion offer and that all other links and distractions should be removed. With that in mind, our landing pages are completely blank allowing for focused calls to action.

On landing pages, all logos, menus, and text area footers are hidden but the general formatting rules consistent with your brand are applied to any content you might add.

Do your sites support SSL?2018-08-20T17:36:39-07:00

SSL / HTTPS

SSL certificates ensure that all visitor traffic is authenticated and encrypted. This level of security is confirmed by the lock icon and a “Secure” browser notification displayed for visitors next to your URL.

Free Certificates

Our free SSL certificates are installed automatically as soon as your website goes live on your official domain. You don’t need to do anything at all and you can rest easy knowing that all traffic to and from your site is encrypted with HTTPS.

Benefits

There are several benefits for websites secured with SSL certificates. Some of those benefits include:

  • Reduced likelihood that information can be intercepted by a third party.
  • Your business appears more trustworthy and professional.
  • Visitors know that information shared via online forms is protected.
  • Your website won’t be identified and flagged as insecure by some browsers.
  • Sensitive data like usernames and passwords are protected.
  • Google rewards HTTPS encryption with a minor SEO ranking benefit.
Do your sites support HSTS?2018-08-24T10:28:42-07:00

HSTS

HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) is a mechanism that helps protect your website from man-in-the-middle attacks including protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking. This is accomplished through a response header that browsers receive when accessing your website.

Preventing Insecure Communications

In addition to supporting HTTPS, we also include HSTS support. With this technology, browsers will prevent insecure communications between the browser and the server and will require all data be sent over HTTPS.

Once a supported browser receives this header, that browser will prevent any communications from being sent over HTTP to the specified domain and will instead send all communications over HTTPS.

Can I hide pages on my website?2018-08-24T10:29:03-07:00

Page Visibility

Every page can be assigned one of several visibility options. You can choose to have a page visible to everyone, visible only to visitors who have been given an exact URL, or invisible and unavailable to everyone.

Will you share my information with other companies?2018-08-20T17:39:14-07:00

Protecting Your Privacy

We’ll never share or sell your data with anyone else. Ever. Period. The End.

We don’t like it when other companies do that to us and we won’t do it to you.

How do you fight evil robots?2018-08-20T18:28:54-07:00

Slowing Down Screen Scrapers

Some companies use screen scrapers to your website content. They then use that stolen content on their own websites.

Many of those companies harvest your data from cached previews stored by Google. We disable Google’s cached previews to help prevent unethical companies from stealing your content.

Are your servers secure?2018-08-24T10:30:12-07:00

Secure Servers

Our servers are protected by multiple layers of networking firewalls and third-party application firewalls. We also perform frequent software updates and patches to ensure optimal server security.

Access to our servers also requires multi-factor authentication from designated IP addresses to further prevent any unauthorized access.

We also use custom monitoring tools and alarms to help prevent bad actors from taking advantage of our systems.

Have you ever been hacked?2018-10-02T18:13:17-07:00

Stay Secure

Keeping your website, your photos, and your content secure is our #1 priority. If you’ve ever been hacked, you know how that feels. It sucks.

Never Hacked

Websites on the Good Gallery platform have never been hacked.

We use technologies that are inherently more secure than other content management systems like WordPress.

Not only is our software is closely controlled, we’ve included checks in our system that prevent common hacks like brute force attacks.

If you want to avoid being hacked (or being hacked again), then you might want to consider Good Gallery.

How do you prevent brute force attacks?2018-08-20T18:09:18-07:00

Brute Force Attacks

A brute force attack is a trial and error method used by hackers to guess login credentials. Good Gallery protects you against this kind of attack by limiting the number of login attempts.

If a series of unsuccessful login attempts, your account administrative account is temporarily locked to prevent further attempts. This process slows down brute force attacks to the point where it isn’t likely automated systems will continue the attempt.

Do your sites prevent tabnabbing?2018-08-20T18:09:05-07:00

Tabnabbing

Tabnabbing is a security attack that uses impersonation to gain important login details. This is accomplished by loading a fake page on an open browser tab.

To help prevent this issue for your visitors, all external links on your website use special “noopener noreferrer” code that prevents this kind of attack.

Are your sites optimized for touch screens?2018-08-20T17:43:50-07:00

Touch Optimized

Our mobile menus and gallery navigation are highly optimized for touch gestures. With a focus on creating a natural and unobtrusive user experience, mobile visitors will find movement through your website quick and easy.

Swiping

We use large tap targets to help ensure a positive touch-based user experience. We also employ four-directional swiping navigation to provide visitors with a natural presentation of images.

Can I add social media icons?2018-08-20T18:08:42-07:00

Social Networks

In Good Gallery, social networks refer to external websites and applications that visitors use to communicate by posting comments, information, messages, and photos.

Menu Options

With just a few mouse clicks, you can add social media icons to menus. Choose from 500px, Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, or add a link to any other social network.

The highly recognizable and customizable social icons are embraced by visitors who want to take a quick peek into your social networks.

Control Bar Tools

The control bar is presented to visitors viewing individual gallery photos. The control bar includes several social sharing buttons.

These social media tools help visitors share your content on social networks like Facebook and Google+. In addition to these social media options, a share via email tool is also included.

Rich Pins

When you use the control bar Pinterest tool to share content, Good Gallery automatically shares the photo title and entire description. This makes it easy for you to create keyword-rich content on your website and then move it to Pinterest without effort.

Twitter Cards

We’ve added twitter card support to allow for rich content for shared pages and photos. These advanced marketing features help drive traffic to your website.

Open Graph

We support this Facebook protocol which means that we’ll include rich content for shared pages from your website.

Can you help me manage my contact info?2018-08-24T10:32:24-07:00

Contact Info

Your contact details are arguably the most important pieces of information on your website. Without them, visitors won’t know how to get in touch with you. With Good Gallery, we make it easy for visitors to find that information.

Menus

Using our simple tools, you can add your email address and phone number to your website menu. This prominent placement of your most-important information helps improve your conversions.

To help prevent harvesting robots from collecting your email address, we’ll obfuscate your address so that visitors can see your address and click on it to send you email, but unsophisticated robots are prevented from adding your information to their spam database.

Footers

We provide you with several options to add your contact information to footer areas of your website.

If visitors are on one of your pages, they’re far more likely to scroll to your page footer instead of clicking on your contact page when they’re looking for your phone number or email address.

Contact Page

Every website should include a dedicated contact page. And we make it easy for you to create an attractive and easy-to-use page that shares your information.

Your new Good Gallery website includes attractive icons and sample information you can use to provide your essential contact details.

What photo tools are available for visitors?2018-08-20T17:46:37-07:00

Control Bar

Our control bar tools displayed alongside every photo provide visitors with many options to manage their viewing experience.

Visitor tools allow for social media sharing, displaying groups of photos as thumbnails, activating the zoom feature, starting and stopping slideshows, and viewing detailed information about photos and galleries.

To customize these options, you can disable any control bar button. This means that visitors will only perform the actions you prefer.

Are breadcrumbs supported?2018-08-24T10:34:07-07:00

Breadcrumbs

For websites, breadcrumbs refer to a hierarchal secondary menu that shows your position on a website. This alternative menu system helps visitors navigate your site. Breadcrumbs also help search engines understand your content.

Automatic Feature

The breadcrumbs feature is enabled by default. When enabled, the alternative menu is displayed at the top of all text pages automatically.

Benefits

Breadcrumbs provide a convenient secondary menu, reduce the use of the back button, and aid visitors who arrive at a subpage understand their relative position on your website.

In other words, breadcrumbs can prevent visitors from getting lost on your website.

Search engines like Google may also use your breadcrumbs in their search results. This makes your search snippet more desirable to searchers.

Do your sites support hamburger menus?2018-08-24T10:34:59-07:00

Hamburger Menus

The hamburger refers to an icon used to represent a website menu. The icon consists of three short horizontal lines stacked vertically.  This minimal navigation also sometimes called a hotdog menu or a three-line menu.

This menu takes up less screen space than traditional devices and has, therefore, become a popular navigation element on mobile devices.

Desktop & Mobile Support

Good Gallery supports the hamburger menu on both desktop and mobile devices. The display of hamburger icons is controlled by your system settings. It’s displayed by default on mobile devices and is disabled by default on desktop devices.

How do you handle paginated content?2018-08-20T18:08:13-07:00

Paginated Content

Gallery photos are treated as paginated content. Visitors can navigate between photos using standard gallery arrows or by using next and previous text links in the image info area.

Previous & Next

By providing previous and next links inside image info areas, Good Gallery helps search engines understand your portfolio. These links share the logical sequence and consolidating their linking properties.

We use optimized HTML for these links to aid search engines in understanding this information.

Do you support scrolling or sticky menus?2018-08-20T17:54:18-07:00

Menu Features

Scrolling menus refer to navigation elements that disappear as you scroll down a page. Sticky menus refer to navigation that is always visible.

Good Gallery supports both scrolling and sticky menus.

Fixed navigation makes browsing websites easier because content is only one click away without any scrolling. Some studies have shown that a sticky menu can reduce browsing time by more than 20%. Also, since your logo is connected to your menu, your brand is always present.

However, sticky menus will always consume a relatively large area of important screen real estate. So, if you want to allow visitors to see more of your content, a scrolling menu might provide you with a good alternative.

Scrolling menus often work best for sites with horizontal menus located at the top of the page—especially when the logo is positioned above the menu option text. Reducing that vertical space by scrolling the menu away can help you regain screen real estate.

How can I manage text content?2018-08-20T17:57:16-07:00

WYSIWYG Editor

Our what you see is what you get JavaScript text editor is renowned for its ease of use and clean design. It works the same on all modern browsers and devices.

The intuitive interface is natural to use and fast to operate. Taking advantage of HTML 5 and CSS 3, it’s optimized for rich content.

Live Preview

When you’re using the text editor, you can instantly see how your changes are affecting your website content.

Code View

If you like to look under the hood, you can use the HTML view to access the source code on any page. You can also use this feature to embed your own HTML or JavaScript.

General Formatting

Just like any text editor, you have access to all of the typical content formatting tools like bold, italics, underlines, strikeouts, lists, tables, and so much more.

Table Formatting

If you like to use tables on your website, you can use the WYSIWYG text editor to manage table headers, columns, rows, splits, cell alignment, and more.

Typography

Although we recommend that you manage your typographic content using Good Gallery settings, you can override any sitewide font characteristics and select unique colors and sizes using easy-to-manage tools in the text editor.

Can I create copies of pages?2018-08-24T10:42:28-07:00

Content Templates

You can instantly create a copy of any text page with a single click of your mouse.

This helpful duplicate page feature allows you to create content templates that you can reuse again and again. Or you can also use it to create alternative page designs and then choose the one you like best.

Can I easily change typography?2018-08-24T10:44:14-07:00

Typography

With our easy-to-use settings, it’s a breeze to change your website text.

You can manage your headings, body text, and menus centrally using Good Gallery settings, or you can change those characteristics on a page-by-page basis using the WYSIWYG text editor tools.

And we have an incredible list of available typefaces.

Do you support Google Search Console?2018-08-20T18:07:31-07:00

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service that helps you monitor and optimize your website. These services were formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools.

With this service, you can analyze your website traffic, examine links to your website, check internal links, and monitor website errors.

Verification

Good Gallery provides you with the tools you’ll need to verify your website with Search Console. You’ll just add the HTML tag they provide using Good Gallery’s HEAD Info setting and you’ll be ready to go!

Do you support Bing Webmaster Tools?2018-08-20T18:02:18-07:00

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service that helps you monitor and optimize your website. These services were formerly known as Bing Webmaster Center.

With this service, you can analyze your website traffic, monitor crawl issues, search for keywords, submit sitemaps, examine links to your website, check internal links, and monitor website errors.

Verification

Good Gallery provides you with the tools you’ll need to verify your website with Webmaster Tools. You’ll just add the HTML tag they provide using Good Gallery’s HEAD Info setting and you’ll be ready to go!

Do you support Facebook pixels?2018-08-20T18:03:14-07:00

Facebook Ads

A Facebook pixel is the code Facebook uses to help you optimize ads, track conversions, build audiences, and remarket to previous visitors.

Adding Facebook Pixels

After creating your pixel using Facebook’s tools, you’ll just add the information they provide using Good Gallery’s HEAD Info setting. Then you can include the event code on individual pages and you’ll be ready to go!

Can I assign Facebook preview images?2018-08-20T18:07:15-07:00

Facebook Previews

With Good Gallery, you can control the preview image that appears when visitors share pages on Facebook.

Either let Facebook choose an image from each page automatically or define the image you want to appear when your URL is shared. Just choose your preferred photo or illustration from any image folder.

How do your websites work with my branding?2018-08-20T18:20:20-07:00

Branding

You can use our tools to help infuse your Good Gallery website with own personality in both design and content. Our sites also help you maintain consistency across pages and galleries, from desktop to mobile.

Logos

Our designs are optimized to help keep your logo in the visible forefront for visitors. And to make sure this critical component of your visual brand is perfect, we offer vector logo support for non-fuzzy scaling on all devices at all sizes.

Favicons

You can also upload a custom favicon image to personalize browser branding. Simply upload your symbol or illustration and choose that image for your favicon.

How do you handle support?2020-08-23T15:05:53-07:00

Support

We provide technical information about Good Gallery via our personable support agents. And if our CEO isn’t busy, he’ll answer support emails too. He likes to keep his finger on the pulse of our company.

When you contact us, you’ll work with a real person based in the USA who is highly knowledgeable about our software. These aren’t second tier support personnel. You’ll be corresponding with an engineer or someone who is intimately familiar with every feature in our software.

Is it easy to organize pages?2018-08-24T10:37:33-07:00

Organize Menu

The Organize Menu tool helps you change your website menu. Using our simple drag-and-drop interface, you can easily change page or subpage menu placement.

Perhaps best of all, if you move a page, that change in position may also change the page URL.

To prevent potential issues with search engines or visitor bookmarks, when you move a page, a 301 Redirect is created automatically.

This feature helps ensure that search engines will update their records when they next index your website. And that also means that any bookmarks are also maintained.

Do you have a web design code of ethics?2018-09-19T09:00:03-07:00

Ethical Design

At Good Gallery, we’re committed to ethical design decisions.

We fervently believe that it’s our responsibility to think carefully about how design choices and technical approaches will impact photographers who use Good Gallery.

The decisions we make may sometimes seem insignificant. But we know that every choice can potentially impact your bottom line to a huge degree. And money matters.

With have more experience developing photographer websites than any other website builder. And we harness that knowledge to make your websites work better and consequently help you make more money.

Popular Trends

We don’t design websites based on popular trends. Nor do we blindly follow the latest design movements based on advice offered in speculative self-help books or marketing blogs. Some of those approaches can lead you down the wrong road. And because marketing is a long-term investment, by the time you discover your mistake, you’ve lost money and—more importantly—time.

Instead, we base our designs and features on real-world testing, visitor observation, and practical common sense. In other words, safe and verified methods are held above trendy and unproven marketing that’s based on theoretical psychology.

However, we don’t want to stifle our own creativity with authoritarian moralism. With that in mind, when we develop a new idea that could potentially impact traffic, user experience, or SEO, we first test those features on a small group of high-performing photographer websites. We then monitor user behavior and search engines to determine if our proposed improvements provide a positive, negative, or neutral impact.

Once we’re sure that the result is neutral or positive, and when we’re sure that it’s a definite best practice, then we roll those features out to you. This approach helps keep your brand safe as you navigate the complicated field of online marketing.

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