My Photpshelter public homepage

Last month, Photoshelter undertook an upgrade to their system and the services they offered photographers. They simplified the URL structures to put more attention on the photographer’s name, made integration with WordPress and Graph Paper Press themes easier, lowered transaction fees for photographer’s using the built in e-commerce features, enabled automatic submission of sitemaps and allowed photographer’s with free and basic accounts access to customization. They also added two blank custom pages for you to use as you want. For a lot of photographers, these are the most noticeable changes and possibly the most powerful. I’ve chosen to add a page showcasing some of the multimedia work that I’ve recently started creating and a page with a newsletter signup form. Others have used these pages for tearsheets, calendars, video, resumes, pricing and more.

Custom multimedia page

Custom newsletter page

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Setting up the custom pages is pretty easy. You don’t really need to know how to write code, but you do need to know where to embed it. As long as you put it in the correct place, it will work nicely for you. I’m going to show you, mostly via screenshots, how to do it. This is at it applies to my Photoshelter site which is integrated with Graph Paper Press and WordPress.

Go to your Photographer Area part of Photoshelter and select Customize from the pull down My Website menu. Choose the Website Pages option as shown below. The area inside the red box is what you are looking for. In this example, it says Active in the Status. The first time you do this it won’t say this.

Customize Pages

Here you can enter a page title and meta description. This is recommended for SEO purposes – anywhere on Photoshelter where you see the green SEO box, it’s a good idea to fill in the field. The Template section below is where you put whatever code you want to appear. As in the following screenshot, it’ll be relatively empty when you first go to make the edit. It’ll probably won’t say exactly what the screenshot below shows, but it will be close. It was only a few days after I created my custom pages that I thought to go back and make this tutorial, and I didn’t want to lose all my changes by starting over, so I’ve approximated a bit. Nonetheless, it’ll say something along the lines of Content Goes Here.

Empty Custom Page

Change the text that’s between the h1 tags to give it a title, and insert your content. In the example below, I’ve inserted the code to display my multimedia page. I use Sounslides Plus for my multimedia work and I’m able to generate this code as part of the license. It’s then simply a matter of copy and paste to embed it in the template.

Embedded Code

Users of Graph Paper Press themes on a WordPress blog may want to regenerate their template at this point. I don’t think it’s strictly necessary, but I find that doing so whenever I make changes to either my cultural photography blog or my Photoshelter archive keeps everything nicely in sync.

Graph Paper Press generator

You’ll then need to take the resulting code and insert it into your Public Page Master Template and Customer Page Master Template. For the header and footer respectively, look in the master template for the line that says . Place your code in this section. Now go to the widget section to the right of the screen and look for the custom page widgets.
Add the following code above the search section in the Header HTML. You’ll find the search section near the bottom of the code. Do this for both the public page and customer page.

Code to add to the template

Once you’ve done that, preview it and once you confirm it’s correct, save the template. Double check in the Customization section that your new page is showing the word Active in green under the Status column and you’re done. You can see below how it will appear to viewers who come to your website.

Custom pages in the pull down menu.

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