PhotoShelter & Graph Paper Press Launch New Tools to Help Photographers Easily Integrate Photography Websites and Wordpress Blogs

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PhotoShelter (http://pa.photoshelter.com/), the leader in websites and online tools for serious photographers, today announced a new partnership with Graph Paper Press (http://graphpaperpress.com/), maker of the best WordPress themes and tools for photographers. The partnership provides an easy way for photographers to maintain a single brand across their PhotoShelter website and WordPress blog, beginning with the popular “Modularity” theme by Graph Paper Press. Graph Paper Press also today released several new WordPress plug-ins that enable photographers to easily display images hosted by PhotoShelter via their WordPress blogs. Full details on the partnership: http://pa.photoshelter.com/mkt/gpp.

To accomplish this integration, PhotoShelter has launched a new website template generator that can instantly match a PhotoShelter website with the look and feel of Graph Paper Press themes, starting today with Modularity. This simple tool eliminates the need for any complex coding or design work to unify the branding between these two different web destinations. As a result, photographers can present a fully seamless experience for website visitors to navigate between their website, blog, searchable image archive, private client log-in and e-commerce platform.

“Photography websites have moved away from the static ‘digital portfolios’ of the 20^th century to something that is more interactive, social, and e-commerce enabled. This partnership perfectly demonstrates our vision for how photographers must adapt to embrace new online marketing opportunities,” said Allen Murabayashi, PhotoShelter CEO. “To attract website traffic via search engines and generate new business online, photographers want to eliminate barriers between their blogs, portfolio sites, image archives, and social media– while maintaining a consistent look-and-feel. This is driving a fundamental shift away from passive, design-intensive flash websites that can’t be crawled by search engines – toward more flexible, robust platforms like what PhotoShelter and Graph Paper Press are doing today. Plus, Graph Paper Press themes look fantastic – so we’re delighted to bring these designs to PhotoShelter photographers.”

In addition, Graph Paper Press today released a series of WordPress plug-ins that further expand the integration with PhotoShelter. These plug-ins include a simple method to publish images hosted by PhotoShelter in blog entries, eliminating the need to upload images to WordPress separately. In addition, Graph Paper Press now provides a widget that displays a photographer’s most recently updated PhotoShelter gallery via the WordPress blog, as well as a plug-in that displays the PhotoShelter archive search box anywhere in a WordPress blog – so visitors may search for images directly from a photographers’ blog and purchase prints or license work via the photographer’s PhotoShelter shopping cart.

Thad Allender, Graph Paper Press founder, added: “When you link together tools like PhotoShelter‘s platform with Graph Paper Press themes and plug-ins for WordPress, you get an elegantly designed front-end, plus a powerful content management platform that is incredibly easy to update and publish search-engine friendly content. Photographers can save time in getting their work live online, and consistently build new traffic to view images, hire them for new assignments, or purchase their work online.”

PhotoShelter today also announced a limited-time opportunity to sample PhotoShelter’s website tools for free, for 30 days only – a feature that normally requires upgrade to PhotoShelter Standard & Pro Accounts. More details on the free trial – good through October 9^th – can be found at: http://pa.photoshelter.com/mkt/200909/join.html. Meanwhile, Graph Paper Press today also launched Visual Society (http://visualsociety.com/), a one-stop-shop for WordPress hosting, themes, and plug-ins for photographers, designed to help photographers transition to easily to this new approach to displaying and marketing their photography.

About PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter is the leader in portfolio websites, photo sales and archiving tools for photographers.

Over 48,000 photographers worldwide use PhotoShelter to power their success online, with customizable website templates, searchable galleries, e-commerce capabilities, and bulletproof image storage. Photographers can create a professional PhotoShelter website in under five minutes, or customize PhotoShelter to power their existing website. A true solution designed to make the business of photography easier to manage - PhotoShelter offers security, global accessibility, and advanced marketing tools so photographers can make their images work harder for them. To join our community, visit www.photoshelter.com.

About Graph Paper Press

Graph Paper Press is a repository for Wordpress themes created by photographer and multimedia producer Thad Allender. Graph Paper Press peddles minimalistic modular designs that can transform your blog from a tubular list of posts into an aesthetically-pleasing portfolio or news magazine website. Graph Paper Press is increasingly focused on helping visual artists, photographers, video, and new media producers present their work to the world. Our goal is simple: We want to help you to look good online. We are also developing tools and plugins to help make integration with third party services a breeze. For more information, visit http://graphpaperpress.com/.