According to Imagine Publishing, PhotoforBeginners.com hit the ground running with over 3,000 photos and 900 galleries online from day one – comprising past entrants to over a year of print and online reader competitions.
The arrival of PhotoforBeginners.com has helped take Imagine Publishing’s combined tally of reader images to over 290,000, uploaded by over 76,000 separate user galleries across the Photography for Beginners, Digital Photographer, Advanced Photoshop, Photoshop Creative, Digital Artist and 3D Artist sites.
The Imagine Publishing online gallery engine employs cutting-edge search engine optimisation and some of the latest social networking technologies to make sure that uploaded images can be found, commented upon, and shared effortlessly. The platform’s effectiveness is evident in the remarkable growth that Imagine brands enjoy when they switch to the new platform, says the company. Digital Photographer has seen a 109% increase in unique users, Digital Artist an 85% increase, Photoshop Creative a 65% increase and Advanced Photoshop a 57% increase.
PhotoforBeginners.com adds new functionality in the form of an integrated competition tool that allows multiple user competitions to be run simultaneously. Registered users of the site can now enter an image to an open competition with a simple press of a button – all the associated meta data and user information is instantly pulled into the competition database.
“We’ve had ‘frictionless sharing’, now comes ‘frictionless competition entry’. This new feature means that once a photo is on our site it can be entered into any number of competitions in seconds,” said Mat Toor, Head of Digital. “That immediately provides more fun and engagement for our users, while making it insanely simple for the magazine team to create, monitor and judge online competitions.”
All previous competition entrants have been pre-registered onto the new site along with their photos. So Photography For Beginners’ growing army of loyal users will find everything set up for them already.
Other new features on PhotoforBeginners.com include substantially beefed-up Facebook and Twitter widgets that push readers back and forth between the brand’s highly successful social networking sites and the new website. The site also incorporates the popular Photo Face-Off feature that allows readers to rate photos in real-time with instant face-offs with similar pictures from other readers.
“This is yet another example of the level of innovation and commitment to quality that makes Imagine Publishing one of the most successful multimedia technology content producers in the world today”, said Group Managing Director Damian Butt. “PhotoforBeginners.com is a really cool website that perfectly marries clever technology with the passion and enthusiasm of our engaged magazine readers. The result is a vibrant online community of like-minded hobbyists who support and encourage each other.”
