There are numerous Flash photography portfolio website creation solutions out there. The service concept is simple: by utilizing a templatized approach, the online service allows photographers to upload, create, and maintain their photography rich Flash portfolio sites without any technically backgrounds. Bygones are the days of paying thousands to redesign and keep your site up to date. Now you can afford to look like a pro, and do everything yourself in much less time.

clickbooq is one of the newest kids on the block. Drawing its roots from a web design firm since 2002, clickbooq is celebrating its first year milestone of delivering a convincingly polished product and building user community support. Although priced at the higher spectrum compare to most of its competitors, clickbooq is offering some very compelling features and services to target the more professional market:

• Integrated Flash based portfolio editing system (the "Toolbox").

• Extreme ease of use; most users won't even need a manual.

• Flexible design templates, and free feature upgrades.

• Dedicated phone support in addition to email support.

• Proofpoint technology for email spam protection.

• Partnered with Amazon.com, clibooq provides a more reliable and faster image serving system based on Amazon's S3 Web Sevice Technology.

• Integrated IPTC Metadata compliant image editing system to allow exposure of your portfolio images to be searchable by other IPTC compliant applications or search engines.

• Additional focuses on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), such as automatic serving HTML versions of all Flash portfolio sites to the search engine spiders.

Open an Account with clickbooq: Step by Step

1. Determine the Right Price Package – First decide if clickbooq fits your budget. clickbooq offers three starting price packages, multi-licensing discounts, and upgrade options if you decide to change your package down the line:

   (price are listed as of 6/25/2008, subject to change without notice)

   Base Plan	Monthly	Annual	One-Time
   Price	$69 / month	$699 / year	$1699 / one-time
   Setup Fee	$199	included	included
   Web Hosting	$10 / month	$99 / yeaer	$99 / yeaer
   			Bonus: +5 Portfolios
   Multi-Licensing Discounts
   Monthly payment plans: buy one Monthly plan and receive $50 off the setup fee for the 2nd Monthly plan
   Annual payment plans: buy one Annual plan and receive $100 off the 2nd Annual plan for your first year. Normal rates apply after the first year.
   One-Time payment plans: buy one One-time plan and receive $200 off the 2nd One-time plan.
   Upgrade Pricing
   Monthly to Annual: $499 + 99 hosting ($200 discount off the regular Annual plan price)
   Annual to One-time: $1,199 + 99 hosting ($500 discount off the regular One-time plan price).

2. Try the Demo - Due to the complexity of account setup, some templatized Flash portfolio website creation services don't offer standard try-out accounts. Although you can preview a sample Flash portfolio, you often miss out on the key insights of how you actually create and maintain your portfolio site. clickbooq offers a fully operational five day tryout account. Each demo account could be converted into an actual account if you decide to purchase clickbooq's services afterwards without redoing any of your work.

3. Hosting, Domains, Email, Space – You host your website with clickbooq exclusively. This process allows centralized clickbooq management and instant bug-fix and feature upgrades. You could register a new domain via clickbooq, or stay with your original domain registrar. You receive ten email accounts upon your membership activation. Your email accounts share a single 250MB repository (upgradeable). Standard hosting plan allows you to store 2,000 photos in your online library.

4. Website Transfer Service – Many photographers are upgrading their existing website, and are concerned with potential website downtime and loss of email as the result of the transition. clickbooq has a standard offer to assist photographers in such scenario to allow the creation of a temporary account. Once the new portfolio site is fully functional, the clickbooq staff will assist its clients to smoothly switch to the new site.

5. Order Your clickbooq Flash Site - From ordering to processing, you may begin uploading and building your website via the "Toolbox" within one business day. Your site may be accessed publicly between 24 to 48 business hours dependent upon your domain registration/transfer approach.

6. Support – In additional to standard email support, clickbooq also offers phone based customer support. Coupled with an extensive Online Support Center and user forum, you could find answers yourself or open an official support ticket.

Build Your First clickbooq Portfolio Website

Key operations of creating a typical clickbooq Flash site are conducted within the site creation portal; the "Toolbox"; a fully Flash based integrated application. The Toolbox is arranged in a logical tab system. The streamlined process of creating a Flash portfolio site could be accessed via tabs from a left to right order. Each tab also presents a set of sub categories, arranged from top to bottom on the left side:

• Layout & Style Tab - This is the first tab of the Toolbox. The feature sets create the foundation of your portfolio site's look & feel:

  • Layout - Create a new layout or edit from a selection of pre-defined/saved templates.

  • Navigation - Determine if you want Left-hand or Top-down navigation.

  • Site Color - Use the color picker to select your site's main color. You may also set it to invisible. You may define 1 or 2 pixel site outline, and set the corners to Square or Round. A Drop Shadow feature can also be set.

  • Background - In addition to select your own background color, you may choose Solid or Pattern background. You may also choose from a list of pre-made Custom Back-Drops, or upload your own.

  • Font Color - Define your site font color here, including mouse rollover highlight color, and inactive font color.

  • Logo - Upload or manage your logo image files here. Logo is typically placed on the upper left corner of your portfolio site.

  • Transitions - You may choose from six transition effects for your images: Cross Fade, Wipe (vertical), Simple Fade, Slide (horizontal), Wipe (horizontal), and Slide (vertical).

• Upload Tab - In addition to the standard upload feature, you may also create image archive folders on-the-fly to better manage your potentially massive photo upload library.

• Organize Tab - You could manage up to 2,000 images here via Archive Folders. You may also create Portfolios; each capable of holding 36 photos. All images are presented in real time; rivaling features of standard desktop applications. To narrow down your search, you may conduct Keyword Search. You may define each image’s Title, Caption, and Keywords. clickbooq’s Toolbox stores such meta information inside your images' IPTC Metadata. This approach allows your images to increase its search and index potential by other IPTC aware applications and search engines.

• Content Tab - You may create up to five non-portfolio content pages, such as Client Testimonials, Contact, Bio… etc. In addition to uploading images, you may also define Hot Spots to place active links, such as URLs or email address. Defining Hot Spots is as simple as drawing a rectangle; very similar to image map creation from a standard html composing program such as Adobe Dreamweaver, or creating Image Slices inside Photoshop.

• Settings Tab - The Website Features section allows you to choose from icons or text to be used for your buttons. You may also define settings for Print, Captions, Lighboxes, Thumbnails, and Music. You may also upload your own MP3s. The Search Engine Settings and Google Analytics sections features are covered in the SEO overview below.

What about Flash Site Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

More photographers and digital artists are becoming more aware of the benefits of the practice of SEO. In short, SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of incoming traffic to a website from natural (or “organic”) web searches. As of date, Flash is still not an ideal medium to be indexed properly by the search engines. However, clickbooq has gone great length to incorporate SEO friendly features into its Toolbox and its final output Flash site:

1. Automatic HTML Site Conversion – Flash websites are known to be notoriously difficult for search engine spiders to crawl. Most Flash portfolio website creation services offer little or no HTML conversion options. All clickbooq portfolio Flash sites serve a alternative HTML version to search engine spiders. This approach dramatically increases the chances of your website, content, and images to be found by Google, Yahoo, and other major search engine players (refer to SEO section of clickbooq co-founder interview).

2. IPTC Metadata Compliance – Developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council, the IPTC Metadata standard provides attribute information about your photo’s Title, Description, and Keywords, and allows your photos to be searched by other applications. clickbooq Toolbox’s Organize section's editing feature uses this standard to store your photo information. All existing IPTC information from your images is also automatically imported into the Toolbox.

3. Settings Tab > Search Engine Settings – You may define your website Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Copyright, and submit your website to Google.

4. Settings Tab > Google Analytics – You may paste in your Google Analytics code here to receive one of the best website statistic reporting services.

>> Continue (Page 2): clickbooq Co-Founder Interview

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