We knew there had to be a better way. So, we set out to build an alternative to the traditional “top-down” stock photography business. We made changes that will have radical results. Brace yourself.

Run It Like A Boss

Finally you call the shots. Our new WordPress theme, Stock Photography, turns your web site into a stock photography business. Manage your portfolio, blog and stock photography business all from one site. This streamlined approach will save you tons of time; spend it vacationing on an exotic island like the boss that you are.

Say My Name

For years you’ve been an anonymous cog helping stock photo corporations get bigger and bigger. That ends today. Now, you own the business and the brand. Design it and name it what you want. Build yourself some much-deserved recognition. People will be buying your images and shouting your name from the rooftops in no time.

Be Internet Famous

When you run an online business, Google decides who’s famous and who isn’t. Stick with corporate photography companies and your name and images might end up on page six or page ten. Use our Stock Photography theme, and have the semantic power of WordPress behind you. Our goal is to get you to page one.

Represent Your Niche

These days web sites for every interest imaginable exist; yet stock photography sites have lagged far behind. Today they catch up. With our new WordPress theme, you can create a site for a specific type of stock photography. For example, you might consider building a location-specific stock photography website, such as “Washington D.C. stock photography.” Or perhaps you prefer a topic-specific site and decide to target the niche for “surfing stock photography”. You’re images won’t be lumped together with thousands of unrelated images like on other stock sites, and your web site will rise higher in search engine rankings for your target market.

Get Paid

Stop doing business with other companies that control image pricing and charge you 20-70% commission on every stock photo you sell. Set your own prices with the Stock Photography theme, and keep 100% of the sales. More money, it’s not really a problem after all.

Compare

Advanced Features

We put a ton of research and development time into the Stock Photography theme and packed the theme full of killer features, including:

• Advanced Search - Find images based on keywords, price, collections, licensing terms or the orientation of the image.
• Lightbox - Save images to a lightbox and share with friends, family or clients.
• Metadata - Import image medadata (keywords, location, EXIF) and create automatic archive for each term.
• Dashboard - Create a private login area where your customers can download their purchases.
• Alternative Colors - Includes four alternative color styles to create the perfect custom site design.
• Collections - Organize images into collections, such as outdoors, people and sports.
• Social Sharing - Share Facebook and Twitter in one click.
• Social Icons - Add social media icons to any menu link.
• Custom Fonts - Choose from over two dozen custom fonts.
• Logo - Add a custom logo and favicon.
• Widgets - Includes 8 widgetized areas and 9 custom widgets (popular photos, recent photos, similar photos, etc.)
• Custom Headers - Add a header image to customize the look of your site.
• Custom Backgrounds - Add a background image or change background colors in one click.

And since the Stock Photography theme integrates with the Sell Media plugin, you can take advantage of any of the extensions for Sell Media to enhance the functionality of your site. Sweet, eh?

Video Overview

The Revolution Waits For No One

Don’t let someone else beat you to building your dream company. Here’s a little push: Use this coupon code to receive 20% off the Stock Photography theme - PHOTOBIZWHIZ

The offer is valid until midnight on May 24, 2013.

Overview

The Free Downloads extension for Sell Media brings this ordinarily complex process directly into your WordPress site. Any image, pdf, document or ZIP that you upload into WordPress can be used. Once visitors click the download button, they will be prompted to submit their name and e-mail address to complete the download. This is a great marketing and lead generation tool that you can use to:

• Offer free pdf guides
• Offer free images
• Offer free zip downloads

Screenshot

The screenshot above shows the popup box where your visitors will add their name and email address in order to receive the free download.

Give A Little, Gain A Whole Lot

We designed the Free Downloads extension for Sell Media to give your visitors something they want, as well as something you need. The extension integrates with MailChimp, an e-mail marketing system.

So why not install the Free Downloads extension for Sell Media and grow your subscriber list with every download.

Video Tutorial

Screenshots

More Control = More Freedom

When you activate the Photo Reprints extension, you’ll immediately transform your WordPress site from a portfolio and blogging platform into the hub of your online business. Sell any image you upload to WordPress as either a digital download, a photo reprint or both. Break the chains of third party websites and spend more time creating and sharing your work.

Download the Photo Reprints extension.

Please let us know what you think of Snaps in the comments below!

Our good buddy and former co-worker Philip Author Moore blogged about Full Frame and another sweet theme called Ryu by the talented Takashi Irie.

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

While some of our themes are available on the WordPress.com platform, you cannot download themes from our site and add them to your WordPress.com site.  Why? WordPress.com and the software you download from WordPress.org are two entirely different things (although they do share a vast number of similarities). You can’t install new themes or plugins on WordPress.com.  For more info, please see this post or watch this video.

Download the WordPress.org flavor of Full Frame

Download the WordPress.com flavor of Full Frame

Photography Themes on WordPress.com

Full Frame is the second premium theme that we’ve released on WordPress.com. Gridspace, which was our first premium WordPress.com theme, quickly became a top 10 premium theme available on the platform (some of our free themes are also available there too). Each day, more and more photographers, designers and other visual creatives are discovering the power of the hosted flavor of WordPress and that makes us happy.

What do you want us to build next?

Custom Headers & Background Images

The featured image of each post becomes the background image of the post on home and archive pages. You can optionally add a custom header image and logo, which will sit atop all pages. Here is an example of a post assigned to the “gallery post format” with an inserted gallery and featured image:

Smart Ways to Use Post Formats

Post Formats are an incredibly useful, yet under-utilized tool. If you only wanted to showcase big photos, for example, use the image post format to create a photo-centric site, like this. You could also mix in some gallery post formats, which look like this.

Full Frame supports the following post formats: Standard, Image, Gallery, Video, and Quote.

Keyboard Navigation

You can use your up/down arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate quickly between post on the home and archive pages. You can also optionally use the up/down buttons located in the top right of the navigation bar to navigate as well.

Responsive Design

Full Frame is a single column theme that resizes with your browser. This theme was designed with mobile devices in mind. We’re especially proud of the responsive menu on iPads and iPhones. Give it a ‘lil test!

Sticky, Fixed Navigation Bar

The optional custom header image (not shown on the demo site) appears above the navigation bar. When visitors scroll down below the header image, the navigation bar changes from a relatively positioned element below the header image into a fixed position, appearing always at the top of the page. Pretty useful, eh?

Fonts, Theme Options, Customizer Support

As with all of our newer themes, Full Frame includes custom font options, additional theme options for easily customizing your site, and integrates with the theme customizer tool in WordPress.

Winner?

We’d love hear what you think about Full Frame. It’s been a doozy to make and we hope you enjoy it!

How do you plan on using it?

Our 2013 Promise

In 2013, we’ll continue our one theme per month promise and up it one new plugin each month. While quantity might make for good marketing, quality is just as important to us. Here is the proof: Each theme incubates internally an average of 3 months before public release; we spent 10 months building Sell Media.

Join Now / View Plans & PricingMoney-Back Guarantee

Our First Theme

Storyteller is our first official WordPress theme for 2013. It’s a beautifully designed responsive theme packed with slideshows, header images, custom fonts, and live theme customization integration.

Three New Sell Media Extensions

Our newest extensions for the Sell Media plugin will make the functionality of your website rival some of the biggest stock photography websites in the world. The big difference, of course, is that you set all prices and you keep all profit.

Advanced Search - Find the perfect image or other media based on specific search criteria. Filter media using keywords, collection, min/max price, orientation and available licenses. Read more about the Advanced Search extension for Sell Media.

Commissions - Reward contributors with sales commissions. Build a small photo agency or collective and distribute sales commission amongst contributing photographers. Read more about the Commissions extension for Sell Media.

Expander - Quickly browse, enlarge and buy images or other media on Sell Media archive and search pages. Read more about the Expander extension for Sell Media.

WordPress Users Win

A growing number of our users power their entire web presence (portfolio, blog and e-commerce) atop WordPress. This makes both practical sense and it makes business sense, given that WordPress is free, themes are inexpensive and the platform is infinitely extensible. Thousands of developers around the world are building new themes and plugins for WordPress around the clock. This translates into a big win for WordPress users.

Renters vs. Owners

Do you own or rent your website? If you pay a third party platform to run and host your website (a “hosted solution”), you are a renter. Changing small things like links and colors can sometimes be impossible. After all, you don’t own your website, you’re merely a renter. Many of the hosted solutions available today are expensive, confusing or bloated with features that cater to “edge cases” that 99.9% of people don’t need. Plus, if your landlord decides to sell or close down, well, so does your website. And so would your business. That’s scary.

On the other hand, if you own your website, you control everything. You control the color, the design and the functionality. Lets say you want to integrate your site with your newsletter list on Mailchimp. No problem. Maybe you want to build your own theme or tweak an existing one. No problem. This is powerful and has the potential to alter the trajectory of many small businesses.

If you do anything in 2013, become an owner.

Join Now / View Plans & PricingMoney-Back Guarantee

“When you look bad, I look bad. And I don’t like to look bad,” said Snead.

It was a simple, yet powerful statement that essentially transfered the success of the photo shoot from the subject to the photographer. Consequently, the subject relaxed and Snead worked hard to make great photos. In the end, the photos came out great. It was a brilliant move. A double win.

At Graph Paper Press, we work hard to build beautiful WordPress themes and we understand that the success of your website depends greatly on the support you receive from us along the way. When questions pop up, we help you out. When you find an issue, we get it resolved. After all, when you look good, we look good. Looking bad isn’t an option.

Improvements

So earlier this week, we implemented small changes to improve our support system to make sure you get the answers you need, fast.

1. Fix or FAQ – This is a new policy we’ve instituted internally. It essentially means this: If our users ask the same questions over and over again, we must be doing something wrong. If that’s the case, we’ll fix it. Otherwise, we’ll mark it as a FAQ entry or make the thread public.
2. Public or Private - Also a new internal policy. All support tickets are now a private two-way conversation between you and our support team. Some users we’re occasionally posting sensitive data in our forum, which was public. Our support team does have the ability to make a private discussion public. We will use option to highlight quality, resolved discussions. This will make our support forum far more useful for finding answers.
3. Clearer Support Policy – We’ve clarified our support policy and made it available on the homepage of the support forum for easy reference.
4. New Customization Options – If you don’t know code, but want to customize your WordPress theme, you have two options: If you need a small change that requires coding, you can hire a Tweaker. If you have lots of changes and need full-blown site customization, you can hire a Customizer.

3 Tips for Fast Response Times

When the initial question our customers ask is helpful, we can provide a fast response time, which helps to solve the problem in as few steps as possible.

1. Write short, concise questions. One sentence is ideal.
2. Post one question per ticket.
3. Always provide your URL.

Our goal for customer support is simple: Make sure all questions are answered as fast and accurately possible. We hope you find these small improvements helpful. If you have ideas for improving on what we’ve outline above, we’re all ears. After all, when you you look good, we look good. And that is our goal.

We have a lot to be thankful for this year; for starters, the beginning of December marks our five-year anniversary! (Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday to us… )

Since our launch, more than 190,000 photographers, artists, bloggers and other creatives have downloaded and use our minimalist WordPress themes. As a thank you to all of our totally awesome and inspiring users, we have two killer deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – and you can start saving today!

Grab the codes below to join the party:

Black Friday 30% off Coupon Code:

blackfriday2012

Use this discount on the following Graph Paper Press products:

• Annual Plan
• Forever Plan
• Single Theme Sales
• Sell Media Extensions

Valid Wednesday, 11/21/12 – Saturday 11/24/12.

Cyber Monday 30% off Coupon Code:

cybermonday2012

Use this discount on the following Graph Paper Press products:

• Annual Plan
• Forever Plan
• Single Theme Sales
• Sell Media Extensions

Valid Sunday, 11/25/12 –  Tuesday, 11/27/12.

Sell Media is a new WordPress plugin that allows you to sell, license and protect images, videos, audio files and PDF’s directly from your website. You can now run your entire business directly out of WordPress without the need for expensive and confusing third party systems.

And it’s free.

Why We Built Sell Media

About 10 months ago I opined my frustrations with the state of selling media online. If you are a photographer or creative professional looking to sell your images, video or audio online, you’ll likely share my sentiment. Many of the hosted solutions available today are expensive, confusing or bloated with features that cater to “edge cases” that 99.9% of people don’t need. Not to mention, you very likely maintain three or four different websites (blog, portfolio, e-commerce) just to run your business online. That’s insane!

We built the Sell Media plugin to make selling media that you upload into WordPress dead simple. You can create your own stock photography website, stock video website, sell audio files, PDF’s and other documents. Basically, if you can upload it into WordPress, you can sell it. Check out the video overview below.

Watch more video tutorials for Sell Media here.

Build Your Own Stock Media Empire

The Sell Media plugin is largely focused on solving issues facing creatives looking to sell their images, video, audio, etc. online. Here are some possible use cases for Sell Media:

• Stock photography website - Create a stock photography website in a few clicks. Sell images that you upload into WordPress. Assign different license types (commercial, personal, etc) to increase the price of the image download. Sell reprints of images that you upload into WordPress. Our soon-to-be-released reprint extensions will automate print fulfillment or allow your to print and ship the image reprints yourself (self-fulfillment).
• Stock video website - Sell stock video files that you upload into WordPress. Assign different license types (commercial, personal, etc) to increase the price of the video download.
• Audio marketplace - Sell audio files directly from your website. You can Assign different license types (commercial, personal, etc) to increase the price of the audio download.
• Document downloads - Sell file (pdf, doc) downloads in a few clicks.
• All of the above – You can do it all using the Sell Media plugin.

Powerful Extensions

Extensions are essentially plugins that extend the functionality of the Sell Media plugin. Extensions will allow you to:

• Sell photo reprints through a print vendor or by self-fulfillment
• Watermark your image uploads
• Integrate customer signups with newsletter lists (Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, SendGrid)
• Backup uploaded Sell Media items to Amazon S3
• Process Credit Cards securely on your site with Stripe

If you have an extension idea, please let us know.

Lean and Mean

We’ve built Sell Media with simplicity and ease of use in mind. It integrates tightly into WordPress, which means you won’t have to learn a new system just to sell your media online. We’ve also tried to avoid “feature bloat” in Sell Media. The Pareto Principle was a guiding philosophy for deciding the features in Sell Media: 80% of the people will use 20% of the features. All other features will be built into “extensions” so we can keep the core plugin lean and mean.

What’s Next

We have a lot planned for Sell Media in the coming months. If you find a bug, please report it here so we can fix it. If you have a feature request or an extension idea, please let us know!

Ready to Sell?

Download the Sell Media plugin now