Design and Photography Highlights

This will make it easier for potential buyers to use the site. They will have to register before they finally checkout but there is not a push now for them to sign up. They are able to casually browse and then add to cart as they please.

Also we cleaned out a lot of the bugs last night in the commenting and messaging areas so you should notice a nice improvement.

And finally, you should have the pagination back in your studios. When we moved the My Network feature to the live site, the pagination of the comment section was screwing up with the pagination of the media files section so that is fixed.

Simon Cowell gave our new releases two thumbs up and was seen here rejoicing with John.

Why is he so excited?

Well, we have just released some new features which should help make our community stronger and more enjoyable.

You can now create a network of friends and contacts on Cutcaster, send messages back and forth between members and comment on your friends studio pages. This all takes place in your studio area under the My Network Place. If you can think of a better name, shoot it over. I was thinking Cutcaster Cool Kids. hahaha. No but what do you guys think is a good name.

1. Friending- You can now link to your friends or your favorite portfolios.

2. Messaging- You can now send messages back and forth between your friends and contacts. Its a great way to stay in touch, send private messages and ask people for more information on how they shot a certain image or get details about someones background and work.

3. Commenting- You can now comment on people’s studio page. This can be used to comment on someones portfolio, say what’s up, supply constructive criticism or let the world know you bid on someones photo. This comments then become links back your studio so please don’t spam people’s comments area which I know you won’t please keep these comments above the belt and PG-13. We believe in the goodness of people and this will be used to help and communicate with one another in a fun and helpful way.

As always we need your help crushing out the dreaded bugs which sometimes creep into our work and make things go funky. If you see any of these tiny critters that upset your user experience, please give us a holler. We will squash them immediately.

This has been moved to a top priority for us and will be getting faster and faster over the coming days to week. If anyone has any feedback on things we can do to get the site running faster I would love any suggestions. Please email me at john AT cutcaster DOT com. We are working on a few solutions that will definitely help with serving up the pages faster and coming back with faster search results but like always I am always interested in learning more and hearing what you guys think could make the site move faster. It’s better for all of us so please post below or email me. It is much appreciated.

Also you can try this free plugin for Firefox to help with the speed when browsing the site: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/.

The plugin increases page load time for example by using a few connections at once to download a page. Once you have downloaded, set it to ‘Turbocharged’ in the options. Hopefully you’ll see a big difference on our site and others.

Public ClipFolders (our form of a lightbox) are fixed and released now on the live site. There was a lot of valuable input that went into getting this right so I want to thank Jeff (absolute rock star with the feedback), April, Henrik, Dennis and Lope who did an awesome job.

ClipFolders are meant for you to organize your images and use it as a tool to showcase similar images and be able to send them to clients for feedback. Let us know if there are features that you would like added to them.

In addition we will feature a ClipFolder once a week or longer depending on how people use them. If you have a ClipFolder that you want to show off let us know. It doesn’t have to include just your own stock photos or images but can be a mixture of other peoples’ photos and your own or just others. It’s up to you but you can be creative organizing them. Henrik Lehnerer is the first to be featured for his hard work so click here to see his fractal collection.

We are also going to be building out the search capabilities for Clipfolders. Right now you can just browse them from the public view page for clipfolders found here.

Thanks for all your input and glad to get this out so you guys can put it through the ringer and good use.

UPDATE- Maybe I spoke a bit too soon about them being fixed. Almost fixed. I have reports of someone losing images from their studio after they added in images to a public clipfolder so be careful. Also it appears to be moving very slow which we will fix asap. Let me know if you guys see anything else.

Are you kidding me?

Fotolia announced a competition over two months ago called “Unleashing your Creativity” with the understanding that “The winning designer will receive an approximate retail value (“ARV”) of $5000 (USD) in cash and prizes. In addition the winning design will be used in Fotolia’s global advertising campaigns.”

Entrants had to submit designs from March 14, 2008 to May 9, 2008 12:01 AM EST. According to Fibtolia, “The Winner will be announced May 20, 2008 at the How Design Conference in Boston, MA.” Then inexplicably, Fibtolia, over two months after the first announcement of the competition and two weeks after the winner should have been awarded the prize or an answer, they announce on June 4th, there weren’t enough entries so no one got any money.

Well… that never happened.

“We regret to inform our fellow Fotolians that the Unleash Your Creativity Contest did not receive enough eligible submissions to judge and award a winner. We appreciate the efforts of our sponsor and those that did submit an entry. It is our hope to run another contest in the future with increased participation.”

Boring and sleazy. So Fibtolia gets a bunch of new signs ups, sells content to people who contributed to the contest (good for contributors who sold content to those who used it in the contest) and gets a bunch of new content uploaded to the site and ideas for it’s global advertising campaign. We ask them. Did you even get one submission?

I normally would never write poorly about another site but this example goes to the heart of what we don’t want to create with Cutcaster.

We want to build and nurture an open and fair dialogue and environment for all members.

We want to do what we say we will.

We will always treat people the way we would want to be treated if we were members on their site.

We want to keep our word to our members.

These are truths and things we swear by at Cutcaster. Open and fair.

I say, even if there was only one entry that person should win by default. I am surprised I hadn’t heard more about it or there wasn’t an uproar. Did I miss the shouting? That will never happen here at Cutcaster and there would have been an “Unleashing” of a prize or a much bigger explanation as to what happened. 3 sentences isn’t fair.

I say, Unleash the cash and keep your word or it’s time to add another check against Fibtolia.