Community @ The Turning Gate

The Private Gallery page is not protected, only the albums within it. The names of the albums appear on the thumbnail, so why wouldn't the search function find them? I understand not searching within a password protected gallery.

But if a bride is looking for her gallery, I guess she would know to go to the Private Gallery page.
Guess there's no real use for a search feature for us, unless we label all of the public photos with a meaningful name, like, 'fireworks on the lawn', or 'Father of the Bride crying' etc.

Oh right, so it is! I think what misled me was the thumbnail has a label so I was expecting a gallery. If you leave the label off, it might be more tempting for people to click on it too. One of my favorite castles, though purists would mention it's not a 'real' one, and only, what, a couple hundred years old?

Having a quick look at sites to get some ideas.
A small criticism. When you click on a titled imaged, say, Castle Coch, one expects to be taken to a gallery of images of that subject. But it's really just the one image and part of a single level slideshow. Have you looked into creating 'album sets'? I think if you start doing those, the site would pop.
Love the photos overall, especially since you use an X-T2 for most. Not a big fan of HDR, but it does look cool for effect, if you know what I mean. ?

Well, back to working on this.
It looks like I have too many restrictions trying to do this.

For the Contact page, I need a Contact form, but the Album template doesn't allow this to be added.
For the Review link, I nee to go to a website, not to an Album page.
The other 2 buttons are doable, but if it can't be done for the other 2, then I have to think of something else.

Guy's I'm happy with what I have. It was easy to add, and I've used it for years. No additional work is needed and it has no impact on traffic to the site.

We actually have access to Analytics, since we advertise on Google, so I've seen the plethora of graphs and stats and have no interest in ploughing through that pile to gather meaningless data on visitors to our site.

In the end, people see our ads, visit our site, decide if they want to book us or not and that's that.

No amount on analysis of activity is going to have any effect on that, which is why it is a fun thing only for us to observe.
I've added my Analytics id to the site, so if I really need to go stat crazy, I can

Hi Rod,

Hi Rod, I was able to do this, so thanks for that.

So now I get a blank page, or hidden gallery. I am trying  to figure out how I insert the content (eg. Contact Form) into these blanks.
We also thought about having other items in this album set that point to portfolio galleries. That should just be a matter of duplicating the albums from Publisher. It duplicates the images, but that's no big deal.
I'm going to try that out first...

Well. if it's that easy... I'll try it out!
Thanks Rod

Yes I am aware of the logistics of different IP's being used by the same person, be it at a work place or on a diff. device etc.
In the end, it's not something we're obsessed with and because our site/business is local, it's never that busy where we need to differentiate.

Here's why we have stats with IP 's:

Reason 1:

When we have just released a private album, we want to know if the couple have viewed it - my wife get's paranoid if she doesn't hear back from a couple after she's spent weeks editing a wedding and has finally released it to the client.

Since the user/password is only released to them, then we know if they have logged on. Having their IP at this time, just allows us to see how often they spend on the site etc.

If we see they have looked at the gallery, then we usually hear from them.

Reason 2:
We can see that we've had a visitor and what pages they went to and how long they spent at the site. If we tag that IP, we can see if they come back later.

The benefits are negligible really, but, it just gives us a glance at how people look at the site.
We have had meetings with people that we know, or strongly suspect first went on our site months prior, then visited again and booked a meeting.
That info, is just that. There is nothing to gain from it. It's just nice to know the history.
If a couple meet up for coffee, we have about a 90% booking rate. That's really the best stat. we have on how we do.

Can Analytics help us improve our SEO? probably yes. But we pay for ads and we get enough work (15-20 weddings/yr.) that covers that cost and gives us enough work. If it ain't broke...

Hi Rod,

So the reason I used Backlight and Publisher, was to have (3) placeholders that I can control their behavior, using the template settings.
They are added as an album set. Because there is so much control built into how the thumbnails are displayed, I thought I would try this out, I mean, Matt's already done the hard part, why re-invent the wheel? Simply changing columns and margins etc. resizes & repositions the placeholders so I can (eventually) get the look I want at different window sizes and on a mobile.

But... because they are album sets, they link to a gallery page, and I want the link to be a web page. Also, that web page is where the thumbnail is referenced. So I am assuming that, unless I hack the code, this is not the way to do this.
But this is the look that I want to get. Is this maybe a feature request?

It would work like an 'Album set' but it would be a 'Page set'
I just want to have a bit more on the home page than a gallery and menu.
I am following the lead of my wife, who has looked at a lot of other photographers sites and wants a bit more than the slideshow on the main page.
I've talked her out of a Parallax design!!!!!