We’ve been working on this site for quite some time now and we thought we’d kick off the blogging with an introduction to the new LG web realm and all it has to offer. Our main goal with the new site was to give you a full sense of who we are, what we do, and offer a new way for you to interact with the Looking Glass Photo Community.

Traditionally I would start off a post like this by walking readers through the homepage since that’s the first thing you’re going to encounter. But honestly, do you want me to walk you through how to navigate a homepage? I thought not. I will include a quick walk through of the homepage at the end of this post but let’s start with the part I’m most excited about and I hope you will be too!

The Looking Glass Photo Community pages

This is the part of the website that is largely driven by you! The Forums and Gallery are completely user-generated. You will need to create your own unique username and password to fully participate in the Looking Glass Photo Community. To sign up simply click ‘sign up’ in the top right corner of any page and follow the prompts. Once you’re logged in feel free to upload pictures to the Gallery (I recommend using images that are sized at 100dpi with the longest dimension not exceeding 10 inches, save as jpg). This gallery was created to give our customers an opportunity to share what they do within a local community of people that are all passionate about photography. You can leave comments on photos, find out how the picture was taken, where it was taken, maybe even offer to buy a print (or sell or trade one!). Use the gallery to show off your pictures to, and get feedback from, your community.

The forums are here for you to start a conversation with other members of the LG Community. Post a question. Respond to other threads. Pick a place you want to go shooting, set a date and time and see how many community members want to join you for the fun. The possibilities are endless.

The LG Community pages are here for you to connect with other members of your community online and, hopefully, in person. Social Media sites are great for quick online interaction, but we have always felt that there is something very personal missing from most of these sites. They don’t actually bring people together in the real world. We’re hoping you’ll take the conversations and interactions you have here to the next level by using them as a way to meet and interact with people in your community who share your passion for photography. It’s what happens everyday inside our store and we wanted to expand those opportunities even further through our website. The Looking Glass Photo Community has been designed to help you along in your personal photographic journey. Please keep content ‘family-friendly’. We will be monitoring it and removing anything deemed inappropriate for viewers of all ages, and feel free to send us a note if you see something on the site that is blatantly offensive in nature.

Speaking of pictures, you may want to know how to produce some of those images that have been languishing on your computer, buried in the digital realm, and giving them a life in the ‘real’ world as well…

How to Order Prints Online

There are a couple of ways to quickly access our online print ordering service. At the bottom of every page in the ‘footer’ is an ‘Order Prints Online’ button. Also on the main ‘Services’ page under the ‘Printing and Processing’ heading you will find a direct link to the online ordering service. Our online ordering service uses software called ‘Silverlight’ which you will be prompted to download if you do not already have it installed on your computer. This is safe to download and only takes about a minute. Then just follow the on screen instructions. If you place your order before 2pm on a weekday your prints are generally ready for you to pick up at the store after 3pm the following weekday. Photo gifts (such as coffee mugs, calendars, and holiday cards) will have longer turnaround times so please plan in advance for these specialty items.

The rest of the site is yours to discover. We’ve included tons of new things as well as most of the same info you could find on our old site, but hopefully in a more user friendly way. We will also be able to update the site far more easily than before, so for those of you that were constantly wondering what new ‘used’ items we have in stock, or what class, workshop, or in-store specials are coming up… you can be sure that these areas will be kept up to date on a regular basis.

And oh yeah, I promised a quick homepage walk through…

The Home Page:

1. Header

The header stays on every page and is a great way to see how to contact us. If you want to get back to the homepage at anytime you can either click on the ‘home’ button or clicking on the header will take you there.

2. Navigation Bar

The navigation bar has quick links to all of the new pages of the website. Most menu options also have a dropdown menu. The main (topmost) button in the navigation bar will take you to the main page associated with that topic, some are an overview of what each dropdown section has to offer, and some take you directly to the first dropdown option. We highly recommend exploring!

3. Slideshow

The topmost image under the navigation bar is giant slideshow of important things we want you to know about. Each main slide image is ‘clickable’ and will take you to a page with more detailed information regarding the offer. You can click on the smaller thumbnails and the main image will change to whatever you have clicked on. From here simply click the large image to be taken to more info!

4. Welcome to LG

This will link you quickly to the ‘About Us’ page so if you want to know more about us, click it!

5. The Community Gallery

This picture is chosen at random and will change every time you refresh your screen. It chooses from the images that users have submitted to the LG Community Gallery. So don’t be surprised if once you have created your own gallery that you see your image on our home page! If you click on the image you go directly to a larger view of that image and can click on it again to see the lightbox view. You can also click on the username underneath the image and be taken to all the images submitted by that user. Or, you can click on the ‘browse the gallery’ link and be taken directly to the thumbnail view of the entire user gallery, sorted with the most recent submissions appearing first.

6. Follow Us

This is a quick way to link to our facebook, flickr, and twitter pages as well as a simple way to sign up for our email newsletter.

7. Customer Testimonial of the Month

Well this is pretty self-explanatory, but, if you’re interested in being our customer testimonial of the month, send us your testimonial and a pic of you to be used with it! The more creative and/or thoughtful, the better!

I’m sure you can figure out the rest on your own, but if you have questions, concerns, compliments or suggestions as you explore the new site… take a look at the footer and use that ‘suggestions’ form and tell us what’s on your mind! Please let us know if you encounter any functionality issues as I’m sure there will be a few bugs to work out that we haven’t come across yet and we won’t know if you don’t tell us!

Stay tuned to our blog which will be updated every week or so. We will be featuring guest bloggers, (if you want to be a guest blogger shoot us an email at info@lookingglassphoto.com and use ‘guest blogger’ in the subject line), video blogs, photographic equipment reviews and tests, shooting spots around the Bay Area…. You know, photography stuff Looking Glass style.

Till next time, I’m Jen from Looking Glass. Thanks so much for reading, and may your next shot be your best shot yet!