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Can You Post Pictures on Pinterest Without a Website or Blog?

Questions & Answers

Estela from Irvine asks: I love pinterest, is there any way I can load my own pictures and stuff into pinterest? or I can only do it if I have a website or blog. My friend has an art gallery and would like to pin his art pieces but doesn’t have a website.

Estela, the short answer is Yes you can! It’s quite simple and I took a few screenshots to show you how, check them out below. But read on for the rest of my answer after the instructions

How to pin Pictures to Pinterest without having a blog or website.

1. Log into Pinterest.

2. At the top right corner you can click on Add +

Add photo from the top right corner link where it says Add +

3. This will pop-up a message with three options. You need to use the option in the middle called “Upload a Pin” click that.

Select Upload Pin from the three options

4. After that, you’ll be presented with a standard message to select a file from your computer and upload it. click on Choose File and select the file that you want from your desktop.

This dialog asks you to find the file on your computer

5. The next step should be more familiar. Pinterests asks you to put in a description, assign the picture to a board and pin it.

This is a lot more familiar. Just complete the information and Pin it!

That’s it, that’s how you post a picture onto Pinterest without having a website!

Now for the long answer…

While you can do this, I would not advise it for several reasons. The most important being that Pinterest is not yours, or your friends. At any time, Pinterest can shut down your account or their service altogether and you’re left with nothing. A better way of doing this is to get a website that you own, upload the photos there, then pin them.

This has two huge benefits. You can promote the gallery because you now have a website, and you can intereact with your visitors to your site on your own terms rather than Pinterest’s.

But getting a website doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. If budget is an issue, a simple way to get started is to find a free hosting blog service and use that. WordPress.com has such a service and it takes 2 minutes to setup and about 10 minutes to learn how to post your first picture. Tumblr.com also offers this and they even let you put your own domain on their blog for free (you still have to buy your domain for about $10/year).

The way you would use your blog or website is to post the picture up to the website, then pin that picture to pinterest. This makes it so people in Pinterest can enjoy the art and repin it, share it and all that fun stuff. At the same time, Pinterest users have a way to come back to the website where they can learn more about the artist and the gallery. Perhaps you can even sell art online like we do for samcarterart.com or cigartink.com

So yes you can do what you asked, but it would probably be more beneficial to add a website first, then pin pictures from the website to get more benefits, recognition and exposure.

Add Editing Missing Options to your WordPress Website

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As you might have heard, WordPress is very extensible. WordPress is a complete website system, some call it Content Management System. Let’s just say that WordPress can be used to build many types of websites with many different purposes. You can build a blog with WordPress, but at the same time you can add eCommerce to your WordPress blog or website. If you use the right plugins and make a few adjustments to the theme you can even make a custom application based on a WordPress website.

But if you’re going to use WordPress a lot to publish or edit content, I think that the built in tools available in WordPress are a bit limited. For this reason, I want to introduce you to a plugin that gives you all the missing options and features in your edit window. Using WordPress is a lot like using Microsoft Word, or another Word-like program. You have the “B” letter to make text bold. “U” to make it underlined, and so on. But the built-in WordPress editor window has a lot of options missing. With this plugin, you can make the missing features or options to edit your text more easily available.

A picture speaks a thousand words they say. So here are a couple pictures to illustrate my point. In fact these screenshots were taken with this post as the example. Let’s take a look at the standard WorPress editor toolbar.

1. “B” indicates making the text “Bold”
2. “U” for underline
3. This button indents text in from the left margin.
4. The Edit Toolbar on Visual Mode

 

And using TinyMCE Advanced you can get this:

TinyMCE Plugin WordPress

The difference should be clear. In this case we have a full row of new buttons. We have “search and replace” button; a justify text button, a simple “add table button” and even a link to add emoticons

The plugin TinyMCE Advanced is free and available through your WordPress dashboard. I don’t believe it is available for standard WordPress.com accounts so you’ll most likely have to have a WordPress.org (self-hosted) site to be able to use it. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was able to get some new buttons I really like having around. Like “adding a table” or justifying a block of text. One of the cool things about TinyMCE Advanced is that you can customize it to give you just the extra buttons you need. Here’s one more screenshot. This one shows you the settings available for TinyMCE Advanced through the settings options window.

TinyMCE Advanced settings

1. Each of the 3 rows here represents a row visible in the editing window. 2. You can drag and drop these buttons to the 3 or 4 rows above.

If you fee like you need more buttons than WordPress gives you out of the box, maybe TinyMCE Advanced is a good alternative. So far, it is easy to install and use. Simply go to the plugins section in your dashboard, search for new plugins using the “TinyMCE Advanced” keyword and install the plugin, then activate it. When ready, you can configure the settings for the plugin under Dashboard, then Settings, then TinyMCE Advanced.

We Are Hiring! Independent Sales Agents

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We are looking for independent sales agents to sell our services and websites. If you like our websites and like telling people why they must be online and how they can easily achieve that with a powerful and effective website, we may be able to work together.

We’re going to be running interviews soon all the people that responded to our Craigslist ad, but we also want to reach out to you directly and invite you to join our team. As we grow, we’d like to bring people in-house but for the time being we are looking for sales people that see an opportunity in adding our products to their portfolio. If this sounds like you, head over to the application form and fill it out. One of us will be in touch with you shortly.

 

 

About us and working together. Here are a couple of things about us:

  • We love to have fun.
  • Our clients love us.
  • Every problem our customers have is an opportunity to grow and learn so we take it head on.
  • We are personable and friendly, you’ll find us on Twitter and Facebook and throughout various Orange County meetups.
  • We provide complete solutions and stand behind them for years to come.
  • You can be in another county, state or even country.

come Join us!

How do you pick Fonts for a Website?

Questions & Answers

Q: How do you recommend going about the selection of fonts and font sizes for a website? Do you have any recommendations on minimum sizes (or other considerations) maximum usability?

Great question by Steven Johnson, in Philadelphia  This was very easy to answer years ago before Google Web Fonts and other web-friendly fonts and font systems came into the picture. I would have told you the answer in one paragraph. But with so many choices now, the answer isn’t so simple. Continue Reading →

What should I do with the footer section of my blog? Blog Footer Ideas

Questions & Answers

Today’s question comes from Carol.

Q: I’m developing a new blog and like the layout of the 3 columned footer section but I wasn’t exactly sure what info would work best in those areas. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations?

A: This is a great question. For the most part each website will have different things on the footer; it depends in the context of the website and the needs and desires of the visitors and the owner. For a blog, you can play around with the content of your footer and experiment to see what works best.

Some of the ideas that come to mind for me include: Continue Reading →

Which WordPress Form Plugin do you Recommend and Why?

Blog, Questions & Answers

Q: Which WordPress form plugin do you recommend and why? Are there others that should be considered or is your top choice the one and only?

This is a great question, thank you Stephen!

Answer: Our favorite plugin by far is Gravity Forms. I believe this is the best form plugin available for WordPress on the market right now, the only downside to it is that you have to pay for it and it sometimes it has too many features that people don’t need.

I’ll tell you a little bit about it first, then I will tell you some alternatives we love as well. Gravity Forms lets you do anything with data collection.

You could for example build a survey system Continue Reading →

How do I Change the Author on a WordPress Blogpost?

Blog, Questions & Answers

Our very first question! If you want to ask a question of your own, please check out: Ask us Anything!

Q: How do I change the user/author/contributor on a post on a wordpress blog? The blog has been written and is in draft form still.

A: This is a great question and often we are asked about this when you have multiple authors contributing to one blog, but one person is the administrator or editor that manages the blogposts. If you are using WordPress, this is a fairly easy change. The requirements are:

You must be an administrator or have special permissions to change the authorship. We’ll talk about the scenario where you are the administrator. It’s worth mentioning that if you want to change the authorship of a post, the author you want to assign this post to must already exist. If it doesn’t, you can easily add a new user from the dashboard.

To change the authorship simply open up the post on edit mode, it doesn’t matter Continue Reading →

Got Questions? Ask away!

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In this short post I’d like to invite you to ask us your questions. We are launching a blog series Dear Abby style, but for websites, WordPress, hosting, FTP, DNS, MX Records, email, and whatever other topics you can think of related to the internet or even your website. We will try to answer the question on our question and answer series, to get started click below!

Ask OC Web Pros Anything

 

 

Your Website is an Asset and Profit Center.

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Is your website a profit center or a loss center?
(image credit: shutterstock)

Your Website is an Asset and Profit Center. Well, at least it should be. One of the biggest roadblocks small business owners face daily is making decisions between activities that that help them generate more revenue, and activities that don’t generate revenue.

I don’t know about you but I have never met an entrepreneur that started a business to loose money. It is time that you Continue Reading →

What is Total Ownership?

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Total Ownership is something that comes with all our websites. It guarantees that the websites we build for you are completely and totally yours. Not only do you own all the content, graphics, and domain, you own the ability to change anything about them at anytime.

You own your site, think of us as the bank that keeps your safety deposit box. We keep it safe for you and give you access to it when you want or need. The contents are yours and you can take your possessions at anytime. You can even go to another bank if you change your mind.

We want you to know you’re not locked down to us. More importantly, you are in total control, you can edit your content when you wish. You can change the text, titles, images and pretty much any other piece of content that we’ve setup for you. You can upload photos, videos, blogposts, documents and PDF files, just to name a few. That’s what we call Total Ownership.

What is a Membership Management System?

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A membership management system allows you to have different sections on your website accessible by different members. The typical use case for a website like this is when you have a public magazine with private content available only to paid members. This is one of the modules you can add to any website we build for you, one example you can see now is WP Blog Videos, which we built for John Chow.