FAQ

WordPress is a state-of-the-art and rapidly evolving web publishing platform. Hundreds of individuals around the globe maintain WordPress’ open source code and thousands of talented WordPress plugin developers contribute valuable enhancements to WordPress’ out of the box capabilities. Our goal at Visual Society is for photographers, videographers, designers, and publishers to be able to take advantage of WordPress’ elegance while simultaneously avoiding the hassle of keeping their software up-to-date.

Security

Chief among the many reasons we keep your WordPress installs and plugins updated is security. Unpatched and outdated versions of WordPress and its plugins are by far the worst security risk that can exist for an owner of a WordPress website. A recent blog post by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg beautifully illustrates the why and the how of staying on top of WordPress updates and the pitfalls that may come with ignoring them.

Time

Time is also a factor. We trust that as visual creatives, our users would rather spend their time making things they love, not performing maintenance on their websites. Simple WordPress and WordPress plugin upgrades can take anywhere from minutes to hours. We spend the time upgrading your WordPress software and Visual Society theme and plugin offerings so that you have more time to take photographs, shoot amazing videos, and publish beautiful designs.

Enhanced Features

With every major version release of WordPress come new publishing features, an enhanced administrative back-end, bug fixes, and software performance upgrades. After Visual Society thoroughly uses and tests its themes alongside WordPress’ latest incarnations, updates are quickly rolled out to our subscribers.

Optimized Update Testing

Optimized WordPress installs require an intimate knowledge of PHP, MySQL, and the best hosting environments in which WordPress installs thrive. The Visual Society server is mirrored and backed up daily.  With every one of our hand-picked WordPress plugins we make sure that upgrades and enhancements play nicely with your content, and we do the same for WordPress core installs. In short, we sweat the behind-the-scene details so you can stay focused on creating.

Sometimes an update is simply the click of a button; most of the time, it’s not. Visual Society eliminates the creative roadblock of managing your software updates so that you have more time and energy to create stunning content and memorable website experiences.

Specific Visual Society Features

Visual Society comes will all of the features of WordPress, plus a few extras that cater to the visual crowd.  On Visual Society, you can:

  • Activate/deactivate plugins
  • Select new theme designs
  • Crop photos
  • Configure your main site navigation
  • Upload photos, video, audio
  • Password protect posts and pages
  • Create your own domain name
  • Allow/disallow comments in a per-post basis
  • Add links to your sidebar
  • Choose theme colors (only available on certain themes)
  • Add logos (only available on certain themes)
  • Add Widgets
  • Create custom contact forms

Like any controlled platform, there are also a few things you cannot do:

  • Add you own themes (Pro Account owners can request new themes and theme customization)
  • Add your own plugins (Pro Account owners can request new themes and theme customization)
  • No FTP, SSH, MySql access for Free and Pro accounts.  Only Elite accounts have FTP and MySql access. If you don’t know what those are, than either a Free or Pro account would be perfect for you.

Upgrades

WordPress evolves quickly thanks to the thousands of designers and developers working around the clock, around the world, to make the CMS better.  We keep you updated so you can focus on what you do best: Create and publish content.

Never “locked in”

Starting your Web site over from scratch takes time and costs money.  We think that your content should travel with you were you choose to go.  We provide exports of your WordPress posts, pages and other content should you choose to move on.

Mobile Web site

Every Web site on Visual Society has the ability to serve users a mobile-specific version of your site.  This option can be activated on the Plugins – WP Touch iPhone Theme.