Ales Sokoloff
Hobbies/interests: travel, studying cultures, design, photography, snowboarding
Work: web development
Place of birth/current home: Minsk, Belarus (although I attended both high school and college in the states)
Website: http://alesandemily.com

1) Can you introduce us into your an ordinary work day?

I like to wake up early and get a good start on the day… my wife and I make breakfast and enjoy the morning and then we usually get to work. We work out of our house, so no commute makes life a lot easier. Depending what our projects are we distribute the work; I usually do more of the back-end programming while my wife takes care of the design end of things.

A lot of times I meet with clients or work on getting new ones throughout the work day.

2) Are you just a freelancer or do you rate yourself as a trade web developer?

Freelancer, and loving it.

3) When did you create your first web? Do you look back and think about it?

When I was 18 – so almost 7 years ago. I think about it some and think I’ve come a long way since then! I’m glad that I started early and learned as much as I could.

4) What are your goals? Do you want to reach some “webdesign” level in?

Well I am definitely planning on expanding the business. Our goals are to have up to 20 employees and free ourselves up to more traveling and choosing our personal projects.

5) Have you ever sold any photo to the photobank? Are you interested in taking a photos?

I haven’t sold any photos, hadn’t really thought about it much, but that is a great idea that I will be looking into.

And actually my wife is more the photographer of the family, although I dabble in it as well. My wife loves taking pictures and is very passionate about it.

Many of you searching for photos were confused with credits, our virtual currency. Pixmac has solved that now for you. You don’t have to learn what credit is and you even don’t have to register at Pixmac if you need just one picture.

This idea came up from our research that most buyers are searching for just one picture first. Usually they realise later that Pixmac is so easy that they can use it twice or more times! The second thing is most users don’t have time. When they’re in a hurry and they don’t have time to learn how the credit system works. Or perhaps they don’t have the time to register at Pixmac. And finally they don’t wanna purchase more credits just because they may not use them in the future.

Our solution? One Stop Shopping.

You can just search for picture you need, click the download button, pay the price and that’s it! Your project and your life is saved. We’ve saved some electricity, you can take more time to watch the wildlife out of your office window. And if you want a better price, then credits are there for you!

Lee Torrens says: “I LOVE your one-stop-shopping idea! It has always been a missing element of microstock agencies so I’m very glad to see you leading the way with this. I imagine there’s a minor loss of leads through not collecting email addresses, but as the market reaches further toward less sophisticated buyers, I expect this easy transaction style will be particularly handy. Great work!” – More about Lee at Microstock Diaries

It is as easy as 1-2-3

You’ll need 3 minutes to have the picture on your disk.

1. Search for the desired picture in the Pixmac stock photo gallery and click on it.
2. Choose the required size and click on Download.
3. Pay for the picture via PayPal or Credit Card. That is it!

We will be making some changes soon that will affect you if want to you upload your pictures via FTP. These will come into effect on 2009-06-16. The changes to be made are:

1) You will no longer need the special FTP username. Please use the same nickname and password as you use to log onto the website.
2) There will be two directories on your FTP account. These will be ‘creative’, for creative pictures and ‘editorial’ for editorial pictures. Please make sure you upload your picture to the correct directory.
3) You will no longer be able to create your own directories.

We hope these changes will make it even easier to upload your pictures. If you would like more information, or have any problems uploading by FTP, please contact us at customersupport@pixmac.com .

Our portfolio is growing pretty fast! We have now launched editorial content at Pixmac. If you ever need fresh photos of famous singers or actors, just jump on Pixmac! The celebrity section at Pixmac already has 300,000 pictures to download from $2 each. They’re ready for your blog, postcard, print, etc. And you know what’s better? Every day more than 10,000 new photos added!

We’re also participating in developing a new celebrity portal. Want to know what Paris Hilton or Brad Pitt did yesterday? Read Everyceleb.com every day!

We’ve also added great new functions for you! So now Pixmac is even easier for you to use.

Multiple operations

We’ve improved multiple operations for photographers. Now it’s really simple to work with multiple photos, add releases or a title to them.

Public lightboxes

Have you found beautiful photos and you want to show them to your friends? We’ve made public lightboxes for you. How does it work? It’s easy. Create a new lightbox and add your favorite pictures to it. Choose the “Show lightbox URL” option. Copy the URL and send it to your friends.

Zoom photos

Now you can zoom photos from Pixmac collection. Just click on the photo to zoom to 100%. Perfect for those who want to check the quality of the original.

Czech version

Pixmac launches Pixmac in Czech this week. In the near future we are planning to launch also other language versions. Almost done is Russian, German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian.

And one last thing. Because of our contract with Fotolia we had to lower the commision for non-exclusive rights to 30% and to 40% for exclusive rights for new photographers coming to Pixmac.

Pixmac announces its first giveaway! Just post your affiliate link in comments. After we reach 200 comments, we will give 50 credits to one of you. Its that easy! Anyway, why should you get gifts only on Christmas and maybe birthday?

Taking part in this giveaway is pretty easy. We’re happy when seeing a lot of comments here. And you can be happy if we reach at least 200 comments in this post with the affliliate link! Its your turn now! Spread the word and help yourself! Its Jackpot time right after we reach 200 or more comments!

Example:

Hi there! I’m Jane from New York and my link is: #Jane

Remeber: If you don’t win now, it may make sense for you to watch our blog via RSS. In the future more giveaways may be coming! Anyway, thank you for participation!

Rules: Credit wins one of the customers or photographers who add their Affiliate code (number or nick with the “#” symbol) into this post. The deadline for giving the 50 credits to one of you is 200 comments. Then we will post the name of the randomly chosen winner here in the post. The winner gets $50 equivalent in Pixmac credits. This credit can be used for photos, illustrations and other graphics from Pixmac collection.