Fstoppers Wants Your Help To Improve Our Picture Of The Day Feature

As most of you know, we have a POTD feature which uses a single image for a 24 hour span and then archives them for later viewing in a month/day/year format. While it’s pretty neat, to be sure, I know that we could improve on it quite a bit to make it both more interesting for viewers and more beneficial for the photographers we feature.

While the POTD is currently one of the lowest-trafficked areas on our site, we don’t believe it should be. We get hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of unique viewers each month, and the rotating top banner is a prime piece of real estate for any photographer looking to promote themselves. We currently pull our POTD submissions from our flickr group and while there’s some great stuff, we think that could also source from other places to find even higher-quality submissions.

We also want the POTD to mean something. If you’re featured on the POTD here, I want people to brag about it and be proud of it. It should be a nice little feather in a cap, something your mother can be proud of, and something that drives traffic to your website. Which leads me to my next question: what do you think we can do to improve our POTD feature?

I’ve bounced a few ideas around inside my head, and those include:

A weekly rotation featuring one photographer per week. This would allow the opportunity for you to see a larger body of work by one artist, instead of just tiny tidbits thrown up that don’t have much cohesion. This would also be better for the photographer/artist and make it mean a bit more; seven days of coverage up there is a great lead generator.

Weekly or monthly themes could also be a way to go. For example, an architecture week, or an off-camera lighting month, or a landscape week, or a portrait month. This keeps everything consistent from day to day and allows everyone to scroll to a certain month to find inspiration and ideas. Being featured in a curated monthly gallery of ‘the best portrait shots of March 2013′ would be a cool little badge of honor, I think.

A weekly or monthly theme featuring shots made with specific gear. While somewhat helpful, doesn’t really show off people’s best work and I’m a big proponent of the idea that the gear doesn’t matter. Would be useful for those who are interested in keeping up with new images from early adopters of fresh products, however. For example, a week of images shot with a newly released lens would give everyone an idea of how that piece of gear performs.

Our favorite shots from our flickr and Facebook groups, which is sort of what we’re already doing. I like using this because active users get to see their work on their site, but like I said, it lacks a cohesion or ‘wow’ factor when we just pull random photos up.

The bottom line is that we want to make a platform for our loyal readers that showcases their work. We want to make it so that we can give back to the community, and I know that we can do a better job of it. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below, or drop me an email at mikek@fstoppers.com. If you have images you want featured on the POTD, again, feel free to drop me an email. I’d love to see a few submissions of seven images so I can test out the weekly or thematic ideas to see what kind of response they get.