Microstock Agency PantherMedia introduces New Website with Fresh Ideas

Image buyers and designers can now choose their favorite background design

Munich, January 26, 2010. PantherMedia, the leading and rapidly growing marketplace for Royalty-Free photography with over one million images, illustrations and a vibrant photocommunity, today introduces its new website with innovative design and many new features, creating an
unique shopping experience for image buyers. The innovations are:

• Design:
o An optimized design und harmonized fonts for a higher clearness enabling customers, image buyers and designers to find quickly and easy the images they need.
o New clearly arranged start page showing all price models at a glance.
o Unique in the market: image buyers can now switch between a white-grey and a more dark background design of the website to create their own favored design for their working purposes.

• Improved Navigation:
o The new site navigation supports an optimized usability, reduces the daily workload and saves the valuable time of images buyers and designers. They can now use the new enlarged and centered search box in a separate menu bar for their image searches.
o The new site navigation to further information can be found at the bottom of the website, together with links to Facebook, Twitter, etc.; daily used menu items (shopping cart, lightbox, MyPanther) are right at the top of the website.

• Improved Search:
o Faster Search and page-flipping thanks to cache technology.
o The Extended Search and the Category Search can be displayed according to requirements of image buyers and designers.
o When searching for images customers can select how many information about and around the images will be displayed in search results (thumbnails only/thumbnails together with few information/thumbnails together with all information) for further customizing the design of search results according to their requirements.

• More Display Options:
o The number of images displayed in search results can easily be customized. Flipping through the pages is way faster for a quick overview on images than scrolling up and down.
o The mouse-over-image feature displays all desired image-relevant information and buttons.
o In the preview modus of an image similar images from the same photographer are displayed automatically under the specific image for a full overview on the series of images resp. similar images from other photographers. Image buyers can also start a search for images with similar colors and for images with the same model.

• New Features:
o Image buyers can now distribute their lightboxes for sharing purposes via a link ("public URL") to other recipients which do not need to be logged in for viewing these images. Simply the best way to quickly show their own customers which images were selected for the assignment.

Starting in spring 2010 the new feature Search History will be availabe. Customers will be able to see on which images they have clicked and which they have enlarged during their past searches to find their desired images more easily.

About PantherMedia
PantherMedia is a marketplace for Royalty Free (RF) photography. Suppliers as well as buyers of commercial and editorial imagery meet on one shared platform consisting of a photocommunity for photographers and a stock agency for image buyers.
The photocommunity serves as the creative heart of the image marketplace. Professional photographers and shutterbugs from all over the world can upload, rate and comment on images. They can share their experience, further develop their photographic skills and showcase their artistic potential.
After a legal and qualitative check through PantherMedia, picture editors chose adequate images for the stock agency. Agencies, publishing houses and enterprises which need images can license photographs for their individual purposes - either as single images or through a flexible subscription plan.
The revenues will be shared with photographers. This novel business model allows through so-called „User Generated Content“, provided by over 20,000 photographers worldwide, to keep the offer of RF-images far below the average market price.
PanterMedia.net is an enterprise of PantherMedia GmbH with headquarters in Munich, Germany and was founded in October 2004. At present, PantherMedia offers more than 1 million images worldwide directly and via an international network of over 90 distribution partners in 36 countries. During the FounderChampions competition of the 25th German Days of Founders and Entrepreneurs PantherMedia represented the Federal State of Bavaria as the best Bavarian Start-up.