I’ve had my gallery site, run through SmugMug for the last 4 or 5 years. While I found it to be a good platform for gallery and print generation, I always felt the default templates left a lot to be desired. Well, now that they jacked the annual price up well over 100% with very little warning, they have at least finally provided some halfway decent templates for those of us unwilling, or unable to find the time to learn CSS to program our very own customized websites.
If interested, you can click the image above to see my website in all it’s Smugged out glory.
While I’m not going to say I’m thrilled with it, I will say that it is a far better looking layout than what it was previously.
Anyone else use SmugMug to host their website? Tips, tricks, suggestions or criticism?
Thanks all,
Tyson
Tyson Robichaud Photo-blography 
Your page looks fantastic! I’d like to know (I looked through all the Smug new templates) how you get a scrollable background using one of your shots. That’s not on their pages as far as I can see. It has a really unique look that I’m going to go for. How??
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Thanks Don,
After choosing a theme, you can add a bg image through the themes tab by scrolling to “my theme” at the bottom, choosing the theme and then clicking on the wrench which pulls up the edit field. From the edit theme field, you choose the background tab (the middle on mine) and navigate to an image in your galleries. You can choose to have it fill the screen, stretch, scroll, etc.
All said and done, it was a little frustrating to figure it out (as much of the sm interface has been through the years in my opinion) but once I got the hang of it, it went pretty smoothly. I admittedly did not read nor view any of the instructional info though… I’m lazy and stubborn when it comes to some of this type of stuff 🙂
Cheers,
Tyson
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I’ve been thinking about spending some money to possibly make some money with their services. There doesn’t seem to be any great alternative, even when you do it yourself.
I’d been keeping photos on Picasa, just to have somewhere to point people but Google continues to push Google+ and I got tired of their nonsense.
Putting $150 annually to make some money means that I’d better make some money, especially if you only make $1.50 per photo–I don’t really know, I’m just guessing at the profit.
I’ve seen their Tweets with big names boasting how wonderful they are, but I see others claiming that they’ve finally caught up. I have a feeling that the uniform layout between photographers will give way to chaos, but with personality.
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For a pro account, it is now $300, which is insane compared to what it has been for the last 5 years. I’ve heard Zenfolio talked about quite a bit, but never took the time to research it in depth, mostly because I didn’t want to have to switch everything over.
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Hi Tyson. I’ve always felt that my SmugMug site (creativeobjective.com) suffered from a lack of it even being obvious that images are for sale. Your site looks great, but it still doesn’t jump out that I can easily buy an image.
I have not looked through the new templates, but you’ve encouraged me to do that.
Thanks!
Reed
Blog: DMC-365.blogspot.com
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Thanks Reed.
Honestly, I’ve never had great luck selling images through sm. A few here and there, mainly for events, but I’ve never really marketed my stuff either. I think that it is more down to a full on marketing campaign with the site purely providing a platform to sell from. Smugmug is not a stock library by any means, and they don’t have a presence that they push to try and get people to randomly search for images so it really is down to the photographer to create the demand. For me, it is very useful for file delivery and backup storage on the back end, its just getting expensive.
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