Forgotten and lost viewers

photosbygerryphotosbygerry Registered Users Posts: 36 Big grins
edited April 1, 2015 in SmugMug Support
A visitor to www.smugmug.com looking for photos to view might leave disappointed. And if so, some of us are missing out on having our photos viewed.

The Smugmug home page has 6 obvious tabs at the top, 5 of which relate to establishing a Smugmug website. The last obvious tab is a login for existing Smugmug website owners. Hidden at the far right is a dimmed search box, which could easily be missed by a first-time site visitor.

An enthusiastic visitor might scroll down the page, about 18 screenfuls, to the bottom, looking for photos and galleries. There he can find "Stunning Photo Websites" which is not a link to anything, and links to Terms, Privacy, Blog, Jobs, About, Refer-a-friend, Prints&gifts and Help. Still hopeful of finding photos they might click on Help. Alas, the Help is anything but! This help is designed for Smugmug account holders and developers.

The lucky visitor who does find the dimmed search box can type in a keyword or two and lo and behold this will take them to the Smugmug wide search page with photos selected by their chosen keywords. At least they have found some photos and they can see there are choices for videos, people and galleries to aid their searches. The default sort order is Photorank but they will not easily find anything which explains what that really means. But at least they can change it to oldest or newest which are understandable.

If they are lucky, they may notice the tabs at the bottom of the search page (if the search didn't return to many phtos so it kept disappearing) one of which is Browse Photos. If they click that they find the page that they probably thought they would get when they visited the home page.

My thoughts:

1. It is great to advertise for new photo websites on the Smugmug home page.
2. It is also a good idea to cater for visitors who wish to see photos so that photos are easy to find. The pages www.smugmug.com/search and www.smugmug.com/browse should be directly and obviously available from the top of the Smugmug home page.
3. Photo viewers may also need help.
4. The Smugmug Blog is a useful feature, but it seems incongruous to have 10 entries showing on what is essentially a photo browse page and not a Smugmug website developer page.

Gerry
Gerry

photosbygerry.smugmug.com

Comments

Sign In or Register to comment.