I would welcome comments/criticisms of my new site. I am new to Smugmug, so this is my first attempt. This is intended to be a photo display site, and not for selling or downloading...
Sharp looking site. Not too sure about the front page slide show with the B&W turning to color. I would rather see more and different images images instead of two of the same subject. Other than that, looks great!
Hi all,
I would welcome comments/criticisms of my new site. I am new to Smugmug, so this is my first attempt. This is intended to be a photo display site, and not for selling or downloading… http://www.stephenunderwood.com
Thank you for your time,
Steve
My Smugmug
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
Much to my surprise, I wasn't the last to unveil my new site. Nothing like a deadline to make one focus .
I know there are still a few rough edges, which I'll work out eventually. Just to clarify, I'm an amateur and not trying to do business on my site. It's just for sharing with friends, family and Dgrinners.
Much to my surprise, I wasn't the last to unveil my new site. Nothing like a deadline to make one focus .
I know there are still a few rough edges, which I'll work out eventually. Just to clarify, I'm an amateur and not trying to do business on my site. It's just for sharing with friends, family and Dgrinners.
I love the split in the galleries for color and black and white, that is an interesting twist I rarely see on websites. The site is clean and easy to navigate. I also love the numbers on hover.
The only thing that sort of throws me off a bit is having all the galleries on the homepage in addition to the menu.
I like the clean and simple setup of your site. And I agree with Steve - I really like the split in the galleries between black and white and color with an easy click to the other set of images.
Having a separate page for search seems to be done quite a bit but I've never liked seeing search on a page by itself. Have you considered also exposing your keywords on that page?
If you decide to do that I would first clean up the existing keywords. You have quite a few all numeric keywords. Some of those appear to be deliberate since they bring up multiple photos, but others look like they were pulled from file names and only lead to a single photo. File name keywording is controlled in Account Settings, Discovery, Search.
Many thanks for commenting, Steve and Denise. I always hated mixing color and B&W on one page, so since I was reorganizing the site anyway, I decided to do something about it. Glad you like the result.
I have removed Search from the menu for now. I agree that it doesn't look good on a page by itself. Search is one of the rough edges.
My keyword cloud is a hopeless mess, for historical reasons. At some point, I started using YYMMDD_nnnn as a filename convention, but I forgot to turn off automatic use of filenames as keywords. So a lot of meaningless keywords got generated. To make matters worse, SM removed the underscore character and created two keywords instead of one, so it wasn't even very good at searching by filename. Don't know what the situation is now, but when I finally discovered the mess, there was no way to do a bulk search for all numeric keywords, which made cleanup a monumental task. Needless to say, I didn't bother. Without some easy way to remove all those useless numerics, there's no way I will ever expose the keyword cloud to the public.
AFAIK, very few visitors ever used the search (when it was available). One thing I didn't like about it is that it can get a visitor into unlisted folders and galleries, so it broke the visibility model I'm trying to enforce. I think for now, I'm going to put search on my About page and use CSS to hide it from visitors. Then I'll think about what I would need to do to make it public again.
My keyword cloud is a hopeless mess, for historical reasons. At some point, I started using YYMMDD_nnnn as a filename convention, but I forgot to turn off automatic use of filenames as keywords. So a lot of meaningless keywords got generated. To make matters worse, SM removed the underscore character and created two keywords instead of one, so it wasn't even very good at searching by filename. Don't know what the situation is now, but when I finally discovered the mess, there was no way to do a bulk search for all numeric keywords, which made cleanup a monumental task. Needless to say, I didn't bother. Without some easy way to remove all those useless numerics, there's no way I will ever expose the keyword cloud to the public.
I've sometimes used a gallery with smart rules to retrieve photos with keywords that I want to remove or change. That allows me to select multiple photos in organizer to update the keywords. This may or may not be useful - when I've found single keywords that need to be changed I usually just click on the keyword from the keyword page, open lightbox, remove or change the keyword.
You're right, it's tedious, but at some point you may want to update the keywords.
Sharp looking site. Not too sure about the front page slide show with the B&W turning to color. I would rather see more and different images images instead of two of the same subject. Other than that, looks great!
Thanks for the feedback, David. I understand your comment about the slide show, and made that change.
I would love any suggestions for improvements that you think could be made. I have been using a lot of custom HTML/CSS for this, but sometimes come up against mobile responsiveness issues...
Also, I'm interested in any ideas to improve the visual representation of the photos in this gallery:
Overall your site looks good but I do have a few comments.
Your homepage has a full page background slideshow. I thought it was odd to see a scroll bar there; I suspect most people won't look beyond the slideshow. If you want the entries below the slideshow to be viewed you might consider adding them to your menu items.
When I click the top-level Galleries entry in your menu I am taken to this page - http://www.jkatzphoto.com/Galleries. The first two entries on that page show the same photo (on that page), and the Beautiful Forests entry shows no photo, just a standard gallery icon. Neither gives a professional look to your site. I think it would look better with unique photos for each entry on that page.
Take a look at your keywords. I would recommend reviewing and removing the numeric keywords. They are not keywords that help your SEO.
New site up and running
I honestly was a little skeptical and scared about migrating to the new SM as I had heard stories about this new infrastructure (not being as customizable as the old one). Additionally I had spent a lot of hours customizing my website a couple of years ago and was afraid that I might not get the look I desired. Well a couple of days ago I got a reminder email that the legacy SM would be retired on Oct 15 and that we should migrate to the new version. I spent a few hours yesterday and today (and with the help of the great forum members like Allen, Denise, Richard and Lille), have my site exactly the way I want it. It definitely was a pretty painless process and now in retrospect I could easily have done this a while ago (change is always hard - but in this case, change is pretty painless and awesome). Here is my new site (I wanted to keep it really simple and clean):
For your long captions you might add some line breaks in. Do not use html <br>, just use your keyboard enter key. The multiple lines should center and I think look much better then going full side to side.
For your long captions you might add some line breaks in. Do not use html <br>, just use your keyboard enter key. The multiple lines should center and I think look much better then going full side to side.
Shniks, your site and the photos are beautiful. I really like the tall images for the galleries page.
Thanks for the feedback. BTW making that main gallery page is really easy. Just create a page and then put the photos you want as the gallery photos on that page. Have each individual image point to a gallery and you are done. If you want to add frames around each image then you can either do it in Photoshop or you can get automatic plugins that will do it for you (there are some that are free on the net).
It's much easier than you would think and it looks really cool. Try it out.
Thanks for the feedback. BTW making that main gallery page is really easy. Just create a page and then put the photos you want as the gallery photos on that page. Have each individual image point to a gallery and you are done. If you want to add frames around each image then you can either do it in Photoshop or you can get automatic plugins that will do it for you (there are some that are free on the net).
It's much easier than you would think and it looks really cool. Try it out.
Cheers,
I used the Photoshop method on my yet-to-be-published site, but they are boringly square. I may try your tall format - looks cool.
shniks I like your galleries page a lot - I guess I have some coding to do now to get something as beautiful for my own page
One thing though: in your panorama gallery you say to point on the photo to the right and chose "Original" from the appearing menu to see the photo in its full glory (and a scroll bar would than show up for the Original). Well on my Mac (Yosemite 10.10.something Safari 9) that menu does not show. So I don't know if it still exists and just does not work like this for Mac or if you changed the behavior and forgot to change the text.
shniks I like your galleries page a lot - I guess I have some coding to do now to get something as beautiful for my own page
One thing though: in your panorama gallery you say to point on the photo to the right and chose "Original" from the appearing menu to see the photo in its full glory (and a scroll bar would than show up for the Original). Well on my Mac (Yosemite 10.10.something Safari 9) that menu does not show. So I don't know if it still exists and just does not work like this for Mac or if you changed the behavior and forgot to change the text.
Good luck
Lille Ulven
Hi Lille - thanks for the feedback. It's funny as I too just observed that fly in menu was not showing up in the new Smugmug. I have now changed the wording in the description and hopefully it is clearer to the visitor now - else I will have to see how to phrase this so as not to confuse people.
You are welcome Nikhil.
Well your words are clearer now...it is only unfortunate that for the visitor who is not logged in user (even if you are logged in with a non-admin user to your site) there is no size-menu in the bottom right of your panorama gallery, only a share menu ;-(
You are welcome Nikhil.
Well your words are clearer now...it is only unfortunate that for the visitor who is not logged in user (even if you are logged in with a non-admin user to your site) there is no size-menu in the bottom right of your panorama gallery, only a share menu ;-(
Best of luck
Lille Ulven
Thanks Lille - there actually is a size menu - but to access that you have first click on the photo to go to the lightbox. It works when not logged in (as a visitor).
I have to figure out how to just open the original image when it is clicked (i.e. the original automatically shows up in Lightbox, as opposed to choosing the size) - that way there will be one less step to view the image as intended.
You're welcome shniks.
Maybe you should change your text a tiny little bit: "you have to click on the photo to open it in the lightbox and down to the right you can find a size menu from which you should choose Original" or something like this?
By the way: I love those panoramas of yours - and thanks to your panorama page and this little discussion I actually found that I had only allowed my photos to show in XLarge, assuming it would be X3 wondering why my panoramas are so small.
Feedback Please
Part of my site is for Basketball. It is at https://hewitt.smugmug.com/Lakeshow. Any and all feedback is welcome. I did a small amount of customization, CCS. You can get back to my home page, but I am just asking for feedback on the link "https://hewitt.smugmug.com/Lakeshow" and contents below. If you get asked for a password it should be "Lakeshow" or "Lakeshow".
A couple of questions.
How do I get rid of the shopping cart icon in the picture footing. The download icon is fine.
In a gallery there is a slideshow button. Where do I customize how that slideshow is run.
How do I have a 2nd slideshow of the same gallery, that will run differently than the one run out of the gallery. I could have 2 identical galleries but that does not sound like a good solution
Part of my site is for Basketball. It is at https://hewitt.smugmug.com/Lakeshow.
How do I get rid of the shopping cart icon in the picture footing. The download icon is fine.
I don't find the carousel slideshow to be very useful. I prefer real slideshows at full screen so I can focus on one photo at a time.
You have a couple of folders with no feature photo set. I believe your page would look more professional with feature photos on everything.
This is purely personal... I've never understood graying out a tile when it is hovered over. The gray obscures the photo and does not lead me to click into the gallery.
To get rid of the shopping cart icon set Visitor Shopping cart to Off. That setting is in Gallery Settings... Shopping.
I am relatively new to SmugMug and our current website (Lynn Henni and me, Paul) was put together very quickly to go with local Photo Exhibitions we are running. I now want to review and improve it, plus look at the linkeages with the WordPress blog we have.
1. Would any of you be so kind as to have wee look and give me immediate thoughts / suggestions for improvements?
2. The usual question on site visibility etc? We've had around 27k visitors based on the SmugMug stats, is that a reasonable amount?
3. We are in the UK and now know that we cannot have visitor specific location associated prices, so we need to create a UK set of galleries / prices and then a US one - anyone done this before?
4. Any other things that may be obvious to you, but not to me?
1. Would any of you be so kind as to have wee look and give me immediate thoughts / suggestions for improvements?
The first thing that jumped out at me is that you haven't removed the smugmug header and switched to the mini-footer. To change:
> customize
> content and design
> click the settings button
> change choices for SmugMug Header and SmugMug Footer
Clicking on an item that takes me from your smugmug site to your blog or other site opens a new browser tab. That's something that usually triggers me to close the site and not come back. Yes, I know, it's something small - but I don't believe web sites should open new tabs or browsers unless I request it. I hate browser clutter.
Your site is very dark. I prefer the look of your blog with the lighter B&W photo spanning the top of the page.
Your background image does not enhance your site; to me it makes it look more cluttered.
Have you considered adding some spacing around the images on your home page and your /browse page?
It seems odd that you are using different layouts for your home page and your browse page.
When I go to your /browse page I see an entry for your pricing page. That is linked from the side menu bar so it is not needed on the browse page. To remove it, change the page from public to unlisted.
3. We are in the UK and now know that we cannot have visitor specific location associated prices, so we need to create a UK set of galleries / prices and then a US one - anyone done this before?
Given that a gallery can only be assigned to a single price list I believe you will need to have 2 sets of galleries. I think these need to be real galleries because smart galleries prices are inherited from the gallery they are pulling from.
I think including a gallery description that contains a link to the (other) gallery with the same photos but different currency might be helpful. You can see an example of this in Richard's galleries - he has a link to switch from B&W to Color images in his galleries, like this one - https://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/Display/Streetb/.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that you haven't removed the smugmug header and switched to the mini-footer. To change:
> customize
> content and design
> click the settings button
> change choices for SmugMug Header and SmugMug Footer
Clicking on an item that takes me from your smugmug site to your blog or other site opens a new browser tab. That's something that usually triggers me to close the site and not come back. Yes, I know, it's something small - but I don't believe web sites should open new tabs or browsers unless I request it. I hate browser clutter.
Your site is very dark. I prefer the look of your blog with the lighter B&W photo spanning the top of the page.
Your background image does not enhance your site; to me it makes it look more cluttered.
Have you considered adding some spacing around the images on your home page and your /browse page?
It seems odd that you are using different layouts for your home page and your browse page.
When I go to your /browse page I see an entry for your pricing page. That is linked from the side menu bar so it is not needed on the browse page. To remove it, change the page from public to unlisted.
Given that a gallery can only be assigned to a single price list I believe you will need to have 2 sets of galleries. I think these need to be real galleries because smart galleries prices are inherited from the gallery they are pulling from.
I think including a gallery description that contains a link to the (other) gallery with the same photos but different currency might be helpful. You can see an example of this in Richard's galleries - he has a link to switch from B&W to Color images in his galleries, like this one - https://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/Display/Streetb/.
Comments
still quite simple, but I'm glad to have a new home for my pictures
https://thomas-lieser.smugmug.com
I would lose the smugmug logo at the top.
Not sure why you have two menus ????
Website
Hi all,
I would welcome comments/criticisms of my new site. I am new to Smugmug, so this is my first attempt. This is intended to be a photo display site, and not for selling or downloading...
http://www.stephenunderwood.com
Thank you for your time,
Steve
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
I know there are still a few rough edges, which I'll work out eventually. Just to clarify, I'm an amateur and not trying to do business on my site. It's just for sharing with friends, family and Dgrinners.
https://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/
Comments and critique welcome.
I love the split in the galleries for color and black and white, that is an interesting twist I rarely see on websites. The site is clean and easy to navigate. I also love the numbers on hover.
The only thing that sort of throws me off a bit is having all the galleries on the homepage in addition to the menu.
Website
Having a separate page for search seems to be done quite a bit but I've never liked seeing search on a page by itself. Have you considered also exposing your keywords on that page?
If you decide to do that I would first clean up the existing keywords. You have quite a few all numeric keywords. Some of those appear to be deliberate since they bring up multiple photos, but others look like they were pulled from file names and only lead to a single photo. File name keywording is controlled in Account Settings, Discovery, Search.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
I have removed Search from the menu for now. I agree that it doesn't look good on a page by itself. Search is one of the rough edges.
My keyword cloud is a hopeless mess, for historical reasons. At some point, I started using YYMMDD_nnnn as a filename convention, but I forgot to turn off automatic use of filenames as keywords. So a lot of meaningless keywords got generated. To make matters worse, SM removed the underscore character and created two keywords instead of one, so it wasn't even very good at searching by filename. Don't know what the situation is now, but when I finally discovered the mess, there was no way to do a bulk search for all numeric keywords, which made cleanup a monumental task. Needless to say, I didn't bother. Without some easy way to remove all those useless numerics, there's no way I will ever expose the keyword cloud to the public.
AFAIK, very few visitors ever used the search (when it was available). One thing I didn't like about it is that it can get a visitor into unlisted folders and galleries, so it broke the visibility model I'm trying to enforce. I think for now, I'm going to put search on my About page and use CSS to hide it from visitors. Then I'll think about what I would need to do to make it public again.
You're right, it's tedious, but at some point you may want to update the keywords.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Thanks for the feedback, David. I understand your comment about the slide show, and made that change.
Many thanks for your time,
Steve
Hey everyone,
I have made some pretty dramatic changes recently to the overall look and feel of my site:
http://www.jkatzphoto.com/
I would love any suggestions for improvements that you think could be made. I have been using a lot of custom HTML/CSS for this, but sometimes come up against mobile responsiveness issues...
Also, I'm interested in any ideas to improve the visual representation of the photos in this gallery:
http://www.jkatzphoto.com/Aerial-view-san-francisco
Thanks!
I am also the cofounder of Travelstoked, an adventure photography blog.
Your homepage has a full page background slideshow. I thought it was odd to see a scroll bar there; I suspect most people won't look beyond the slideshow. If you want the entries below the slideshow to be viewed you might consider adding them to your menu items.
When I click the top-level Galleries entry in your menu I am taken to this page - http://www.jkatzphoto.com/Galleries. The first two entries on that page show the same photo (on that page), and the Beautiful Forests entry shows no photo, just a standard gallery icon. Neither gives a professional look to your site. I think it would look better with unique photos for each entry on that page.
Take a look at your keywords. I would recommend reviewing and removing the numeric keywords. They are not keywords that help your SEO.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
I honestly was a little skeptical and scared about migrating to the new SM as I had heard stories about this new infrastructure (not being as customizable as the old one). Additionally I had spent a lot of hours customizing my website a couple of years ago and was afraid that I might not get the look I desired. Well a couple of days ago I got a reminder email that the legacy SM would be retired on Oct 15 and that we should migrate to the new version. I spent a few hours yesterday and today (and with the help of the great forum members like Allen, Denise, Richard and Lille), have my site exactly the way I want it. It definitely was a pretty painless process and now in retrospect I could easily have done this a while ago (change is always hard - but in this case, change is pretty painless and awesome). Here is my new site (I wanted to keep it really simple and clean):
http://www.nikhilshahi.com
I now have to work on the blogspot blog to make it tie a little bit more seamlessly with the website (colors, sizes et al).
Thanks to all the great folks at SM for making this transition painless. I am a happy camper.
Cheers,
My Website | My Blog | My Facebook Page | My YouTube
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=2011353&postcount=10
Smug had applied a max-width to the caption is why the caption did not center.
Found CSS to override it and center caption.
My Website index | My Blog
My Website index | My Blog
Thanks for that tip. Will amend the captions.
My Website | My Blog | My Facebook Page | My YouTube
Shniks, your site and the photos are beautiful. I really like the tall images for the galleries page.
Thanks for the feedback. BTW making that main gallery page is really easy. Just create a page and then put the photos you want as the gallery photos on that page. Have each individual image point to a gallery and you are done. If you want to add frames around each image then you can either do it in Photoshop or you can get automatic plugins that will do it for you (there are some that are free on the net).
It's much easier than you would think and it looks really cool. Try it out.
Cheers,
My Website | My Blog | My Facebook Page | My YouTube
I used the Photoshop method on my yet-to-be-published site, but they are boringly square. I may try your tall format - looks cool.
One thing though: in your panorama gallery you say to point on the photo to the right and chose "Original" from the appearing menu to see the photo in its full glory (and a scroll bar would than show up for the Original). Well on my Mac (Yosemite 10.10.something Safari 9) that menu does not show. So I don't know if it still exists and just does not work like this for Mac or if you changed the behavior and forgot to change the text.
Good luck
Lille Ulven
Hi Lille - thanks for the feedback. It's funny as I too just observed that fly in menu was not showing up in the new Smugmug. I have now changed the wording in the description and hopefully it is clearer to the visitor now - else I will have to see how to phrase this so as not to confuse people.
Cheers,
My Website | My Blog | My Facebook Page | My YouTube
Well your words are clearer now...it is only unfortunate that for the visitor who is not logged in user (even if you are logged in with a non-admin user to your site) there is no size-menu in the bottom right of your panorama gallery, only a share menu ;-(
Best of luck
Lille Ulven
Thanks Lille - there actually is a size menu - but to access that you have first click on the photo to go to the lightbox. It works when not logged in (as a visitor).
I have to figure out how to just open the original image when it is clicked (i.e. the original automatically shows up in Lightbox, as opposed to choosing the size) - that way there will be one less step to view the image as intended.
Cheers,
My Website | My Blog | My Facebook Page | My YouTube
Maybe you should change your text a tiny little bit: "you have to click on the photo to open it in the lightbox and down to the right you can find a size menu from which you should choose Original" or something like this?
By the way: I love those panoramas of yours - and thanks to your panorama page and this little discussion I actually found that I had only allowed my photos to show in XLarge, assuming it would be X3 wondering why my panoramas are so small.
Best of luck
Lille Ulven
Part of my site is for Basketball. It is at https://hewitt.smugmug.com/Lakeshow. Any and all feedback is welcome. I did a small amount of customization, CCS. You can get back to my home page, but I am just asking for feedback on the link "https://hewitt.smugmug.com/Lakeshow" and contents below. If you get asked for a password it should be "Lakeshow" or "Lakeshow".
A couple of questions.
How do I get rid of the shopping cart icon in the picture footing. The download icon is fine.
In a gallery there is a slideshow button. Where do I customize how that slideshow is run.
How do I have a 2nd slideshow of the same gallery, that will run differently than the one run out of the gallery. I could have 2 identical galleries but that does not sound like a good solution
Thanks in advance for your time and feedback
You have a couple of folders with no feature photo set. I believe your page would look more professional with feature photos on everything.
This is purely personal... I've never understood graying out a tile when it is hovered over. The gray obscures the photo and does not lead me to click into the gallery.
To get rid of the shopping cart icon set Visitor Shopping cart to Off. That setting is in Gallery Settings... Shopping.
You can change the setting in each gallery's settings or you can use Bulk Gallery settings and change multiple galleries at once. For bulk settings, see help page at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1240194-new-bulk-gallery-settings.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Hi All,
I am relatively new to SmugMug and our current website (Lynn Henni and me, Paul) was put together very quickly to go with local Photo Exhibitions we are running. I now want to review and improve it, plus look at the linkeages with the WordPress blog we have.
1. Would any of you be so kind as to have wee look and give me immediate thoughts / suggestions for improvements?
2. The usual question on site visibility etc? We've had around 27k visitors based on the SmugMug stats, is that a reasonable amount?
3. We are in the UK and now know that we cannot have visitor specific location associated prices, so we need to create a UK set of galleries / prices and then a US one - anyone done this before?
4. Any other things that may be obvious to you, but not to me?
Ta,
Paul
SmugMug Photo Page - www.henni.photo
Photo Blog - www.knicksen.com
> customize
> content and design
> click the settings button
> change choices for SmugMug Header and SmugMug Footer
Clicking on an item that takes me from your smugmug site to your blog or other site opens a new browser tab. That's something that usually triggers me to close the site and not come back. Yes, I know, it's something small - but I don't believe web sites should open new tabs or browsers unless I request it. I hate browser clutter.
Your site is very dark. I prefer the look of your blog with the lighter B&W photo spanning the top of the page.
Your background image does not enhance your site; to me it makes it look more cluttered.
Have you considered adding some spacing around the images on your home page and your /browse page?
It seems odd that you are using different layouts for your home page and your browse page.
When I go to your /browse page I see an entry for your pricing page. That is linked from the side menu bar so it is not needed on the browse page. To remove it, change the page from public to unlisted. Given that a gallery can only be assigned to a single price list I believe you will need to have 2 sets of galleries. I think these need to be real galleries because smart galleries prices are inherited from the gallery they are pulling from.
I think including a gallery description that contains a link to the (other) gallery with the same photos but different currency might be helpful. You can see an example of this in Richard's galleries - he has a link to switch from B&W to Color images in his galleries, like this one - https://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/Display/Streetb/.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Hi Denise,
Thanks very much for taking the time to criticise (in the true sense) the site for me. I'll work through your suggestions and see how I get on.
Cheers,
Paul