Using Smugmug Site as NonPhoto Site?

lifeinfocus

Has anybody ever used Smugmug to create a non photography commercial business site? For example to create a business website for a residential building contractor where photos are important.

Phil

colourbox

The workarounds involved are not great, since Smugmug has almost no support for HTML-only pages. You have to shoehorn all the code into the Description field of a gallery and hide everything else, and you only get to do it once per gallery. If you want any other info pages that don't need a photo gallery, you have to start a whole different gallery just to add that one page. Also, it can be a pain to update HTML-only pages on Smugmug, whereas on a regular web server you can more easily do content management, code previewing, and link to services.

If the contractor just needs to add a few photos, or have a photo blog of projects, but they don't need all of Smugmug's advanced photo back end like keyword searches, they might be better off starting a Wordpress account, picking a photo-based template, and paying the $30 a year or whatever to hide the Wordpress ads. Wordpress has photo galleries too.

lifeinfocus

colourbox wrote: »

The workarounds involved are not great, since Smugmug has almost no support for HTML-only pages. You have to shoehorn all the code into the Description field of a gallery and hide everything else, and you only get to do it once per gallery. If you want any other info pages that don't need a photo gallery, you have to start a whole different gallery just to add that one page. Also, it can be a pain to update HTML-only pages on Smugmug, whereas on a regular web server you can more easily do content management, code previewing, and link to services.

If the contractor just needs to add a few photos, or have a photo blog of projects, but they don't need all of Smugmug's advanced photo back end like keyword searches, they might be better off starting a Wordpress account, picking a photo-based template, and paying the $30 a year or whatever to hide the Wordpress ads. Wordpress has photo galleries too.

Thank you. Phil

JoiJoi

You can also use the smugmug api to host the photos and pull what you need from smugmug and use a separate server for the html.
that is what I did works great. might be a little involved with the API but once set it's pretty seamless.

NikonsandVstroms

Or you could have the smugmug sections be a sub domain so it would be images.yourwebsite.com