Dear Smugmug,

jecottrell

How about some "Pro" related templates/themes?

It's fairly obvious that a truly "Pro" site is not easily achievable. Yes, it can be done with the myriad of hacks and mods in this forum, but it would be easier for the pro to build upon a basic scheme as opposed to the Franken mods that one has to go through to whittling away the collection of unneeded features and formatting to get to an aesthetically pleasing and usable, commercial site.

It would be interesting to know what type of account makes the most money for Smugmug and whether Pros warrant the investment in time/$ it would take to generate a few templates.

Thanks,

John

caseserve

Interesting question, I spent many many hours years ago to get my site customized. Now I want to redo it. But the time involved to "customize" it for professional use is daunting. I documented all my hacks in the code. But going thru it and remembering it after not looking for at least 4 years now is a pita.

Andy

Hi, we plan on more of these types of things. Thanks for the great feedback. Sounds like for both of you, your time is really, really valuable, and that is one reason why we put together the Certified Customizer Program there are 7 companies there that can do it all for you, from minor changes, gorgeous new templates, or a full-blown redo. And you'd be surprised at how affordable many of the options are.

jecottrell

Andy wrote:

Sounds like for both of you, your time is really, really valuable, and that is one reason why we put together the Certified Customizer Program there are 7 companies there that can do it all for you, from minor changes, gorgeous new templates, or a full-blown redo. And you'd be surprised at how affordable many of the options are.

Yes and no. I am fortunate enough to have a day job that allows for a lot of 'standby' time where I can accomplish other tasks. But, if those tasks appear to be fruitless and frustrating beyond reason, I'm not going to take the time.

I can see investing another $345 for a template from an Certified Customizer if I wanted to add a bunch of functionality and create a site radically different. But, I'm not sure if it makes sense to pay ADDITIONAL money to STRIP AWAY the Smugmug appearance and reveal my own. Does that make sense?

Hell, in the Simple Customizer, I can't even set the default width of the page to something that is more in line with the larger monitors today. I can't left justify a logo in the header with the body and right justify a navbar with the body. As it is now, I've got to rely on the extremely painful "search, experiment, fail, post question, wait for reply, experiment" iteration for EACH modification I'd like to attempt. I understand that there are numerous indexes of how-tos, but that only reduces the search time in the process.

I hope I can be of some help in your process of making Smugmug more pro friendly.

Thanks,

John