Smugmug's "Help" needs a lot of help!
cfrey6
Registered Users Posts: 114 Major grins
I do not know what has gone on lately, but there have been changes to the help on your website and it's really frustrating me and my customers.
1. Please keep help for my customers and help for the pros separate.
2. The help needs a major upgrade. Wherever they are on my page, there should be helpful boxes, which are pertinent to whatever they are trying to do on that page, such as placing an order, or ordering prints, digital downloads, etc... For example, I use to be able to easily find help on how to order digital downloads and bulk ordering of prints. Seems both have gotten lost.
3. The help screen sometimes shows screen capture on the tutorial, which would only be seen from a smugmug pro, and not from a customer trying to purchase prints.
I can go on and on, but your help is frustrating my customers is not helping me make sales. :dunno
1. Please keep help for my customers and help for the pros separate.
2. The help needs a major upgrade. Wherever they are on my page, there should be helpful boxes, which are pertinent to whatever they are trying to do on that page, such as placing an order, or ordering prints, digital downloads, etc... For example, I use to be able to easily find help on how to order digital downloads and bulk ordering of prints. Seems both have gotten lost.
3. The help screen sometimes shows screen capture on the tutorial, which would only be seen from a smugmug pro, and not from a customer trying to purchase prints.
I can go on and on, but your help is frustrating my customers is not helping me make sales. :dunno
0
Comments
We updated our help pages in August of 2011 and that's when we did away with the separate help pages for visitors and logged in users but since then, nothing has really changed. There are pages still around for just visitors, things like this and when they are there, the screenshots are only what a logged out user would see.
I will pass this along to those that write our help pages, if they have any feedback I'm sure they will post it here.
With best regards,
Ryan W.
Getting started on DGrin? Go here first!
Contact a Support Hero: http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/emails/new
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93267-how-do-i-buy-prints-
SmugMug Support Hero
If you find other specific examples or have specific thoughts on improving particular pages, please let me know. We are revamping things and would love to have some user feedback.
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I sent you a reply with a few ideas for improvement and look forward to your replies!
I'm finding a number of previously linked pages that no longer work. I'd be happy to uncover all of these for you, but I'd want to be paid for my time and effort. The two I noticed today are:
1) http://www.smugmug.com/cards (your visitor facing site). If you go to the lower left and click on "Tell me more about cards" you get taken to a page with the headline "This article doesn't have a translation for English". I've bumped into a number of broken links that go to the same or similar page. What your IT team should do is look at the referring traffic report for this page, and uncover all of those broken incoming links.
2) I would highly recommend that you provide different help content for visitors than photographers. The primary reason is that each have different issues. For example, if I search your generic help content for "how to create a photo card", I end up at help content that is specific to SmuMug photographers. I can't find any help for visitors.
From a marketing perspective, visitors don't want to see content on how to make money with SmugMug, they want to see product specific info. Your help doesn't appear to provide this and it creates a very poor user experience. I've actually had to create my own help content for my visitors as a result.
Again, I suggest you take another look at your strategy in this area. There should be separate help content for Visitors and Subscribers. The more help you can provide Visitors, the more sales you'll be able to generate for your SmugMug subscriber base.
SmugMug Support Hero
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93267
The content seems to be directed at both "Visitors" and "Owners", but the screen shots on this help page are taken from what the "Owner" would see, not what the "Visitor" would see. There's probably quite a bit of help content on SmugMug that use the "Owner" view as an example. This is likely confusing to visitors who are looking for similar content, but don't have the same options available.