Add a Blog

ADMIT Photography

It would be nice if smugmug could offer a blog option for Pro and better like many other companies offer.

southeasternphotography

+100000000000

Andy

Or, you can just do a blog on blogger and link to it. Or Wordpress.

Really - why must SM do EVERYthing? There are amazing blogs out there. And you can make them close enough to your SM site.

Don't wait for SM to give you blogging, if you want to have a blog. Just do it.

southeasternphotography

Seems I have been reading that blogs in the same host address area (forget the right internet protocol terms) as the website have a much better SEO relationship. If this is not true, then I will probably go spend my money elsewhere to accomplish that instead of perhaps paying SM a little more to have it there if needed. BTW, have you not noticed one of your main competitors has blogging along with their website? Or just how do I "make them close enough to your SM site"? Don't quite understand how to do that. Are y'all even thinking of blogs or is that a company secret. Seems like a pretty fair question.

WinsomeWorks

southeasternphotography wrote: »

Seems I have been reading that blogs in the same host address area (forget the right internet protocol terms) as the website have a much better SEO relationship. If this is not true, then I will probably go spend my money elsewhere to accomplish that instead of perhaps paying SM a little more to have it there if needed. BTW, have you not noticed one of your main competitors has blogging along with their website? Or just how do I "make them close enough to your SM site"? Don't quite understand how to do that. Are y'all even thinking of blogs or is that a company secret. Seems like a pretty fair question.

Look at Denise's Post #8 in this thread: http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=238057&highlight=blogger I don't know how far she's gotten as far as teaching others how to match their New SmugMug to Blogger, but I can tell you her instructions to do this on Legacy were really great. (in that post, she's addressing what to do about New Smug) I have no technical experience beyond what I did with cut & paste to customize my Legacy site, but I was able to follow Denise's instructions fairly easily. Blogger is much easier to match up than WP, imho. You can do either one free though, so you wouldn't necessarily need to spend money, just time. I've wondered about the SEO part of it. It seems to me to defy logic that better SEO would be had by an integrated blog (just because "external" links are supposed to be the big SEO booster & it seems that would not be an "external link". But if you've seen contradiction to that, I'm interested in knowing that too, and would like to know why that would be the case.

denisegoldberg

southeasternphotography wrote: »

Seems I have been reading that blogs in the same host address area (forget the right internet protocol terms) as the website have a much better SEO relationship.

That makes very little sense to me given that one thing that helps SEO is inbound links. You can have inbound links from an external blog; you can't have them from an integrated blog.

The thing that is really important is to use your blog. Post on a regular basis, and use your posts to highlight your work.

I can't tell you how many sites I have looked at that have a blog linked to from the menu where the blog is never touched. That doesn't help at all. To me including something in a web site that is never updated is a negative.

You have choices right now - use an external blog, or use pages to create your own "blog" in your smugmug site.

--- Denise

southeasternphotography

Andy, when you said this "And you can make them close enough to your SM site" were you meaning address area (dang still can't come up with the term) or did you mean constructing the blog to "look" more like the website in many details (as I read about folks doing that somehow).

Others (great people!): Yeah, I see the point that if it was an integrated blog with the website, the links just might be considered internal. I can understand that.

mbonocore

http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/205231-make-a-blog-tool-in-smugmug&sa=D&usg=ALhdy2_vZIPrhl0rVe3ZergBRfFx10wh0g

WinsomeWorks

southeasternphotography wrote: »

Andy, when you said this "And you can make them close enough to your SM site" were you meaning address area (dang still can't come up with the term) or did you mean constructing the blog to "look" more like the website in many details (as I read about folks doing that somehow).

Others (great people!): Yeah, I see the point that if it was an integrated blog with the website, the links just might be considered internal. I can understand that.

I'm about 99% certain Andy meant that you can construct your blog to look like (almost match) your Smug website. With blogger at least, if you use the suggested methods in Denise's thread, you're basically just plopping code in Blogger's dashboard (behind the scenes) area straight from your website... such as your Header, Banners, NavBar & links, Background Colors, etc. etc. If you click on my Blog link on my Smug, you're taken to Blogger, and probably some people don't even know they've actually gone off my Smug site: http://www.winsomeworks.blogspot.com/ as it matches pretty well. (My NavBar jiggles a bit & menu buttons aren't identical, but I could probably tweak that some more). Unfortunately I'm terribly guilty of exactly what Denise complains of: setting up a blog & not regularly posting to it. Mine is extremely in need of attention. Lots of reasons for that, and I hope this fall will bring some changes.

I honestly had a lot less trouble setting up the blog than I've had posting to it! SmugMug has (or had in Legacy) ways of posting linked photos, etc., but never really ironed out the bugs. (maybe that was in WP, where my photo ended up square instead of rectangular)... I don't think they yet have auto-posting to Blogger. But besides that, there are a couple different ways of posting even within Blogger itself when including a photo. Denise suggests the best method, and she's absolutely right, but I hadn't gotten around to posting regularly enough to remember a thing about how I did it last time. I'd have to look back at Denise's thread. The options within Blogger are confusing to me. (HTML or not, borders, fonts, sizes...) If you've had web design experience, they won't be. And in WP, the options are MUCH more confusing. I also need an actual "thrust" or focus for my blog, which I haven't settled upon yet. Otherwise it hasn't much point. So if you do it, I'd suggest thinking up a direction for your blog first, then when you've done a successful post, copy those instructions to yourself in an email or something & refer to them when you want to do it again. And keep it going, like Denise says. I do think the SEO from an external blog with inbound links can be quite powerful, according to what I see in my stats. [ETA: If I recall, the main issue I ran into when adding my Smug site's code to Blogger was this: I have ampersands in some of my NavBar titles & links. Blogger couldn't read them in order to reproduce them, & I got error codes. I was very proud that I tracked down the problem myself using Google & was able to add a few letters to each spot where an ampersand occurred, and it immediately solved the problem. Otherwise, the code transferred easily to Blogger]

southeasternphotography

Thank you Anna for that very positive and instructional post!clap Exceptionally well done. I will be going and taking a look at Blogger soon and will keep EVERYTHING you said in mind.

cmason

After moving my photoblog from Blogger, to Wordpress, then to Posterous (where I was very happy), then Tumblr, and then Wordpress again....I have moved it to New Smugmug.

It was really difficult. Creating text on a page is simple. Creating text on a page with a photo: not bad. Creating text on a page and flows with photos: ARGH!!!! What a kludge!

The ability to embed a photo in a text box, or perhaps do something like Squarespace does, where a photo box can let text flow around it, would be a huge help.

Finally, linking to the blog was just impossible. I could not create a folder with pages, because the folder has no content and can't be displayed, therefore, there is no 'blog homepage'. And since each blog page does not have a gallery, there are no photos to link to if you create another page for creating links to the blog posts. So I was forced to first create each blog post, which, after practice, takes about half an hour each. Then I created another page where I post a photo, that has a Caption that matches a portion of the text in my blog post, and turn on "Display Caption". I then link to the blog post.

Here is this 'blog homepage": http://digitalmason.smugmug.com/Blog
and an individual post: http://digitalmason.smugmug.com/Blog/My-White-Balance-Workflow-in-L

By the way...it is really impossible to create a banner display. I suppose there is some CSS that will solve it, but I am getting tired of monkeying with stuff.

everydaymemories

That's very clever Cmason. I started to create a blog on Smugmug similarly. But I really felt limited, since I've been using WordPress for many years, and the requirement on readers to log in for commenting was the last straw. I decided that maybe it isn't reasonable to expect one company to be all things -- Smugmug does pictures best and WordPress does words best -- and I decided to make my Wordpress site a subdomain of my Smugmug site. http://michelekendzie.com goes to my Smugmug site and my blog is at http://blog.michelekendzie.com (I set this up at Bluehost, where I'm hosting my blog.)

I put the same header and menu bar on both to make them look the same as much as possible.

cmason

Looks great Michele! I also like your taste in blog layout

But, I don't want to spend any more $$ on websites, hosts, etc. I would rather put it into Cameras and lenses. Smugmug's yearly fee is enough for me. Perhaps someday they will offer some blog templates...