SmugMug: WHY did you fix what wasn't broken?

Kory Lidstrom

I'm posting this to express my extreme disappointment with the "new" SmugMug.

I've been with SM for about nine years now. My site is exactly how I want it, and has been for years. It looks just how I want, does what I need it to, and, until recently, was 100% customize-able by myself whenever I wanted to change something.

When I first joined SmugMug, I spent a lot of time asking questions on this forum, listening and learning how to do everything I needed to do to become self-sufficient. And, guess what? It worked. For many years now, I've had complete and total control of my site. Anytime I wanted to change or tweak something, I could do it in a jiffy.

And then SmugMug decided to "fix" what wasn't broken and completely fu**ed everything up. Last month, I had to pay someone to make my own site compatible with the "new" SM before the deadline of October 15th. Ever since then, it's been all downhill.

Now, even making the slightest change to my own website is a frustrating experience. Gone is the Advanced Customization page where I could access all the code for my entire site in one easy place. It's been replaced by a never-ending series of menus and dialogue boxes. What used to take a few mouse clicks now involves slogging through menu upon menu and smashing one's head against the wall.

SM, why in the hell did you do this? I can only guess that you were trying to make site-editing easier for newbies. Whether or not you succeeded in doing so is up for debate. But, regardless, the worst part is that you forced this change on us, not giving "legacy" customers a choice to continue doing what's been working for them all along. For a company that prides itself on customer service, this is the most unnerving part. Why alienate your oldest and most loyal customers? You want to change everything for new customers? Fine. Knock yourselves out. But, for crying out loud, DON'T FORCE IT UPON THOSE WHO DON'T NEED OR WANT IT!

Between this and the gigantic price increase from a couple years ago, the SmugMug that I thought I knew is becoming more and more unrecognizable to me. It seems that SM is gearing itself more and more to the newbie, hobbyist photographer market and people who spend more time tweaking their websites than actually shooting.

In the last five years, almost every other pro photographer that I know has left SM for other companies that cater to actual working photographers and aren't constantly adding superfluous, peripheral features that no one really needs. Sadly, I may need to follow suit. I joined SM to have a polished, working site that required little maintenance. As of late, it has been anything but.

SmugMug, why hast thou forsaken me? I thought we were tight. :cry

leftquark

Kory Lidstrom wrote: »

SmugMug, why hast thou forsaken me? I thought we were tight. :cry

We sure hope we're still tight!

Like any usable item, in order to improve the experience, grow, and even survive, we have to continuously update and innovate. That's not really possible with something that was built over a decade ago. Photography has changed so much in the last 10 years and we have to grow with it. We're not a Google, a Microsoft of an Apple, with thousands and thousands of developers who could potentially maintain old software (they don't even do that, with their massive number of employees) and we cannot add new features and make SmugMug better while trying to maintain two systems. For the last 2 years, where we maintained Old SmugMug along side New SmugMug, it wasn't possible to build every new feature in a way that would work on both systems. We had to focus on the future and that was New SmugMug. We did let you have the Old SmugMug ... for 2 years ... we left it there while also allowing you to get comfortable and see how great the New SmugMug is. At the end, we spent a lot of time adding tools to make the transition even easier.

As a customer almost as long as you (I've been on SM for 8 years), I too, had to go through the growing pains of learning the new system. But boy was I glad I did! I spent money to have a custom built Old SmugMug site ... trying to figure out what code to put where was just too time consuming. When New SmugMug came out I realized I didn't have to pay someone and was able to replicate, and even improve my site, all by myself. Many customers found that they had to spend money on their Old SmugMug sites but didn't have to with the New SmugMug!

New SmugMug actually does a lot of things that you mentioned: make it easier for you to be out shooting and spend less time tweaking. You don't need to figure out code anymore. You don't need to search and scour dgrin or the internet for slideshow code. You don't need to figure out how to build a "Client Login" area. It's all built right into New SmugMug and all it takes it a drag and a drop with your mouse.

We have a few webinars that are available online to help you become familiar with the New SmugMug and we have a dedicated Help Center. As always, the Heroes are here to answer any questions and walk you through anything.

Richard

I've been a SM customer for over 10 years. Before getting into photography, I was an IT guy. I made the choice back when I joined that I would not customize, as I wanted to focus on photography, not Javascript, which I didn't know at the time. When the time came to migrate, I decided to spiff up my site a bit. Combined with the off-the-shelf widgets that the new SM provides, a little CSS goes a long way. It did take me a few weeks, but I think the new look is far superior to the old--much more of the screen real estate goes to the images, which is what I want.

Teetime

Hey Kory, your site looks great - I really like your photography!

I too came from the old SM. I found it so difficult for me to update/maintain I moved to a content management system called Concrete5 several years ago and built my website there. But when Google started penalizing search position for websites that weren't mobile friendly (responsive) I started looking for the best way to get there. To my surprise, the New Smugmug made that part of it pretty easy. I notice your site also takes advantage of the responsive capabilities which should help drive more clients your way.

I've come up with a lot of dumb questions but the folks here on Digital Grin (Allen, Mike, and a host of others) have been a huge help. I'm starting to feel more comfortable with CSS and the customization capabilities it offers. I may be wrong, but I don't think it was even possible to build a responsive website with the Old Smugmug so, for me the New Smugmug is a definite improvement.

pilotdave

Old smug was infinitely more customizable than new smug because of JavaScript, but new smug is probably infinitely easier to customize. If you were comfortable using the old advanced customizer, new smug will be easy to work with, once you get used to it. Code goes wherever it makes the most sense instead of being all together in one place. It's different and if you're really good with the old system it might be slower, but that'll change as you use it more. And after months or longer since working on customizing your site, it's a whole lot easier to figure out where the code might be that you need to edit.

Dave

colourbox

Sorry, but if Smugmug switched back to the old system, I would have to leave.

The more I've been working with the new SmugMug I see what they were after. I also use WordPress and I can see that SmugMug clearly modernized the site in a Wordpress-like way to be more in line with what we need now.

The old SmugMug was extremely annoying and as far as I was concerned, broken. The design choices available to non-coders were limited, hard to alter, and fully mobile-hostile. The new SmugMug is fully responsive design, easier to work with and yet I can still customize CSS.

As far as the Advanced Customizer goes, if it involves CSS it seems like you can still do much of that using site-wide CSS. I have CSS for the whole site and CSS specific to themes.

I won't say the new Smugmug can do everything the old one can. I'm sure many of the issues you have are true. I am still unhappy about several aspects of the new Smugmug, like the lack of master elements that can cascade down to child folders (I know about the CSS workaround but I haven't had time to understand how to implement it yet), and the inability to create reusable elements which is actually holding me back from expanding my site because I don't want to enter the same stupid content block or page layout specs 150 separate times in a row when those should just be a linked library element or saved style.

But I would still never go back to the old Smugmug. Old Smugmug was obviously behind the times and completely unfriendly to phones and tablets, and I was almost ready to jump ship. New Smugmug is good, but needs a little more upgrading for me to be completely satisfied, and I have to admit being a little concerned that the pace of new features has slowed considerably lately, making me wonder when more of the gaps will be closed.