You lost a customer because . . .

Bob Morrison

of the way the default is set up when you log in. Here's the story.

A friend, new to photo sharing, took my advice and signed up for a subscription to Smugmug. Over the course of a month, she wa unable to find the "Create Gallery" button. Frustrated, she quit trying and went to one of the ad-littered sharing sites. Although she commended your online and phone help, she was never able to create a Smugmug gallery and upload photos.

In talking with her, I discovered exactly what happened. When she signed on with her user name and password, she simply waited for the next page to appear. Smugmug defaults to return to the previous page WITHOUT PROVIDING USER TOOLS. You MUST click on the link to your home page to be able to create galleries, for example. It seems that even your otherwise excellent help facilities somehow missed this step.

I strongly suggest that either you change the default after signing in, or else make it clear on the page that appears after signing in that you MUST click on the proper link in order to have the user tools available.

Thank you.

Andy

Our welcome emails say:

login at

nickname.smugmug.com

if she did that, and waited 10 seconds, she'd have been brought to her homepage.

If she logged in at www.smugmug.com, and waited 10 seconds, she'd be at www.smugmug.com still, but the header would say "your photos" and she'd need to click there to get to her site.

But our welcome steps are really clear - go to http://nickname.smugmug.com and login....

I'm really sorry she had trouble.

Still, we thank you for the feedback. If you'd care to send me an email with your friend's info (email, site name they chose) I'd like to investigate further.

marlinspike

Andy works for smugmug, so he has to be nice...but I mean, come on...are you serious? She really couldn't figure it out over the course of a month? Either too old or too something else to be using the internet.

Andy

Bob Morrison wrote:

Over the course of a month,

Gaaa! I just realized this was a month long situation - which, of course, means that she's out the subscription fee if she's not using SmugMug. If you can email to my attention at the SmugMug help desk, the details of her account - I'll gladly issue here a full refund. No questions asked. Sorry I didn't notice the one-month thing before when I posted...

All the best,

Andy