Why not our own HTML entry pages?

jfriend

I am generally very happy with the smugmug service (I've got 18 referral credits even). But, I'm baffled by one limitation of both the power user and the professional packages.

I have not yet customized my smugmug pages, but in looking at the capabilities here at smugmug (I have the professional package), I'm wondering why I can't have my own HTML pages. Instead, I have to figure out how to force fit my design into a smugmug template and there are parts of the smugmug banner that one can't get rid of under any circumstance. That doesn't feel right for a professional package. I can understand this for the basic service, but this doesn't make sense to me for either of the upsell packages. I would think that smugmug would want to cater to the pro or semi-pro users and would want to enable them to build basically any type of web-site that they want with the whole easy-to-use upload, gallery and print ordering engine behind it. You almost have the whole enchilada - just missing one thing. A smugmug power user or pro user can't have their own HTML pages in front of their galleries. If you really want to do that, you have to pay someone else to host those HTML pages and then link to your smumug galleries from there.

It seems crazy to me. Plain HTML pages are trivial to host, they don't take much storage space, they consume a ton less bandwidth than images and they don't require any server horsepower to serve up. As best I can tell, this is the ONLY thing that really stands out as missing. I get that you don't want to be or compete as a pure HTML page hosting service. But, it seems like a very modest feature that should be part of one of the upsell packages and it's hard to understand why it would be hard for you to offer.

I hang out pretty regularly in dpreview where I often steer folks who are looking for a place to host photos to smugmug. Just today, I was sharing my smumug experiences when another user (completely unprompted by me) basically said the same thing I just said. The only thing smugmug is missing is the ability to have your own HTML pages. Here's his message in dpreview: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1009&message=12576107.

--John

devbobo

John,

I would suggest that some of the options that Smugmug provide for Albums (for example: Originals, External and Protected, to name a few) wouldn't be possible if using HTML templates. That sort of thing needs to be handled in server side scripting.

Alot of other sides don't provide an API interface to their site. That is the alternative to write an XML-RPC interface from your hosted website to smugmug.

Cheers,

David

jfriend

I'm just asking for entry pages, not album views
I'm not suggesting that album views themselves be allowed to be in arbitrary HTML pages. Today's template system is OK for that. I'm just suggesting that the main landing page for a photography business web site (and a few other related web pages - contacts, directions, etc...) be allowed to be regular HTML.

devbobo wrote:

John,

I would suggest that some of the options that Smugmug provide for Albums (for example: Originals, External and Protected, to name a few) wouldn't be possible if using HTML templates. That sort of thing needs to be handled in server side scripting.

Cheers,

David

David_S85

jfriend wrote:

I'm not suggesting that album views themselves be allowed to be in arbitrary HTML pages. Today's template system is OK for that. I'm just suggesting that the main landing page for a photography business web site (and a few other related web pages - contacts, directions, etc...) be allowed to be regular HTML.

I'm not a Smugmugger myself, so I should be careful to comment here... but why couldn't a main default splash page be at a host site somewhere (with it's own "index.html" as the splash), which then directs to the Smugmug pro account page after a click-through? Shouldn't that solve it?

onethumb

David_S85 wrote:

I'm not a Smugmugger myself, so I should be careful to comment here... but why couldn't a main default splash page be at a host site somewhere (with it's own "index.html" as the splash), which then directs to the Smugmug pro account page after a click-through? Shouldn't that solve it?

This is exactly what we recommend.

We're a driven, dedicated company, with a single purpose: make the best photo sharing site in the world. Period.

We try not to stray off that path, since there's years worth of work still to be done to accomplish just that one goal. Getting into HTML hosting, when there are so many companies out there that are happy to do it for you, would be taking our eye off the ball.

Plenty of sites already use this method with us, such as:
E M Photo (not smugmug)
her wedding portfolio (smugmug)

Howard Dean ran his presidential campaign through us the same way. So did Barack Obama for his senate race:

Obama For Illinois (not smugmug)
Obama's Photos (smugmug)

Fairly easy to do, not too painful, and it lets us focus on what we do best: photo sharing.

Hope that helps!

Don

Mike Lane

devbobo wrote:

John,

I would suggest that some of the options that Smugmug provide for Albums (for example: Originals, External and Protected, to name a few) wouldn't be possible if using HTML templates. That sort of thing needs to be handled in server side scripting.

Alot of other sides don't provide an API interface to their site. That is the alternative to write an XML-RPC interface from your hosted website to smugmug.

Cheers,

David

You could totally do smugmug with html templates by using tags in the same way that blogs use tags. I'm crossing my fingers that this is what they'll be going to so that we can design and arrange our pages in any way our little hearts desire:)

Mike

jfriend

Yes, that's what you are forced to do today (put your entry pages somewhere else and link them to smumug), but when you're paying $100 a year for the professional package (which you may want to use your own domain with), you shouldn't have to pay someone else just to host a few web pages on yet another domain.

Even with that solution, you are still left with the issue that some parts of the smugmug banner aren't replaceable, making it feel like forced advertising on a $100/yr product aimed at professionals.

--John

David_S85 wrote:

I'm not a Smugmugger myself, so I should be careful to comment here... but why couldn't a main default splash page be at a host site somewhere (with it's own "index.html" as the splash), which then directs to the Smugmug pro account page after a click-through? Shouldn't that solve it?

jfriend

A fine line between focus and serving customers
I understand focus. I've been through six startup companies myself and my favorite line related to this is that "no startup ever failed because it focused too much". And, I'm not asking for rich HTML page hosting. But, it seems like a $100/yr package aimed at the professional or semi-professional photographer shouldn't make you own two domains and use two services just so you can have 10 static web pages on the front of your site that are your own look and feel.

I don't need full flown directories and scripting and ASPs and all that. That, I agree should come from another service and should be beyond your focus. But, I'd just like to control the static look of the front of my site without having to buy something from someone else. Heck, I'd take something as simple as one directory with a max of 20 HTML files in it and one of them that could be named "index.html" as my main page. If you wanted it to fit into the existing upload scheme, it could even be a special gallery that you upload HTML files to instead of images and you could use the gallery management scheme for managing the HTML pages.

--John

onethumb wrote:

This is exactly what we recommend.

We're a driven, dedicated company, with a single purpose: make the best photo sharing site in the world. Period.

We try not to stray off that path, since there's years worth of work still to be done to accomplish just that one goal. Getting into HTML hosting, when there are so many companies out there that are happy to do it for you, would be taking our eye off the ball.

Plenty of sites already use this method with us, such as:
E M Photo (not smugmug)
her wedding portfolio (smugmug)

Howard Dean ran his presidential campaign through us the same way. So did Barack Obama for his senate race:

Obama For Illinois (not smugmug)
Obama's Photos (smugmug)

Fairly easy to do, not too painful, and it lets us focus on what we do best: photo sharing.

Hope that helps!

Don

fish

onethumb wrote:

Howard Dean ran his presidential campaign through us the same way. So did Barack Obama for his senate race:

Obama For Illinois (not smugmug)

That is seriously cool. :cool



looks like howard nuked his account/images?

devbobo

jfriend wrote:

But, it seems like a $100/yr package aimed at the professional or semi-professional photographer shouldn't make you own two domains and use two services just so you can have 10 static web pages on the front of your site that are your own look and feel.

firstly, you don't have to use the Pro account to use your own domain.

I don't know about the case in the US, but here in Australia, most ISPs provide 10-30MB of web hosting with your internet connection. Get your domain hosted and pointing to that content. Then use a frameset to link into the smugmug content.

Check out this url http://www.introversion.com.au
It's really simple.

Cheers,

David

onethumb

devbobo wrote:

firstly, you don't have to use the Pro account to use your own domain.

I don't know about the case in the US, but here in Australia, most ISPs provide 10-30MB of web hosting with your internet connection. Get your domain hosted and pointing to that content. Then use a frameset to link into the smugmug content.

Check out this url http://www.introversion.com.au
It's really simple.

Cheers,

David

WARNING: Using frames is *strongly* discouraged. It seriously breaks cookies and navigation. Almost every single time someone's trying to use their domain with smugmug, and having problems, it's because the frame is obscuring the domain and we can't set and read cookies properly. If you see funkiness with your site and you're using frames, now you know why.

(Frames just suck in general, but I won't get on that soapbox right now

Don