Contact form "To" field customization

sdb · January 25, 2018

Hi all!

I'm Sebastian from Italy. I just joined this forum and this is my first post here. This is my site www.sebastianph.com

I'm using SmugMug since 2014. I'm satisfied with it and the possibilities of this platform. Thanks to the help of the Heroes, the many advice read in this forum and on the sites of the major contributors, I managed to build the site starting from zero. I'm not an expert in web language but using a bit of logic I understand something.

I used some CSS on my site. Now, this winter, after a long time I want to update my site, so I'll post some questions for which I haven't found an answer among those already posted. My first one is about the contact form. In my newly registered condition I can't add screenshots, so I try to describe it in words. I changed my profile displayed name to "Creative Wedding and Portrait Photographer" instead of my name, for simple SEO reasons.

The matter is that when one client contacts me, this phrase is too long and is displayed badly. In addition, I want to display my real name here instead of this phrase that I want to use only as meta title after the folder/page/gallery name. Is there a way to change it maybe with a CSS code? I've read some threads about the possibility to change the other fields (message...subject...), but no one about changing the "To" field. If you visit my site and click on email in the nav bar you'll see what I mean. I don't think it's possible...but I try to ask you!

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hikin' Mike · January 25, 2018

I understand changing your displayed name for SEO reasons. I used to use 'Prints for Sale" because SM adds "my" name to the end of every page/gallery/folder on the page's <title> element. The only place that it doesn't do that is your home page. You are free to use what ever name you see fit (a good thing). That said, using "Creative Wedding Portrait Photographer" in my opinion this isn't going to help and it looks too spammy. I would just use a good <title> on your home page and change it back to your name. Feel free to take a look at my 'SEO for the Photographer' link in my signature.

For your question. I use a combination of SmugMug (only for my galleries) and WordPress. My contact form is from WordPress. So, I added a SmugMug contact form on my testing page just to see what I can do. It looks like SM is using Javascript to embed your name, so I'm not seeing any way to change that.

sdb · January 26, 2018

Mike, thank you for your answer and your considerations.
Yes, on the homepage I can choose an unique site meta title and it would be very nice if we could do it for every page of the site.

I must say that I had already read your link about Seo, as well as others found here in the forum and outside. For this and other reasons I decided to do some updates, and I would like to be sure before doing them...since if I'm wrong I'll notice it only after a long time (of no SEO results)!
At this moment I've my blog on Wordpress (.com) since SmugMug doesn't have a real blog platform (I know there's a way to build it, but I need something more immediate). I've there a contact form, but since I can't match the 2 sites at this moment I can't do anything. Site has a contact form and blog another.
A site like your, wordpress (.org) + SmugMug for the galleries it's a great "wedding".

So...at the end I've just rewritten the profile name with my name, as advised by you, also because with the above mentioned phrase it looked ugly and less personal than my name when people contact me.

Contact form "To" field customization

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