Show Us Your New SmugMug Customized Sites!

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  • cendrinemediacendrinemedia Registered Users Posts: 50 Big grins
    edited March 6, 2018
    Hello everyone!
    The link to my website is in my signature. :-) Thank you for looking!

    Cendrine Marrouat
    Nature, B&W and closeup photography: https://www.cendrinemedia.com

  • chris_swisschris_swiss Registered Users Posts: 5 Big grins
    edited August 28, 2018
    Hi everybody.

    My new site is online since sunday. I tried to use as few css/html tweaks as possible. Even with the "official tools" it is possible to go quite far beyond the templates.
    Exited to know what you think about it.

    www.christianschaerer.com

    See you
  • uncooluncool Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins

    Chris,

    Here are some initial thoughts and observations:

    The site template is clean and easy to navigate
    The sections are a bit disorganized - You have an Architecture section in your Portfolio and a separate Architecture section. There should just be one.
    There is a separate Around the World section - not sure why it's not part of the Portfolio section
    The News section shows photos without any stories and two links to what look like stories but are blank pages
    I searched for the word Building and found seven images. There are many more images of buildings on your site
    There is no "About Chris" - who are you, why did you make these images?
    What is the purpose of the site? Some pages have a Buy Photos button, some do not.

    Overall I like your images and the template you started with.

    Well every person you can know,
    And every place that you can go,
    And any thing that you can show,
    You know they're nouns.
  • picomomentspicomoments Registered Users Posts: 34 Big grins

    Hi everyone,

    Here's my latest version of my SM site:

    https://picomoments.smugmug.com/

    Looking forward to you comments and feedback.

  • nspz73nspz73 Registered Users Posts: 4 Big grins
    Hello,
    I just checked your Picomoments on SmugMug, on my Samsung S9+...
    Looks good but in landscape mode the persistant black header bar hides more
    than one third of the screen.
    I don't know if Smartphones are part of your target but if it is a much
    thinner header would be nice...
  • uncooluncool Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins

    Kreeson,

    The main thing that struck me is that it looks like a mobile site on my desktop. You have great images but they are not given a chance to breathe. That said, the flow is good. The About, Packages, and Contact are clear and easy to find. So since you are looking for comments - my main one would be to use one of the responsive templates to really show off your work because it deserves to be seen large.

    Well every person you can know,
    And every place that you can go,
    And any thing that you can show,
    You know they're nouns.
  • picomomentspicomoments Registered Users Posts: 34 Big grins

    @nspz73 said:
    Hello,

    I just checked your Picomoments on SmugMug, on my Samsung S9+...

    Looks good but in landscape mode the persistant black header bar hides more

    than one third of the screen.

    I don't know if Smartphones are part of your target but if it is a much

    thinner header would be nice...

    Thank you, i'll look into it

  • picomomentspicomoments Registered Users Posts: 34 Big grins

    @uncool said:
    Kreeson,

    The main thing that struck me is that it looks like a mobile site on my desktop. You have great images but they are not given a chance to breathe. That said, the flow is good. The About, Packages, and Contact are clear and easy to find. So since you are looking for comments - my main one would be to use one of the responsive templates to really show off your work because it deserves to be seen large.

    Thank you for the feedback, regarding the folder pages and galleries, are you referring to having them spread across the screen instead of a fixed width? Which templates are you referring to? I would really appreciate some examples if possible.

    Thanks once again.

  • uncooluncool Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins

    Here is a list of the stock SM templates:
    https://www.smugmug.com/features/photo-website
    Personally I am fan of:
    https://demo-turbo.smugmug.com/
    https://demo-nyx.smugmug.com/
    and this one with a more navigation:
    https://demo-sierra.smugmug.com/

    Basically I want to be hit in the face with an image yet be able to navigate a site easily. Don't take up too much space with a logo and let me explore your site. And if the site has a specific purpose like yours does, don't hide that. Your site does not.
    On my large screen, there's a lot of wasted space. I may be in the minority when it comes to your target audience. If you're running Google Analytics and you find that your visitors are mostly visiting on laptops , tablets, or mobile, make sure your site looks good and functions well for those platforms.

    Well every person you can know,
    And every place that you can go,
    And any thing that you can show,
    You know they're nouns.
  • picomomentspicomoments Registered Users Posts: 34 Big grins
    edited August 31, 2018

    @uncool said:
    Here is a list of the stock SM templates:
    https://www.smugmug.com/features/photo-website
    Personally I am fan of:
    https://demo-turbo.smugmug.com/
    https://demo-nyx.smugmug.com/
    and this one with a more navigation:
    https://demo-sierra.smugmug.com/

    Basically I want to be hit in the face with an image yet be able to navigate a site easily. Don't take up too much space with a logo and let me explore your site. And if the site has a specific purpose like yours does, don't hide that. Your site does not.
    On my large screen, there's a lot of wasted space. I may be in the minority when it comes to your target audience. If you're running Google Analytics and you find that your visitors are mostly visiting on laptops , tablets, or mobile, make sure your site looks good and functions well for those platforms.

    Thank you, really appreciate the feedback, I realised that the look was very busy as well. I've reworked it, have a look and let me know your thoughts.

    PS. I haven't tweaked it since for mobile. I'll work on it.

    https://picomoments.smugmug.com/

  • uncooluncool Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins

    Boom! That's the impact your images deserve.

    Now that I am looking at the entire site again it occurred to me that you offer People packages and Home/Office prints. The People Packages info is straight forward and easy to understand. The gallery however has issues - I searched for "water", "building", and "night" in your shop and didn't find anything. I suggest you either heavily tag your images or remove the search.
    The shop could also benefit from more promotional activity "Imagine this print over your sofa..." or "You can get all my prints in a variety of sizes"

    Your Instagram contains broken links and shows a variety of subjects. Research has shown that people prefer to follow a specific look, subject, content, style...etc. By showing everything, it will be harder to attract an audience.
    Your 500px site only six images - that's not much reason to have visitors leave your site. I'd consider removing the link or increasing your 500px activity.
    Same with your Flickr site (although you have more images).

    Your About page contains a Contact link that's broken.

    Keep tweaking.

    Well every person you can know,
    And every place that you can go,
    And any thing that you can show,
    You know they're nouns.
  • picomomentspicomoments Registered Users Posts: 34 Big grins

    @uncool said:
    Boom! That's the impact your images deserve.

    Now that I am looking at the entire site again it occurred to me that you offer People packages and Home/Office prints. The People Packages info is straight forward and easy to understand. The gallery however has issues - I searched for "water", "building", and "night" in your shop and didn't find anything. I suggest you either heavily tag your images or remove the search.
    The shop could also benefit from more promotional activity "Imagine this print over your sofa..." or "You can get all my prints in a variety of sizes"

    Your Instagram contains broken links and shows a variety of subjects. Research has shown that people prefer to follow a specific look, subject, content, style...etc. By showing everything, it will be harder to attract an audience.
    Your 500px site only six images - that's not much reason to have visitors leave your site. I'd consider removing the link or increasing your 500px activity.
    Same with your Flickr site (although you have more images).

    Your About page contains a Contact link that's broken.

    Keep tweaking.

    Thank you so much. Yes it's a work in progress, looking forward to getting it to looking the best it can be and then changing over the domain.

    I'll let you know when it's ready for the next revision. Lots of work to do.

  • ShinryaShinrya Registered Users Posts: 197 Major grins

    Checked out your site yesterday and thought it looked pretty good layout wise.
    Just checked it again and noticed the massive change. I hate to be the one to say it, but your site looks a million times better now over on Format. Nice, fluid modern design and animation.

  • picomomentspicomoments Registered Users Posts: 34 Big grins

    @Shinrya said:
    Checked out your site yesterday and thought it looked pretty good layout wise.
    Just checked it again and noticed the massive change. I hate to be the one to say it, but your site looks a million times better now over on Format. Nice, fluid modern design and animation.

    Thanks, but I'm not too fond of the Format's offering, it's ok for a basic portfolio.

    I do like the animation and the menu disappearing as you scroll down and reappearing as one scrolls up. Also they're got the great looking hamburger menu. But that's about it for me.

    I like the control I have on SmugMug but I really wish SM could add those bits above to their offering.

    BTW, I love your site, very well executed and stunning photography. Love Singapore ;-)

    What did you like about my SM site yesterday as opposed to today's?

    I am trying to reduce my expenses hence wanting to consolidate the websites into one as I've been using SM for my personal photos as well.

    Thanks once again for taking the time to check it out.

  • picomomentspicomoments Registered Users Posts: 34 Big grins

    @uncool said:
    Boom! That's the impact your images deserve.

    Now that I am looking at the entire site again it occurred to me that you offer People packages and Home/Office prints. The People Packages info is straight forward and easy to understand. The gallery however has issues - I searched for "water", "building", and "night" in your shop and didn't find anything. I suggest you either heavily tag your images or remove the search.
    The shop could also benefit from more promotional activity "Imagine this print over your sofa..." or "You can get all my prints in a variety of sizes"

    Your Instagram contains broken links and shows a variety of subjects. Research has shown that people prefer to follow a specific look, subject, content, style...etc. By showing everything, it will be harder to attract an audience.
    Your 500px site only six images - that's not much reason to have visitors leave your site. I'd consider removing the link or increasing your 500px activity.
    Same with your Flickr site (although you have more images).

    Your About page contains a Contact link that's broken.

    Keep tweaking.

    Hi,

    I still have to update the keywords on the photos, will get there soon ;-) I'll definitely work on the promotional stuff for the Shop.

    Regarding my instagram, which links are broken?

    500px is going out as I don't really keep that updated.

    I was trying to link the Contact on the about page to SM's Contact pop up, but having explored that enough. Can it be done?

    Thank you so much for the feedback.

  • uncooluncool Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins

    Rechecked Instagram and all photos are populating - there were several that didn't appear yesterday - so ignore that one.

    The contact form - good news/bad news. It's possible but I can't remember how I did it.
    Here's how it looks on my site: https://www.brenrosephotos.com/Galleries/About-Dack - There's an HTML link and a link on the footer.

    Here's some starter info:
    https://dgrin.com/discussion/254048/code-to-link-contact-form

    https://dgrin.com/discussion/261395/smugmug-contact-form-linked-from-custom-html-is-this-possible

    Or if you want a more complex form:
    https://help.smugmug.com/add-a-wufoo-form-to-my-site-Byw_lxwJVHz

    This could be a good opportunity for you to test SmugMugs support.

    Well every person you can know,
    And every place that you can go,
    And any thing that you can show,
    You know they're nouns.
  • chris_swisschris_swiss Registered Users Posts: 5 Big grins
    Thanks for your detailed review! I appreciate that!
    So far i focused on the touch and feel components - now i have to work on the content (about page, tagging, more galleries). i hope the structure will come out clearer after uploading all the selected pictures from my harddrive. then the difference between portfolio (best of) and all the other galleries (closed "storys") should be evident. if not i will change the structure;-)

    ps: the lightroom plugin "mykeyworder" is doing a really good job for tagging all my images!!!
    www.mykeyworder.com/
  • elmanielmani Registered Users Posts: 97 Big grins

    Hi folks... I got bored and did a bit of a redesign on my site. Would appreciate any feedback on opportunities to improve. My site is just a personal photo site for friends and family.

    There are a couple of areas I'm still not happy with, so if you have any thoughts or solutions on these, that would be great !
    1) I'm not sure if the menu on the homepage is clear enough, but this is the best I've managed to achieve without impact the background image.
    2) I don't like having the 'Home' button on the homepage as it's redundant - is there a way to remove, but leave on all the other pages?
    3) The biggest aspect I'm still not happy with is the search page. Ideally I wouldn't need visitors to select between people and events, instead, just searching and then having 2 different sets of search results appear side-by-side.

    As ever, thanks in advance for anyone that takes the time to review and feedback.

    All the best
    Adam

    www.elmani.com

  • brandofamilybrandofamily Registered Users Posts: 2,013 Major grins

    I am not sure if I ever posted my new site in this thread... it's been around for awhile now...
    brandolinoimaging.com

  • uncooluncool Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins

    brandolinoimaging the site seems overwhelming for a casual visitor - so many of the galleries are locked. While I understand the need, I suggest they all be gathered together under a "Client Work" section. Since you are selling some work, this would allow visitors to focus on the content that can be purchased.
    The guestbook is not very populated so I don't see a big need for that page. You could use some of the quotes for a testimonials page if you wanted to make use of that material.
    I wouldn't mind a darker background on the drop down menus - the menu text becomes difficult to read on some of the pages because it overlaps with the page text.
    There you have it, so thoughts from a random dude on the Internet.

    Well every person you can know,
    And every place that you can go,
    And any thing that you can show,
    You know they're nouns.
  • brandofamilybrandofamily Registered Users Posts: 2,013 Major grins

    @uncool said:
    brandolinoimaging the site seems overwhelming for a casual visitor - so many of the galleries are locked. While I understand the need, I suggest they all be gathered together under a "Client Work" section. Since you are selling some work, this would allow visitors to focus on the content that can be purchased.
    The guestbook is not very populated so I don't see a big need for that page. You could use some of the quotes for a testimonials page if you wanted to make use of that material.
    I wouldn't mind a darker background on the drop down menus - the menu text becomes difficult to read on some of the pages because it overlaps with the page text.
    There you have it, so thoughts from a random dude on the Internet.

    Thanks for the input. There actually is a Client section, maybe the OBD Galleries could go there too, but those are specific to a dance company and get the most traffic from the members thus the separate tab.
    I do agree about the Guest book page. Few people are interested in leaving comments these days.
    I'll give the darker background idea a look. Thanks

  • txt2nitetxt2nite Registered Users Posts: 39 Big grins

    Hello

    I thought that it was time to share the website I've been working on. I have a photography project called tube mapper, where I taking photos at every London Underground, Overground and DLR station

    This website is the shop for that project and you can view it here

    https://shop.tubemapper.com/

    it's not quite finished, I need to add my actually products to my product page and upload load more stations but I think you get the idea.

    thanks :-)

  • ShinryaShinrya Registered Users Posts: 197 Major grins

    @txt2nite said:
    Hello

    I thought that it was time to share the website I've been working on. I have a photography project called tube mapper, where I taking photos at every London Underground, Overground and DLR station

    This website is the shop for that project and you can view it here

    https://shop.tubemapper.com/

    it's not quite finished, I need to add my actually products to my product page and upload load more stations but I think you get the idea.

    thanks :-)

    Looking good! One thing did stand out to me. When scrolling, the grey text on your semi-transparent menu bar is hard to read.

    You could possibly increase the opacity, or maybe change the font colour for the menu links.

    .sm-page-widget-nav-toplink a {
    color: #XXXXXX !important; /change menu text to a color of your choice/

  • txt2nitetxt2nite Registered Users Posts: 39 Big grins

    Thank Shinrya,

    I made the text black, but think it would also benefit from a slight adjust of opacity. Do you know how I target the opacity. I couldn't seem to highlight the area using my web inspection tool.

    Regards

    Luke

    @Shinrya said:

    @txt2nite said:
    Hello

    I thought that it was time to share the website I've been working on. I have a photography project called tube mapper, where I taking photos at every London Underground, Overground and DLR station

    This website is the shop for that project and you can view it here

    https://shop.tubemapper.com/

    it's not quite finished, I need to add my actually products to my product page and upload load more stations but I think you get the idea.

    thanks :-)

    Looking good! One thing did stand out to me. When scrolling, the grey text on your semi-transparent menu bar is hard to read.

    You could possibly increase the opacity, or maybe change the font colour for the menu links.

    .sm-page-widget-nav-toplink a {
    color: #XXXXXX !important; /change menu text to a color of your choice/

  • ShinryaShinrya Registered Users Posts: 197 Major grins
    edited December 3, 2018

    If you mean to adjust the opacity of your header, you can do that by going into the settings for your Active Theme>Advanced>Site Section Colours>Header Opacity.

    For the text in the header, I'm not sure what the code is to adjust the opacity for text (if there is one), but perhaps you could try a darker grey instead if you don't want pure black.

    You can also change the hover colour for the text in the menu, which is independent of hover colour for hyperlinks.

    /* Turn the navbar text a different color when the mouse hovers over it */
    .sm-user-ui .sm-page-widget-nav-toplink a:hover {
    color: #XXXXXX !important;
    }

    *apologies to whoever it was who originally posted this code. Can't remember if it was Mike or Aaron.

  • txt2nitetxt2nite Registered Users Posts: 39 Big grins
    edited December 5, 2018

    @Shinrya said:
    If you mean to adjust the opacity of your header, you can do that by going into the settings for your Active Theme>Advanced>Site Section Colours>Header Opacity.

    *apologies to whoever it was who originally posted this code. Can't remember if it was Mike or Aaron.

    yes it was in the settings.Thank you.

    PS: love your photography, the building shots are fantastic

  • shniksshniks Registered Users Posts: 945 Major grins
    edited December 27, 2018

    Hi all,

    I had a concern regarding my homepage slideshow. I have put in a watermark in the center of my photos in the slideshow (to ward off any theft - I am aware that some skilled PS users can remove the watermark). Do you guys think it's distracting? If I remove the watermark, how secure is the site against image theft? My concern is that someone could download the full res images that are in that slideshow gallery. Thoughts?

    My website is in the signature or can be found here.

    Cheers,

  • uncooluncool Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins

    To watermark or not to watermark is right up there with Nikon/Canon and Coke/Pepsi.

    My take - don’t watermark (it’s distracting and defeatable) but embed your copyright in the exif data.

    Well every person you can know,
    And every place that you can go,
    And any thing that you can show,
    You know they're nouns.
  • shniksshniks Registered Users Posts: 945 Major grins

    @uncool said:
    To watermark or not to watermark is right up there with Nikon/Canon and Coke/Pepsi.

    My take - don’t watermark (it’s distracting and defeatable) but embed your copyright in the exif data.

    Thanks for the feedback. I just took the watermark off - will see what happens. Hopefully, it's not that easy for images to get stolen as I have limited the resolution that can be displayed. It is my understanding that a copy of the image (up-to the resolution size) is stored on the computer when the website is accessed by a client. I guess the other option would be to just not show a full screen slideshow and instead use one of the templates from SM.

    Cheers,

  • Hikin' MikeHikin' Mike Registered Users Posts: 5,448 Major grins

    @shniks said:
    Hi all,

    I had a concern regarding my homepage slideshow. I have put in a watermark in the center of my photos in the slideshow (to ward off any theft - I am aware that some skilled PS users can remove the watermark). Do you guys think it's distracting? If I remove the watermark, how secure is the site against image theft? My concern is that someone could download the full res images that are in that slideshow gallery. Thoughts?

    My website is in the signature or can be found here.

    Cheers,

    I can't see how somebody is going to get the originals.

    I would say 90% of the people that insist on using watermarks don't really need to worry (the pics aren't that good). You have some nice work, but I hate seeing watermarks. My vote is remove them.

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