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Smugmug...too overwhelming, perhaps, for some first-time visitors?
papajay
Registered Users Posts: 441 Major grins
Assume, for this fiction, you are modestly competent to use a computer for general web-browsing...perhaps even some Internet shopping. You get an email from an acquaintance with a standard Smugmug subscription inviting you to check out his picture galleries by following the link to the acquaintance's smugmug home page.
You arrive at the homepage and see an attractive looking page with several sections ("home", "featured galleries", "galleries", "friends and family", etc), including a number of thumbnail pictures organized.
Being a bit unsure where to start, and what to look at, you click on the "help" link at the top of the homepage....(you begin to smell TROUBLE now!)...you think you might have accidently stumbled onto a page you were not supposed to see:
Maybe you'll just hit the Reply button on the original email and say..."Great Pictures"....that'll buy some time.
You arrive at the homepage and see an attractive looking page with several sections ("home", "featured galleries", "galleries", "friends and family", etc), including a number of thumbnail pictures organized.
Being a bit unsure where to start, and what to look at, you click on the "help" link at the top of the homepage....(you begin to smell TROUBLE now!)...you think you might have accidently stumbled onto a page you were not supposed to see:
- There's a section titled "Your Account" (you're afraid someone is going to insist on you signing up for one just to look at his pictures).
- Another section heading is titled "Adding Photos"....now you KNOW you are on the wrong page!
- There are headings for POWER USERS, and PROFESSIONAL USERS and a lot of other scarey stuff...you just wanted a little advice on how to navigate an unfamiliar website, but got slammed with a lot of technical stuff that's WAY over your head at this point.
- Then you see a section titled VIEWING...aha, that must be it! Hmmm, the page doesn't look anything like the one you first saw when you first arrived at your friend's homepage. Keep looking...
- PHOTOS, that's gotta be where you'll get some pointers on how to navigate this site!.....CROP??? DELETING??? ROTATING????..man!, you're really lost now. Maybe you should just go back to where you started....You Know...the HOME page. There's the link at the top. Click!
- Woah!!!! That's not the home page you started with...it's some completely NEW Home Page about SMUGMUG. Where's your friend's homepage? Going back to the original email might be easier than clicking BACK through all those wrong turns!....
- etc.
Maybe you'll just hit the Reply button on the original email and say..."Great Pictures"....that'll buy some time.
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Papa, we constantly monitor this with many visitors, in tests etc. Thanks for the great feedback though, we appreciate it, and I'll share this with the team.
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Hi Andy...ever get the feeling I'm out to "getchya"??? I'm not, really....Smugmug is such a fabulous product, but try as I might to get all my family and friends to take the plunge (after they say things like "Loved your pictures....wished I could do that!"), I believe they often conclude that Smugmug is beyond their abilities to set up and manage.
That's why I really think Smugmug would be well-served (in terms of enticing more new subscribers) if there was a "Smugmug-Light" Tutorial on the front-end of the site where it's immediately obvious to a newcommer. The tutorial would "ease" them into the experience....a one HTML page tutorial that briefly describes what Smugmug is, how the typical standard homepage is organized, and how one can navigate to and through galleries, etc. And tell them they can explore the other "styles" without doing any "damage" to the subscriber's photos or site. Finally, tell them "there's so much more you can do (but we'll save that for another time), so for now, just dive in and enjoy your visit. ...but come back later to learn more about Smugmug."
Papajay, that's a great post and summarizes my feelings perfectly (as does your following post, where you point out that smugmug is basically a great thing). I want my photos to be accessible to people who can barely use a browser - so I've gone to a lot of trouble to customize my galleries and eliminate virtually everything but the bare essentials. It wasn't easy figuring out how to do that - and I'm a software developer myself, although web sites aren't my specialty. Which leads me to a related point...
SmugMug can be heavily customized but the route to that knowledge leads through various disconnected FAQs and member posts and the necessary knowledge seems to exist in the form of countless "tips and tricks". What I would like to see is a streamlined top-down presentation for the reasonably technical user, telling me WHAT I can change and HOW. Not in minute detail, but in the sense of "to change the appearance of a gallery, you create custom entries to a CSS which apply in addition to, or in place of, the contents of a base CSS which is not modifiable. Here is a list of elements which can be changed, and a short description of each..." and so on. A "white paper" aimed at people who basically understand how a web site works in a technical sense, presenting an outline of a smugmug site in terms of naviagational structure, content, html, css and javascript.
Also, I'm still stymied by the lack of a workable 'template' for new galleries so that when I create a one I don't have to manually tweak a whole page of settings - matching them to the settings of an existing gallery. I've never been able to get 'bulk settings' to work.
In short, this is a great photo site in many (most) ways but when a photographer friend recently asked about using smugmug as a basis for his own customized side I had to say um... well.... yes but... anticipating the difficulties he'd have in figuring out the customization process. And how I've already forgotten a lot of what I figured out while setting up my own gallery.
Believe me, I understand the difficulity and expense of creating this sort of documentation. I also understand all too well how a large complicated site grows as features are added, to the point that it becomes difficult to explain it all to a newcomer. But I think this is what smugmug needs to stay on top and get to the next level.
www.jimhughes.smugmug.com
I'm sure they (Andy and the rest) are "listening" and will continue their efforts to do just that!.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=52629
www.ivarborst.nl & smugmug
Andy: B- answer.
Like this from your site?
http://saurora.smugmug.com/photos/sspopup.mg?AlbumID=2270942
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A lot of very well done website together.
www.ivarborst.nl & smugmug
After a week, I have a pretty basic site with a simple navbar, etc. I agree, the help instructions for the newbie setting up a new site was very convoluted, but I got through it. Now, somewhere on my searches, I saw somebody's site that had a help button that brought up very detailed instructions on how to order prints, the shipping charges, all the questions that the visitor has.
Is there a Smugmug link I can use in my help button for prints ordering that doesn't take them out of my site? Is it copyrighted? Does anybody know what I mean by this?
Thanks.
www.kevincopus.com
Many pros have done just this. Standby I'm making an example one on your site right now
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Like this?
http://kevincopus.smugmug.com/gallery/2404712
It's really simple. Follow the FAQ instructions for creating an HTML Only Gallery , #40, then Copy the HTML from the help page you want (you find it by viewing source with your browser)... and then pasting it in the gallery description in between <html> and </html> tags.
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Thank you so much.
kevincopus
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