the new SmugMug
Today the new SmugMug was released to the world.
I was privileged to participate in Smug's early release program so I've had a bit of time to play. My first goal was to become familiar with the new features, new gallery formats, new way of building a site. Play was an important first step that was followed by thinking about how I planned to bring my site into the new world. As I wandered through Smug day-by-day I could see the addition / fine-tuning of new product features. In the few cases where I reached out with a question I received answers very quickly. Knowing that the full team at SmugMug had to be very busy (and very tired) made the speed of response even more impressive.
My (old) site customization was driven by my desire for much larger thumbs to represent the galleries than was possible with the base product. I wanted my viewers to have an idea about the contents of a gallery before they clicked into it so a number of years back I removed the standard navigation and replaced it with my own. It took only a few minutes of exploring new options to realize that I would be able to easily use the new features of SmugMug without needing to use code, to use the standard breadcrumb and standard display sizes for photos presented in a folder or in a gallery. Awesome!
Once I had my head wrapped around my updated design it took very little time to complete the site customization.
I love the new organic layouts, and the ability to build my site by using the features of the product is wonderful. I love the fact that my site looks the same whether I'm looking at it on a computer or on my phone.OK, OK, it did take me a couple of hours to edit the description of every gallery and remove my old custom breadcrumb; as far as I'm concerned that was time well spent since I now have a site that is much easier to maintain.
I'm happy!
