Why I Ditched my Smug Mug Website

I recently launched my newly revamped website, www.annettestiersjonesphotography.com. I have been working on it since July. This is the main reason why my blog posts and even creation of new photos has been a bit slower lately. But, the effort is truly worth it. While Smug Mug was a great place to start hosting my website at the beginning of this journey, over time I came to see many limitations. What Smug Mug offers in convenience and easy set-up is a trade off for several things that limited my growth. If all you are looking for is a place to showcase your portfolio and sell a few prints here and there to friends and social media followers, it's a perfectly fine solution. But if you would like to see more growth and discovery of your work through organic search, or if you want to have full control and choice of your print offerings, you need a more sophisticated solution. Read on to learn more.

Smug Mug Limits Your Choice of Printing House

If you are using Smug Mug for your website, you are using their choice of printers. At first I did not mind this. For my region, the print house of choice for Smug Mug is Bay Photo. There are a lot of things I like about Bay Photo. They are fast, easy to work with, and offer good customer support. But I was disappointed with Bay's color gamut for metal prints and acrylic prints. Many photos in my collection had out of gamut greens, purples, and magentas with the ICC profiles for Bay's metal and acrylic. A large part of the time I spent in developing my new website was centered on identifying new print houses with better capabilities for acrylic and metal. I tested several of my most challenging color gamut photos with the ICC profiles for multiple prints houses to narrow down the field for test prints. Now, with my new website, I have the choice to offer these options for sale. I can offer prints with the truest presentation of color as I originally envisioned it.

Smug Mug Limits Your Ability to Customize Print Options

Bay Photo offers many more customization options than what are available in Smug Mug. On traditional canvas, for example, Smug Mug does not provide options for bordered wrap effects, even though Bay Photo does. For smaller size prints, it can be very advantageous to employ a digital stretched or mirror image wrap effect on canvas. Simply wrapping the image around can result in significant parts of the image not being visible when viewed straight on. Smug Mug does provide Stretched Canvas (which has an all white wrap, photo entirely on front) or ThinWraps (canvas material but no depth to stretcher bar). But for me, I really wanted to have a full 1 1/2" stretcher bar with a digital wrap for a more premium display. This is something I can do with Bay Photo, but isn't an option through Smug Mug's system.

The other limitation in customization is choice of mounts/hanging system. The only offering on Smug Mug for metal prints is a float mount hanger with a saw tooth cutout. You can get a French cleat system with a wire when ordering directly from Bay Photo. Why is this important? Galleries will not accept prints with saw tooth mounts. I cannot think of one gallery show where I have displayed my photos that did not require a wire hanger. This may not be important if it's just a print for someone's home of their wedding, graduation, sports team photo, etc. But if you're intending this piece to be collector grade item that can be shown in galleries, details like this matter. You also cannot add a frame on Smug Mug, which is an option Bay Photo provides for several of its wall displays, including canvas, metal, and epic prints.

Things you can control are mediums that you choose to offer; I reduced my offering on Smug Mug to just the options that had color gamuts I was happy with, and to simplify choices to customers. For some mediums, the customer can choose the finish: matte, satin, or glossy. You can also add back stamps and print marks. But overall, the Smug Mug restrictions on customization were more limiting than I liked. I really wanted the ability to have a wire hanger mounting system, digital stretch wrap on canvas, and options for frames. Check out this page to get a look at the printing mediums and options I now offer.

Smug Mug's Proofing Process Leaves More to be Desired

When you upload a photo to Smug Mug, you upload one version. This version acts as both the visual presented on the webpage as well as what will go to print, for any print medium. If you spent much time using ICC profiles to proof your prints, you know what different mediums can present colors in vastly different ways. So, if a customer orders a print of a photo on fine art paper, it can look very different than a print of the same photo on metal or acrylic or canvas. The one work-around is to enable "proof-delay." You can delay the printing for 1-7 business days, In that time, you can replace the uploaded photo with your proof for the medium that was ordered. But, the next time an order rolls around for this image, you'll need to repeat the process if the next customer orders a different print medium. It would be more ideal to have one single static image as the online presentation, and then a prompt to upload your proof for that medium via the order process.

No Pop-Ups/JavaScript

I wanted to add some custom code from my email marketing platform to create a pop-up that would encourage site visitors to sign up for my newsletter. Smug Mug does not support JavaScript, so there was no way to do that. The best I could manage was a form widget buried down in the footer of my webpage.

Coupons Cost More Money

It costs an additional $162 per year to upgrade from the Portfolio to Pro plan. Pro Plan has coupons; Portfolio does not. The couple other benefits associated with the upgrade were not of value to me as a landscape photographer. So, I was frustrated by having to pay an additional fee just for this feature. It seemed even less worthwhile considering that no one could find my page (see below!).

Inadequate Tools for SEO Optimization (i.e., NO ONE CAN FIND YOUR PHOTOS)

If you are a wedding photographer, a portrait photographer, or any other type of photographer that makes your money from personalized photos that only your direct customer is going to buy, Smug Mug may work just fine. The customer finds you through word of mouth recommendation, or maybe on Google maps if you have a physical studio, and when you have the photos uploaded, you send a gallery directly to your customer to buy photos. You don't need a specific photo to be found or discovered by an unknown customer base.

For landscape photography, the model is different. Rarely is there a commission for a specific photo; we are going out and taking the photo in the hopes that someone will someday buy a print of this piece. You need to be able to be found on the internet. This is where search engine optimization comes in (or it should). Google crawls your website, indexes your pages and sitemaps. It identifies relevant key words, so that when someone searches for that key word, your page comes up as a result.

This first came to my attention when I started Googling how to improve my SEO for my Smug Mug site. I had done things Smug Mug had suggested: I gave my photo file names detailed descriptions, I added meta descriptions and alt text. But that information I supplied seemed to go nowhere. I read this blog about issues I was experiencing. To summarize, because of Smug Mug's photo storage system, the photos do not have the descriptive names I provided, e.g. Sunset_at_Mount_Rainier.jpg. Rather, they all have random numbers/letters assigned. Additionally, the Title Tag and Meta Description are exactly the same for each photo in a gallery, even though the URL is different. Therefore, Google does not see a need to index the photos, because they all appear to be the same.

So, this was really the final straw in my decision to start building a new site. I did not see a path to address these issues within Smug Mug.

A New Beginning with Better Tools

You may be asking after reading all this, so what options should I consider instead?

My new website took a TON of work. I used a blocks builder within a content management system. I have the ability to customize and choose so much more, but all that comes at the cost of time investment. There certainly are people out there building websites for landscape photographers. This option will cost you more money than time, but still a lot of time will be required. You'll have to provide all the content: all the images, the image descriptions, your policies, your print styles, your prices. All of that probably took as much time as building the actual website.

So, I think the answer lies in how much time and money you want to invest, vs. how much you want to grow your platform and expand your options. Smug Mug is a great place to get started, and probably is a great tool for event and portrait photographers. For landscape photographers, I think it depends what you want to get out of it.

Have a question? What do you think of the new site? I'd love to hear from you. Hop over to my contact page to drop me a note.