Marketing myself or How to avoid common mistakes at the start of your web presence - Part 6 / Website Design

Reaching the stage where (finally!) the editing was finished, the next step was the design of the site.

There are many small and big points to pay attention to, many of them completely subjective, but here too there are some rules that should be followed. The first step was to find a platform that could host my site and have the various flexibilities I was looking for, but most importantly the one that could get customisation, so that I would get exactly the result I wanted. So, too many weeks searching the web, I came across Smugmug.

People behind SmugMug are a team that knows its job well. They are always there to help you, there is a forum for extra help through users, guides for each topic, etc. It is possible to sell your images directly through your site (in whichever of the collaborating workshops you choose yourself) and not only on paper, but also in mugs, clothes, etc. A full time merchandise shop if you will!

After choosing SmugMug, the appearance of the site followed.

I definitely wanted it to have a slideshow that would run the moment you entered the home screen. I also wanted it to be fullscreen and finally I wanted a navigation bar, which should not disturb the view of course, but it should be clear where it is located. I chose the images and their order. They had to be images from all categories and have a beautiful aesthetic continuity, as the slideshow would flow. Easy step relatively, since I had just come out of the editing torture. Next, I found the fullscreen slideshow, which plays flawlessly on SmugMug immediately after I discovered how to hide the navigation bar. The hard part with all of this was that I had to find skilled developers who could do what I wanted in the SmugMug environment. So, I found Adam and within a few weeks we finally got to the final version of the site.

If I have to find any negatives in SmugMug, these are:

• the expertise one needs to get it right (assuming the ready-made templates don’t cover you),

• that the mobile site looks very poor compared to the desktop version,

• the fact that you can not create a custom favicon for the screens of smartphones/tablets,

This is my favicon

• the fact that your blog can not be hosted within your site and

• the fact that there is no central application that helps you do things on the fly, such as preparing a new post e.g.

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  PS:

  Long after I prepared this article for my blog, our paths with SmugMug parted, as I discovered the lures of Squarespace. My site and blog have been hosted there for over a year now and I'm more than happy. More on that here.