Recently, I’ve been looking at how to apply a fresh new design to SmugMug‘s online portfolio for photographers, that breaks away from the limited default template choices.
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SmugMug is a great tool that connects photographers to their customer’s and allows them to view their photos instantly online as soon as they become available via any device. They can review and share photos and order albums directly from SmugMug, whilst the photographer can sit back and relax.
However, there isn’t much choice when it comes to customising the SmugMug templates or themes, so we need to move away from the inflexible “builder tool” and the pre-set theme choices. This is not just a problem suffered by SmugMug users, but all website builders often have their limitations. It’s the unfortunate trade-off to making website building accessible to the masses, at some stage there will come a roadblock where you just need to do some web development coding!
A WordPress solution that doesn’t break the bank
There is a SmugMug API, which is perfect if we want to do a deep integration, but a build of this level is not exactly cheap! Instead, let’s look at a WordPress option that utilitises the Photonic plugin and embed some of the SmugMug features directly into our site.
Why WordPress is a good fit for photography websites
Photographers always have a great range of images to work with, so we’ll want a flashy design with big imagery to show off their great work. This could be a bespoke design, but if as we’re on a budget we can use a template and make some tweaks to add uniqueness.
By using WordPress we can create a cost-effective website that looks great and offers a really simple content management, making it possible for the photographer to be in full control of text and imagery.
Photonic Plugin and SmugMug
To make the most of SmugMug’s features, we’re going to directly feed in photos using the Photonic plugin. This is a great plugin, which is freely available. It gives us the power to create carousels and galleries all loaded with our photos directly from SmugMug – no time wasted uploading the same photos twice, then!
Use a cache to ensure fast loading
The Photonic Plugin uses the SmugMug API to communicate with your account and draw in the images you’ve indicated. Because it takes time for this interaction to happen, we will need a cache plugin to get around this wait time. A performance plugin will save the page in memory and only need to periodically load in new items.
Preparing our SmugMug website
The client previewer is one of the most important features offered by SmugMug. So, what we want to do is show the generated SmugMug website in an iframe. This is a way of embedding your old site into the new WordPress system
In order to ensure that this looks as seamless as possible, we’re going into our SmugMug account and use the builder tool to strip back the existing template to only show our album list – and nothing else! Also we’ll use the builder to match up colours to our new design. We can now embed our SmugMug page into the new “client area” page.
This gives the impression that the list of private galleries is loaded from our new website, but actually it’s coming from the new cut down version of our SmugMug portfolio.
The beauty of this approach is that customer’s will benefit from all of SmugMug’s features when browsing their photos in our new site and by embedding in this way we save on development time.
Highly complex websites are possible on a budget
SmugMug offers great features at a reasonable price, so when you hit a roadblock such as trying to improve the look and feel of your SmugMug website using the custom builder, then you are bound to wonder “How much will a photography website cost?”. Your first thought might be that building a website that does everything your existing SmugMug website does is going to be expensive, but we can be creative in how we approach the solution. And, by combining WordPress, SmugMug and the Photonic Plugin, we are able to offer a premium solution at a slice of the cost.
Let’s get back to taking photos then!
