The SmugMug Platform Upgrade First Look

Yesterday my website hosting company, SmugMug, announced a major platform upgrade that brought their website designs a big jump forward.  The look and feel is modern and engaging.  The user interface to customize the site is much, much easier.  In the past, you had to either know html and css programming or at least be a really good mimic of other people's code to enhance your site.  Now, the interface has a host of customization options built right in and the predefined templates are a big improvement too.

I started noodling with new options for website design and gallery layout and already I'm seeing some things that look really great.  I probably won't flip the site public for a while yet as I let my design decisions sink in, but I thought I'd share a little bit of what I'm seeing.

I love the new options available for gallery layout.  Particularly something called "landscape collage".  For example, here is my Events gallery today...

Pretty dull huh?  The text is small and hard to read and the previews aren't much to look at.  There is a lot of white space in this screen shot because the gallery doesn't stretch to fill the window.  You can have anything you want as long as it's in two columns!

And now for something completely different... here's my events gallery in configured using the New SmugMug options.

Pretty cool huh!??  Stay tuned.  I'll be tweaking the site over the next couple of days and will let you all know when the new look and feel goes live.  If you have any questions, give me a shout!