People come to your galleries to view your photos (and for Pros, to buy!). It’s great to have your brand/studio/company name prominently displayed, but let’s face it, they’re really there to ooh and aah over your photos (and buy them!).

It turns out that people are allergic to scrolling, particularly to see photos. They don’t want to click, scroll, click, scroll, click, scroll. Yet many people customizing their smugmug pages put enormously large headers on their photos which cause their viewers to scroll their pages. Many leave in disgust, not having seen (or bought!) most of them.

So, here’s smugmug’s internal guidelines for making sure your customers are happy and able to see your photos, not to mention buy them.

That’s the main reason smugmug’s logo is so small… it’s not because we’re not proud of our brand (we are!) but because we know people are there to view photos, not ogle our cute logo.

Might want to give your own headers a little re-thinking and possibly re-tooling.

If you want to remove the feeds use this code in your CSS:

#feeds {
     display: none;
}

When a pro adds a custom footer, the links to the RSS and Atom feeds are also nuked. I came up with some javascript that will put them back wherever they want them to be.

First, add the following code to the Javascript section of your customizing page:

function findFeed(feedType, feedImage) {
  linkTags = document.getElementsByTagName("link");
  for (i = 0; i < linkTags.length; i++) {
    if (linkTags[i].type == feedType) {
      document.write('<a href="'+linkTags[i].href+'"><img src="http://www.smugmug.com/img/'+feedImage+'.gif" border="0"/>< /a>');
    }
  }
}

Then, in any of your HTML sections, add this code and the buttons will appear:

<script type="text/javascript">
  findFeed("application/atom+xml","atom");
  findFeed("application/rss+xml","rss");
</script>

First step is to create an empty gallery, we are going to hide the “This gallery is empty” warning using style sheets. We can then place the HTML you want on that page inside the gallery description. Pros can either add the style sheet code to their customizing section for CSS, or they can put it inline like everyone else. Here is some example code that shows a description on your homepage, but hides that description once you get to the gallery page itself. Remember to add enough space between the description and page code iteself so that neither will be cut off.

<div class="opening">A list of prices for various sizes.</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; color: #ffffff;
  font-weight: normal">Welcome to my pricing page.</div>
<style type="text/css">
  .nophotos { display: none; }
  .opening { display: none; }
</style>

You can also feature and image for this gallery, but you should force the gallery to style to be All Thumbs (sorry non-pros). Go ahead and upload a single image; then in your style sheets section add:

img[width="100"][height="80"] { display: none; }

But change the width and height to match the exact width and height of the uploaded photo as it appears on the gallery page.