Guide Your Guests to the Gold

As your photo library grows and grows, so does the challenge of keeping track of your memories or our clients' shoots. It's crucial to keep your site neat, and it's exceptionally easy to manage all your folders and galleries with the powerful Organizer tool.

But beyond that, the content you display on your pages is the most important part of your viewers' experience. Think about what a guest or a potential client is looking for when they see your website for the first time. Will they find what they need or will they give up and move on?

So how do you go about guiding them to the right stuff?

There are several really great ways to guide visitors that arrive on your homepage to the content that you want them to see most. We've gathered a few of the best examples from SmugMug photographers.

Sweet Simplicity: Homepage Content Blocks

Did you know?

This option is available on all SmugMug accounts.

Similar to displaying Categories on your legacy SmugMug homepage, but far more flexibility as to what you choose to display. 

You can add:

• Single Image blocks that click through to a favorite gallery.

• Folder, Gallery or Page blocks that lead your visitors right to the work you want them to see. These can be used as a “call to action” to move the visitor from your homepage and into a specific selection of pages on your site.

• Video from your SmugMug site, YouTube or Vimeo.

• A feed from your Blog

Here are a couple of really elegant examples of content blocks on the homepage:

Keyword Cloud

For the Uber Organized. Take advantage of the keywords that you've added to your photos to help visitors find the right stuff.

You'll find the keyword cloud content block among the discovery choices in the customize content block panel.

The Navigation Menu

A roadmap for your visitor. A well-constructed menu bar allows you to surface the galleries that you want seen first, and to link to other places around your site.

Examples:

Your portfolio, your About Me page, your pricing, your contact information.

The SmugMug default navigation menu includes the links: Home, Browse and Search, but we recommend that you add more so that guests don't have to slog through all of your galleries to find a few examples of your work.

Look here to see how to add new links to your menu bar.

Best Option: Both!

Why choose? The very best (and clearest!) way to guide your guests is to use both a well-curated homepage AND a well-manicured menu bar.

Here's what we suggest:

• Use the menu bar to link to an About page, how to contact you, and what services you offer.

• Use content blocks to show your fans specific galleries that demonstrate what you do best