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- Essentials for a Successful Website
- 3 Flavors of Privacy
- Build a Custom Website on SmugMug
- Your Own Photo Home in 4 Easy Steps
- A Photo Organizer Worth Switching For
- Unleash the Power of the Menu Bar
- Special Occassion Print Order Deadlines
- Understanding the Crop Tool
- Picture Perfect Wallet Size Prints
- Guide Your Guests to the Gold
- How to Make a Photo Blog
- Your New SmugMug Site in 5 Minutes... or Less
- The Save Photo Reminder
- Get the Legacy Look in the New SmugMug
- FAQ: Why Switch to the New SmugMug?
- How to Customize Your System Pages
- The No-Hack Custom Page Tutorial
- Encyclopedia of the Watermark
- For Pros
- How to Get Paid for Being the Real You
- 5 Simple Steps to Building Your Brand
- Photography Pricing Cheat Sheet
- Market Your Photography: Share Your Photos
- Create a Great Experience on Your Site
- 8 Tools For Selling Photos Online
- Protect Your Photos from Theft
- Why Events Are Best for Your Business
- Maximize Your Wedding Photography Workflow
- Sports Shooters: How to Win More Sales
- How Can Search Help My Sales?
- The Great Pricing Hoax
- A Winning Portrait Business Model
- 5 Things Your Client Needs to Hear
- The Changing Business of Wedding Photography
- Make More Money with Digital Downloads
- Photo Tips
- 5 Reasons Why We Fell in Love with Lightroom
- Aim to Impress: Go Beyond Paper Prints
- Prep Your Files for Great Prints
- Why Print in a Digital Age?
- 5 Camera Tips Pros Wished They'd Known Sooner
- Get Your Photos Done in Record Time
- Keeping Your Phone Photos Safe, Too
- Get That Shoebox of Photos Online
- Punch Up Your Sport Portraits with Levi Sim
- Travel: How Gary Arndt Does Everything, Everywhere
- Mobile Phone Travel Photography with Michael Bonocore
- Underwater Model Photography
- What Not to Wear (to That Photo Shoot)
- The Art of Making Things Delicious
- 5 Killer Locations for Your Photo Shoots
- Color Calibration for Perfect Prints
- How to Shoot Winning Sports Photos
- Taking Beautiful Macro Photos
- How to Organize a Photowalk
- Get Out of That Photography Rut
- Kickstart Your Lightroom Workflow
- 5 Lies Your Camera Likes to Tell
- What Photos Sell?
- How to Take Delicious Food Photos
- Inspiration
- iSmile Studios, Inc. Maximizing Profits With More than Just Seasons' Greetings
- The Mompreneur: Kelly Lester
- Andi Grant: A Wedding Pro's Love Affair with "Events"
- Wildlife and Travel: Chris McLennan
- Awais Yaqub Photographic
- How to Create Your Own Success
- Sports Photography: Glossy Finish
- SmugMug & Pro Cycling Photographer Graham Watson
- Sports Photography: Kent McCorckle and SmugMug
- Quit Your Job and Run For the Hills: Ron Coscorrosa Speaks Out
- Adventure Photography: Is It Worth the Risk?
- Picture Perfect Pets: Kira Stackhouse
- Spooky Storytelling: History Trekker
- High-Speed Macro: Liquid Drop Art
- Underwater Wildlife: Scubazoo
- Meghan MacAskill Photography
- Matthew Jordan Smith Photography
- Smilebooth
Your New SmugMug Site in 5 Minutes... or Less
Short on time? We understand, and that's why at SmugMug you get everything you need to polish your site with minimal work. If you can click a mouse, you can make a beautiful website. Here's how.
Step 1. Add some photos!
When you open a new SmugMug account, you'll want to add photos to it right away. There are many ways to upload your photos, from our built in browser based uploaders to the Publish Service for Lightroom users.
Step 2. Tweak site-wide stuff.

We'll land you on your brand-new beautiful homepage. From here, you can change the look and feel of the elements that will appear across all your site's pages: Add a background image, your name to the header, change text on your menu bar, and put your brand name in the footer (just as examples).

GROUNDBREAKING FYI: At this point your site is good to go. Simply hit the Done button at the top and your new website will be visible to the world! But if you want to make further personalizations, keep reading.
Change the Design
We start you off with the versatile SmugMug design, but we have 20 other beautiful site designs for you to choose from. Click Choose a New Site Design to see them all. Each one comes with an out-of-the-box, designer-approved layout, font choice and color scheme. We give you a huge variety to fit many styles of photography, so scroll through and pick the one that speaks to you.
Can't commit? That's OK! You can create several looks using several designs, save them all and swap between them at any time.
Basic Users:
You'll be able to use the "SmugMug" design and change its look and feel, but you'll need to upgrade your account to use the other Designs.
Click the Customize > Content and Design button at the top to open the customization mode.
Here's a few things you could tweak first:
Polish the Header:
Most designs already include a basic navigation bar with a way for your viewers to get back to your homepage, view your site content on a Browse page, and search for a specific photo. You can add more links by editing this content box.

Tweak the Theme:
Designs have their own color schemes, but you can pick individual page colors and fonts if you prefer a different feel.
Finalize the Footer:
If you have a Power, Portfolio or Business account, you'll see the option to tweak the footer to add your name, social buttons or whatever else you wish.

Tip: Make sure you're on the "Site-Wide" customization mode, otherwise your tweaks won't show up everywhere:

Step 3. Personalize your homepage
Your Design will include various galleries and content to your homepage, but you can edit them (or add more!) by clicking Customize > Content and Design and making sure your Homepage is selected.
This is the fun part! Drag and drop, remove or edit the individual content blocks that appear on this page. You'll know where they can go when you see a green shaded box appear. Note that you can stack content blocks one after the other, or line them up to create columns across the page.

Tip:
The page elements are color coded, so you can edit any level content block from any page. For example, if you click the Customize button from within a gallery, you can still tweak site-wide things like the header and footer.
Step 4. Click publish!
Once you're happy with the content blocks you've put there, you can click Preview to see your changes without the customization menus covering the screen.
Love it? Hit Done! We'll publish your new site so that it's on view to the world. Congratulations!

Bonus Step 5. Make more stuff.
Your design will have all the essentials already built right in, but with a Power, Portfolio or Business account you can always add in more pages to suit your style. For example, you can create an About Me page with your photo and bio, a Services page, etc. It's easy:
Simply click the Organize button at the top of you homepage. Once inside the Organizer menu, choose Create > Page and call it something, like "About Me".
We'll drop you on your brand-new, clean slate page. From here, you can customize and add in any content blocks that you wish, in virtually any configuration you want!
When you're happy with it, publish your changes.
Open up customization mode and mouse over your menu bar. You'll see that it indicates that this box appears across all pages of your site, just FYI. Click to edit it and add a new link, then find the link to your brand-new About Me page within the 'Pages I Choose' picker menu.


Tip: Don't forget that you can drag to rearrange the different links in your preferred order.
You're finished! Was that so bad?
RememberThis
on August 20, 2014There seems to be an error in the directions. Step 5 says to click on the Organize button, but you must click on the Create button to add a new page and be taken to it to edit its contents.