[Music]
[Music]
okay hi everyone and welcome to another
of my smugmug tutorials
in this video i'm going to show you how
we can set up a custom gallery for our
smugmug website
now there are many advantages to doing
this
and i'll show you first of all why i
think it's better to set up a customized
gallery this way
now
when you have your smug mug website and
you if you you probably already know how
to set up your galleries how to upload
your photos if you don't go check out my
first video that shows you how to do
that
well when you set up your galleries in
smugmug
then if you go into the organizer you
can see all your galleries here
now by default of course that gallery is
automatically made available on your
smugmug website
and typically if you go up here
if you've on your home page by default
your galleries
are already shown here
and if we click any of these
we can go to the default standardized
smugmug website this is this is the
gallery page that is generated for you
automatically
the title of the gallery is put here and
the description of the gallery is put
here by default
when you're viewing
all of the galleries
categories here in thumbnail again you
get the gallery title here and if we
look at the gallery
if we go up here to where our tabs are
i've revealed them now i didn't have
them showing before sorry
but when you have a web page open up in
your tabs up here you'll see if you
scroll over
you'll see this little bit of text here
that is called the meta title
now
that meta title is visible to you like
this
but this meta title is actually very
important it's the first thing that the
search engine will read
so what's in the meta title
is mega important because when somebody
is searching if somebody was searching
for photos of mountains then google
would look at all of the websites it has
in its index and look first at the meta
title and if photos of mountains is in
the meta title is one of the first
things they will consider for indexing
it in that search
so it's very very important what you put
here and having photos of mountains on
its own is not really enough
we can change that
if we go to the gallery itself of course
if i go to photos of mountains settings
now i can change this
i can say photos of mountains
in slovenia
and i can put things like now this is
really important you see i can put
things like bi
canvas
framed
and find our
prince
now this is a great thing to have in
your title because then if somebody's
searching for canvas prints of mountains
canvas prints in slovenia frame prince
of mountains this is in my title it's
much more important that this these
keywords are in your title
and again in my description i can put a
really super long description in this
gallery you can browse and purchase some
of my best photos of mountains in
slovenia yeah
purchase
any photo
as a fine art
oh
photography print
on canvas
framed
metal
and more much much better this is also
the meta description that the search
engine will see so first it looks at the
meta title then it looks at the meta
description then it looks at your
on-page content
so having all of these is really really
important now i know you've got meta
keywords and you can put these in there
but the meta keywords these days search
engines i don't even think they even
look at it really it's it's these are
good to have here because these are used
in the smugmug community when people are
searching the smugmug community but when
it comes to the search engines they're
not really looked at so much and they're
certainly not given much weight or
importance by the search engines
especially google
so
you can have a good description and you
can have a good meta title this is
really really important
now if we save this now first of all if
we come back here and refresh the page
now we've got this up here
in our meta title much much better but
the problem is we've now also got it
here
visible on the page
and also the title down here is is the
description sorry down here is visible
and what's more if you go back to our
home page where we look at our our
galleries
categories like this
again it's here in our title
well okay that's fine if you don't mind
that but really i want my titles here to
to be very simple
and there's no way to change that it's
one or the other
so that's one downside to this
the other thing is i would like to have
more text
on here
i would like to actually have more text
informing people that i'm selling my
photos
now okay we have a buy photos here that
could easily be missed
we could have a bit of text here but
again text could easily be missed
sometimes you need to make it really
obvious to someone who's viewing your
page that the photos are for sale
because
you know ultimately on the website or on
the internet today people
are really
almost blind actually they go to a web
page and they can scroll through that
page and they can miss so much because
really only the big things jump out of
them
so
the better thing to do
and i'm going to show you an example of
what i've actually done with this
mountains gallery
it's much better
to have a page like this
with a big title here
a bit of descriptive text about the page
so i want to talk about the photos and
give a bit of descriptive information if
people want it
by prints and now i've got these three
pictures showing examples of how prints
of my photos could be displayed on a
wall in your home
in your office in your living room
things like this so
immediately someone scrolls down they're
going to see this these pictures are
going to jump out oh that's nice it
immediately tells people that these
pictures are for sale
and they may scroll past quickly oh oh
that's great yeah they may see this too
or they may not but still it's there
there's lots of information buy prints
big example pictures buy any photos they
may actually look at this and then go oh
buy any photos are high quality high
quality fine art print oh okay then
they'll go on and look at the pictures
but now when they're looking through
your pictures
they already have it in their mind that
these pictures are for sale so they
could be scrolling through a scroll and
then suddenly go oh wow that's a great
picture they'll click it
and again now it's in their mind that
they can buy this photo so you know
this is a much better tactic
to
encourage people to inform people and to
market yourself that these pictures are
for sale
otherwise because there are so many
images on the internet these days that
people could just scroll through a
gallery like this they can miss the buy
photos bit and just be scrolling through
looking all these are nice pictures
lovely lovely lovely pictures and unless
they click one
they won't
really see that they're for sale or they
may not think that they're for sale
so
a gallery like this
with this bit of text at the beginning
and these examples is much much better
when it comes to marketing yourself as
someone who is actually selling your
photos not just displaying photos for
people to look at so how do we do that
quite simply we create a page so we come
back into organize
we go to create
and create a web page so we're going to
create an entirely separate web page
completely
new so we're going to start with a blank
page so we go the page type we set
custom a custom page gives lets you
start
a page from scratch
so let's create that and now we can put
in our title
now i'm gonna um
i'm gonna do now for as an example i'm
gonna do a custom page for my
photos of portland bill in dorset
england
so just like with the galleries we're
going to put a title a meta description
and the meta keywords okay so remember i
said this is very important the meta
title and the meta description are very
important for the
search engines
it's good to be prepared and i usually
have everything prepared in a word
document or something so i can just
simply copy and paste everything in
rather than type it all there
so
my meta title
is this
that's good to keep it short you uh
smugmug will allow you to to write as
much as you want i think but ideally for
search engines your meta title should be
about 100 should be about 60 characters
long
and your meta descriptions should be no
more than 160 characters long
so
we can simply do that by highlighting
that come down here in word we can do a
character count 57 so that's good
i'll copy this
and then
paste that into my title nice and easy
i'll come back
to my
meta description
copy that
paste that into my meta description box
and
i said it's not really that important
but it doesn't do any harm to have a
good set of keywords some of the most
important ones again i paste that in
now you'll see down here automatically
creates a custom url based on your title
but you're also going to see that
because my title is really really long
my custom url is really really long we
don't want that i can get rid of all of
that and shorten that to simply photos
of portland
bill sorry
featured image
so i'll come here now it's going to be
my portland build so i'm going to come
to my
portland build gallery and i'm going to
choose the featured image
so the featured images on your standard
gallery your default gallery is the one
you see at the top usually
so
you can choose one of these i'm going to
choose this one
done
now once you've done the basics
it's good to check your security and
sharing and make sure that first of all
you've got the visibility to public
because that's what you want
anyone can access
web searchable now
your site settings
that should be set to yes
um but just in case yeah
you'll see down here if you tick this
you can your site settings will be set
to yes
but if you're setting up a page or a
gallery or a folder and you want that
not to be web searchable here you can
choose no but of course we don't want to
do that we're creating a page that we
want to be viewed everywhere same here
with the smug mug searchable so it's
searchable in smug in the smugmug
community but it's also searchable by
website so this page can be found by
websites and index so this was we want
this of course we do so we just double
check make sure all of that is set
then go back
and click create and we create the page
now by default you get a page like this
and you get here the breadcrumbs
i don't want this i normally come up
here sorry
come up here and delete remove that get
a completely blank page to start with
so
the first thing
is we're going to want that header just
like i showed you can you can make your
page design any way you like of course
but this is how i'm going to do it
but i'm going to come up here with a
single photo
put that
up the top
and here i'm going to choose my photo so
again i'm going to choose
this one as my header because
that looks good
now actions on click now you can choose
if someone
opens a light box
you don't want to open the gallery
because they'll go to your default
gallery then
info style
i tend to have it bottom bar
text alignment left
center photo on
fit width
and the aspect ratio now for a header
really the aspect ratio wants to be
something like three to one ideally
that's that so you don't want to put a
title because if you put a title
let's say portland that appears above i
don't want that on the header so leave
that blank and there'll be no title
nothing up there
now that's done
okay now of course this is a small
header you might say
that's simple we just come in here we go
to
layout
and we set the layout to stretchy
now we've stretched the layout right the
way across the page
now we've got a margin here 24 i don't
want that
you can if you want but i'll just put
that to zero
now we've got all our margins on zero
the body width is set to auto we've set
it to stretchy so it's going to stretch
to the screen we don't want any sidebars
and that's it
so
now we've got our header image
and we've got the description down here
if you want or simply just turn that off
if you just want the picture
so now i've got my header the next thing
i want now
is
i want some title text now title text
should be only for the main title
because this would give you a h1 tag as
a top level tag for the search engines
it tells the search engines the main
name of the page and of course you want
your important keywords to be in there
but you only want one title
so if we select the title here
bring that down here it appears here by
default
now
again it's already there but uh
photos of portland bill is going to be
my page title so i'll get rid of that
yeah now this is the advantage you see i
can
get rid of that and put my own custom
page title which will still not appear
up here you'll see that
now i want to make it i like to make the
page title
all uh uppercase so
i just type it in
in uppercase like this photos of fortn
and bill
you can set the text size however you
want it large small i tend to find
mediums is big enough
keep the color if you want it default or
change it
line height letter spacing you can set
no problem whatever you want
now here you can align the text so
ideally it should be in the center
that's where you want to have your page
title now of course again you can have
that page title above the main image if
you want so let's click done
if you want to put that above you just
simply click this bar here
and move it above now you've got it
above the main header if you want but i
want it below
so i'm going to pull it back down
here
now i've got my main
page title
now i'm going to add some more text so
now i go to the text button and i check
the arrow here so i put it
underneath
my main title
so as i said i've got everything
prepared
so i'll come in here
click copy
here i'm going to paste
and highlight
centralize my text and set the size
i think 16 is a good size but you can
have
20
if you want
i tend to find 16. now you can bold it
underline it or anything like that
but i don't think that's necessary
so
if you want it all in one
paragraph like this by all means or you
can see that i've separated mine out
into three different paragraphs four
different paragraphs actually so i can
just it won't paste it in like that
so we can just separate it out
there we go so now we've got it into
four separate
paragraphs
so i can click done
now the text stretch stretches right the
way across
i don't want that so i'm going to come
in here to dimensions
and i'm going to change my left and
right margin
if i do that 300
by 300 now i've put that text more into
the center of the page that's fine now
you might be tempted to say oh i can
just say i could just change the
container with but it doesn't it it
makes it left or right it doesn't
centralize it so i found the easiest way
is to make keep it 100 but then set the
set huge margins either side
so there's my main text
i now
want to
insert another bit of text here
because i want to put my
by
prints
if i highlight this
then i can centralize it
change the text i can also make this
header text
so i can make it
a h3 text for example or h2 assign it a
bit more importance
click
done now i've got my buy print section
now i want to insert those pictures
where do i get those pictures you may
ask well
there's a really great website
called wall app
and it's part of a website called
ohmyprints.com
they very kindly created this wall app
where you can drag your own artwork into
all these
different templates
to showcase it in many different
situations
now it's completely free to use and all
that happens is you get this little
promotional bit of text down here which
i think is fair considering that they're
letting us use this for free
so what you do i'll put a link to this
wall app down in the description
so what you do is um
you can select any picture it doesn't
matter which one you can always change
it afterwards so let's start with this
one
and then where it says drag your artwork
here you click this and navigate to a
photo
so let's put this photo here and here it
puts it in and now we can just simply
resize it
and position it wherever we want on the
wall like that there you go when that's
ready you just click
save file
and it will
download it to your downloads folder
most likely
what i tend to do
is
go to
show in folder
i tend to try to open it first in
adobe photoshop
now the reason i open it in adobe
photoshop
is so that i can convert the profile to
an srgb srgb looks better on a web page
and then
i save as now i usually save it into a
separate folder from my downloads folder
so i've got that here wall app
and i save it here
so i'll go back
and
create three of these you can create
more if you like of course
you can reset the artwork
and then drag in a new piece of artwork
like so
so now i have my free photos showcasing
my artwork in different situations in
different living room and an office
in another living room
so now i can upload these to my smugmug
site
so if we go back
to organize
now if you ever want to come out of the
page that you're doing if you're not
ready to publish it just click save for
later
okay now
if you haven't already you want to set
up a gallery
for just these pictures
i have it here walla examples you want
to make sure that gallery is unlisted
because otherwise it's going to be
available in all your gallery settings
so people are going to see it in general
and you don't want to do that that's the
same for any other images throughout
your site that you just put in on there
that you're not putting up for sale so
make sure that you've got
security and sharing unlisted
not private because then nobody will be
able to see those photos
so you want unlisted
anyone with the link you don't want
people with the password or people you
choose because then you're restricting
it you want to make
um
if you set it like this then when when
you put it on your uh any of your pages
anyone visiting that page will see it
you want to make sure
down here web searchable no smug
searchable no unless of course you want
it to be searchable but generally these
are just illustration images so i turn
that off
so we make sure we've got that setting
done on your uh gallery
so this is the gallery where i'm going
to place all these photos so i can come
into this gallery
and upload directly to it
so here's where i've put these photos
these are the three photos i'm going to
upload now
there we go
that's done now go back to my page
edit page design
so now we want to put these pictures on
the page
so we come down here to photos multiple
photos
drag this across and
place it underneath the buy prints
header
come up here get rid of the title
same thing i don't want that title
showing and select from you want photos
i choose because you want to choose
specific photos
click here to choose the photos navigate
to your
gallery and select the three photos you
want to put in
click done
and now you can see already they're
appearing down here
action on click
none or
open light box
open light box then people could click
and view it bigger
layout
collage portrait is usually the best and
the size whichever size you want
medium
or large
you can have it large like that across
the screen if you want
i think sometimes that's a little too
big
so i think medium will do the trick
nicely
display options now spacing between so
you want a good spacing between i think
24 or even 36 make it nice and big
pagination well
just leave it like that because there's
no paginations only three photos
okay
and click done
again
do like we did before with the text
make these margins bigger
to centralize it
i do 300 300 puts everything right slap
bang in the middle nicely
click done
now we've got our three images
again as i say if you want to adjust it
just go up here to tools
if you want to make try and make those
photos bigger
large
now they're going to go like this so if
we do that then we need to
change
we need to come back again and make our
dimensions smaller
yeah if we did 200 200 that's actually a
little bit bigger so
you can play around with that as i say
so again now we come in again i'm going
to add a bit more text underneath these
images
here
and
here i'm going to
copy this little bit of text
this in highlight it
centralize it
put that down
now this bit here i'm going to make into
a header to make it bigger
and this bit here i'm going to make it
about 16
and now we've got my prints nice and big
directs people to look at these three
pictures and then again by any photo as
a high quality fine art print
and a little notice if people do read it
click on any image to enlarge and
purchase a high quality fine art print
on a variety of products such as metal
acrylic framed canvas prints whatever
whatever prints you have set up on
smugmug for sale
so now we're ready to add our photo
gallery
so again up here
multiple photos
set it to go right at the bottom
underneath all of this
get rid of the title once again now this
time yes we want single gallery
and choose gallery so click this
and select the gallery you want to
insert
if you want to create a custom uh page
with all different photos from different
galleries then you just simply do what
we did before choose photos and come in
and select photos from all different
galleries but in this case we're just
going to insert the gallery so we select
the gallery
click that now we can see the gallery is
down here
actions on click you don't want to go to
gallery you're displaying the whole
gallery so you want to open lightbox so
people click an image they get the
lightbox open up with all the options to
purchase
layout choose your layout i choose
always collage landscape
photo size small or medium or large
however you want it
if you have a lot of photos then i think
that the small photo size is better
if you only have a few photos then maybe
medium or large but definitely like in
my case
i've got a fair few photos i'll start
off with small and then i'll see how it
looks
display so i'm going to set my
space between images
always good to have a space between
images i think
info style
i want to have it on the bottom bar
or
you can have it under the image
okay it's your choice i think i have i
have it under the image
here it looks better it doesn't
sometimes
if you've got a lot of text or a lot of
description
then if you have it on the bottom bar
then it kind of obstructs especially on
a thumbnail it doesn't look so good you
can't really see the picture
so
for this case let's do it under
text alignment left center i prefer left
myself
pagination style now if you have a lot a
lot of photos
then you can choose
the
not all of the photos will load at once
and you can choose a scrolling option
which means that when people get to the
bottom it will automatically load more
photos each time or you can choose an
option to click
and in which case then you can choose
the number of photos that will be
displayed and then when people get to
the bottom they'll have a button to
click to show more
i
this i leave it a scroll because
actually i
there's not that many images in this
gallery so it won't be a problem
then click done
and
there we have it
there's my gallery
click the tools here
and
let's see how it looks
medium size
now there's not so many images here so i
think the medium looks good so i'll
leave it like that
i'm just saying that there's one odd
picture at the bottom there so
uh
maybe i'll go back
try small again
now that they're small everything's nice
and even actually i'll leave it like
that i think
so when that's done
click done
publish now
and now here is my custom page
now people scroll through they see the
picture
they see the options to purchase
and then they come down and if they see
a picture they like they click it brings
up the light box with all the purchase
options
so this is much much better
now of course the other problem
you need to create a menu link to this
page it won't be automatically done your
smug mug standard or default galleries
will automatically
be shown here
but this page won't
be shown here
so you need to add it to the menu like
i've done here you can add it as a drop
down menu and this is how you do it so
go back into customized design
and come up here to your menu entire
site
click to edit your menu
here are your links
so you need to add a new link so click
add
enter the link title
so i'm going to call portland bill
custom url
or page i choose so you want to go to
page you choose because you've created
this page choose the page
come down here now be careful this is
your gallery but this is your page and
this is what you want to select
click done
go back and you'll see it down here at
the bottom now you want to move it so
click and drag it up
now up here you'll see that
here shows you the position so
if you bring it down here move it just
across a bit
that's now made it a submenu of the
smugmug galleries
click done
done again publish now
now if i come up here now
i've got a
menu linked directly to my
new custom gallery page
so it's that simple
so i hope you've enjoyed this and found
it useful and if you have as always uh
please give this video a like i'd really
appreciate it if you're the first time
here then i'd be very grateful if you
subscribe and go check out some of my
other videos
and remember if you're not a subscriber
to uh smug mug and you are interested
then you can use the affiliate link down
in the description which will give you a
15 discount if you decide to purchase
the smugmug plan
you can sign up to a free 14-day trial
with no obligation you don't have to
enter your credit card details but if
you click the link and set up set it up
start your trial
the link the discount is automatically
applied if you decide to purchase you'll
get you'll get the 15 discount straight
away so there's no code needed no credit
card needed to get started
okay so thanks for watching and uh catch
you later bye
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
you