Ann - I took a look at your site and I don't think you would have any trouble getting close to what you have now.
To answer your questions: I started with the Smugmug design, added the slide show and deleted the section where galleries would be displayed below the folders section. You don't have to make it public until you're happy with it. You can run it in the sandbox to check everything out before you hit the "unveil" button. The square thumbnails are the defaults, but you can select from several different aspect ratios. You can change the word "folders" to anything you want or get rid of it completely. That's a good idea, I may do that later. You can set the category thumbnails to any photo on your site just as you do now. I'm not sure why that didn't automatically carry over. It says they should in the help files. It only took me a few minutes to reset them. There isn't anything changing randomly unless you set it to work that way The unlisted galleries only show up when you're logged in. Password protected galleries show up if they are not unlisted. Password protected galleries show a lock if you don't select a thumbnail image. That all works just as it did in the old Smugmug. There is also a new level called private. These only show up for the site owner and only when logged in. When I was making my final changes I ran the legacy site in Internet Explorer (logged out) in one window while I was logged in doing the new site design in Chrome so that I could refer back and forth. I looked at your site and it doesn't look like you have anything that would require html or css in the new system. You could get it very close. There are a lot of predefined backgrounds that look very nice. If you don't find one you like, you can supply your own. One thing that will change, the new Smugmug is much more aware of the screen size and device the viewer is using. I've looked at my site on tablets, phones and several screen sizes. It adapts beautifully. But be aware that it does that by re-arranging things. This is the "responsive" design that everyone is trying to pull off these days. So far I think Smugmug has done it very well. You can lock it so this doesn't happen, but I wouldn't. It works very well for the user, no matter the size or type of device. Text is appropriately re-sized and sometimes put into a scroll box. The Banner is re-sized and on really small screens cropped a bit. As it is now your banner doesn't even show up on the small iPhone screen and it is very small on an iPad. It should be readable on both screens in the new design. On my site, nothing changes drastically, but the size of the slide show and the number of columns used for the folders changes. On a phone the folders display in a single column when the phone is held vertically, two columns when the phone is held horizontally. On the iPad it's two and three columns. On an 11" screen it was three columns and on bigger screens it's four columns. They try to make the photos as large as is appropriate device. Like I said, most of this can be locked down, but at least on my site, I wouldn't. If you don't have different devices to test, you can just change your window size and watch it adapt. Once you start playing I'm sure you'll find that it's all fairly well laid out. I can't stand the way most sites are doing help files these days. You know the kind I'm talking about, type in a question and get mostly irrelevant answers. Smugmug has done the same, but they do have a "view all help" selection. This makes much more sense to me. You can read things more like a book and get a feeling for how all of it works before you start clicking around and trying to discover how things work. I should have done that, but did click around for about an hour before scanning through the help files. The main thing is, nothing changes (except gallery styles) for the public until you unveil your site. You can even have multiple designs in your sandbox and see what your site looks like under several different designs. This works even after you go public, so you can continue to tweak and re-design your site and only make the changes public when you are happy with them. Rest assured, it will be different, but overall, the new system is a huge improvement. gs George Sinos -------------------- www.GeorgesPhotos.net www.GeorgeSinos.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
