Kittens prints for sale, and how I got there.

CLIK AND BAI MEE!!

I am simultaneously micro-reviewing SmugMug’s pro printing and sales service AND using the opportunity to try to sell some of my painfully cute kitten photos!

I needed a system for allowing clients to interact with my photographs; an ordering site where they can select the images they like, get them printed in a huge array of sizes, surfaces, materials and objects, and have the products shipped directly to them without the need for me to intervene and micromanage it. I found one that seems to work well for my level of technical requirements and professional quality, and at as competitive a price as I have seen so far: SmugMug. If you are a photographer who wants a system where people figure out their own print sizes, quantities, surfaces, crops, etc., someone else makes the prints, ships them out, bills the credit card and deals with all product returns or tech support, and all you do is upload some digital images and collect payment checks, then you need to check out SmugMug’s pro accounts.

For me, the ability to have my SmugMug ordering site “hidden” behind my site name was an absolute requirement for a print sales business like SmugMug. My print order URL is “prints.donstrattonphotography.com”, which is a subdomain pointer on my domain host that points to my area on SmugMug, so it all look more like it is “my website”. Most SmugMug pro users I have seen are not savvy enough to know how to do that on their own, so usually the URL is more like “joeblowphoto.smugmug.com”, which I feel detracts from the focus on MY branding. I also tweaked the SmugMug page layout until it more closely matched the look and feel of the rest of my web site, and I could have gone really nuts by integrating my CSS and defining ONE look and feel across both sites, but I chose to be semi-lazy and just used the basic controls available via the SmugMug account settings.  After setting some basic print prices and services I wanted to offer I had a gallery all ready to start taking on paying customers immediately.

You can check out the results on my Tonkinese cat photographs gallery.

–Don