Archive
Phase 2 done. On to phase 3 – Themes ahead!
We finished phase 2, are thrilled with the result and the reception, and dismayed that the rollout didn’t go flawlessly. That’s life, I guess, but we learned some lessons and will get better with our next release. Thanks for sticking with us – you really are the best customers anyone could ask for.
Phase 3 is coming right along, and should be a quick release. We’ll finish adding the new CSS code to the remaining Styles (Journal, Slideshow, Traditional, and All Thumbs) so you can continue to customize to your hearts content. Ditto for your personal homepages, community homepages, and misc other pages.
Phase 4, though, will be the really interesting one. I’m going to break company policy just this once, and talk about a future feature. We’re calling it ‘Themes’ and we’re only just beginning to flesh out how it will work. The basic idea, though, is that all smugmug accounts – Standard included – will have access to ‘Themes’ on a per-gallery basis. Think ‘Birthday Party’, ‘Halloween’, ‘Tropical Vacation’, and the like. Your entire gallery would then take on that ‘Theme’.
Even better, though, is we’ll have a great WYSIWYG interface where you can create your own themes, giving them your own names, and changing *every* detail within your gallery – from font colors to dashed lines to backgrounds. You then can save it and re-use it on any galleries you’d like. Don’t like the new green? Simply use one of the other Themes or create your own.
Note that this isn’t complete HTML and CSS control like Power Users and Pros get – you won’t be able to create your own banners for the header and remove the footer. This is purely making the gallery look & feel match the occasion behind the gallery.
No promises on when it’ll come out – we’re a ‘when it’s done’ company, so it could be quite awhile, but I wanted everyone to know that it’s coming.
Meanwhile, enjoy Phase 2. 🙂
new layout, phase 2
So we’re nearing completion (tonight, hopefully!) on phase 2 of our site design overhaul that greatly enhances the control everyone gets of the look & feel of their smugmug sites. Heavily CSS-driven, with lots of fine-grained control, it should make a lot of people happy.
I’ve posted a call for comments (inluding a preview screenshot) over on digital grin, so if you’re curious, take a look.
You can also see this thread about stylesheet changes you may want to make if you’ve customized smugmug already.
OSCON 2005: Google & Open Source
As an interesting follow-up to my post about giving back to the open-source community, the same subject came up during Chris’ session about Google and their approach to open-source software.
As you may know, Google’s got a great track record with open-source, particularly with their current Summer of Code program. Normally, I’m glad we’re not huge like Google – I like being small. But I have to admit that they have a wonderful opportunity to help the open-source community in many ways, not just financially. Looks like they’re doing well with it, too.
Interesting to hear, though, that they have some of the same thoughts and qualms about so-called “bounty” programs for open-source that I have. I’ve worried that, should we make cash contributions to certain projects, it might backfire on us. It’s pretty easy to imagine some sort of fight or, at the very least, feelings being hurt among developers as they figure out how to use the contribution. I think their approach is a sound one with Summer of Code and all of their other open-source participation, but similar things would be very hard for a tiny operation like us.
Anyway, Chris’ session was both informative and warm-and-fuzzy: Google’s doing well contributing their own code, enhancing and using existing projects, and in general, supporting open-source.
Giving back to open-source
smugmug couldn’t exist without open-source software. Lots of blood, sweat, & tears mixed liberally with open-sourced software (and a bookshelf full of O’Reilly books) = smugmug.
Now that we’re successful, though, it’s been weighing on my mind: How do we give back? We have support contracts for some of the components we use, which is nice, and we’re sponsoring OSCON 2005, which is also nice, but it’s really not enough. Some of the key components don’t have a service & support arm. And while sponsoring a conference about open-source is a nice gesture, it doesn’t put money right into developers pockets, which is really where it belongs.
We’re not successful enough (yet!) to simply hire open-source developers and pay them to continue doing what they were doing. I can’t wait until we’re at that stage, but we’re just not there yet.
So what do we do in the meantime? Simply donate cash to the projects in question? Offer to host their websites and development efforts? Maybe give them some stock in smugmug?
I’d love to hear any suggestions. And if you’re at the con and want to discuss it, look for the guy in the red smugmug hat. 🙂
We're raising prices
This was pre-announced a few months ago, but it’s finally happening sometime this week (Thursday night? Friday?) if we get everything tested in time.
Here’s the deal, short and sweet:
If you already have an account, or sign up before these changes go into effect, you WILL be grandfathered for as long as we possibly can. (Years, at the very least). So if you were planning on signing up, or upgrading your existing account, now is the time to do it. You’ll “lock in” current prices in on your account for years, rather than having to pay the new prices.
Just to be very clear here, we’re not doing this because our company is in trouble. smugmug is profitable, growing rapidly, and has no debt or outside investment. It’s solely owned by the employees, and we’re all thrilled with how it’s going.
Instead, we’re doing it because there are some new things coming, such as partnerships, which necessitate a slight rise in prices. We don’t anticipate raising prices again for years, until something like inflation catches up with us.
Mac OS X Tiger – problem city?
We’re pretty OS agnostic at smugmug, and we like it that way. We have customers that use every operating system, so I think it’s wise that smugmug’s employees do the same. So everyone has Windows desktops, Mac OS X laptops, and Linux boxes abound.
I’m the only one who hasn’t upgraded to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), though, I think. Everyone else at smugmug jumped at the opportunity and quickly installed. Soon, I heard howls. Turns out that 10.4.0 was quite buggy. (We kept a box or two on Panther for testing, but everyone’s primary laptops were upgraded by their respective owners). Lucky me for not upgrading. 🙂
After 10.4.1 came out, the howls went away. Apparently not for everyone, though, as Jeremy Zawodny is having big problems of his own.
I’m dying to upgrade, beacause the geek in me can’t help it, but it sounds like it’s still not worth the hassle. I’ve been telling people for years that Mac OS X is the best OS on the planet, but maybe it’s backsliding a little? Anyone else still having major problems?
Vendor lock-in sucks: Making it easy to leave smugmug
Most people these days “get” photo sharing, particularly people doing the whole internet thing here in the Valley. They nod their heads politely while I describe all the neat features we have at smugmug. Some aren’t unique, some are. But the thing that always stops them in their tracks is the fact that we make it easy to leave smugmug by exposing a rich API, offering CD/DVD backups of your photos, and the like.
“What?!” they exclaim, “If you don’t achieve lock-in, your customers will leave as soon as there’s something better!”.
“Yes,” I explain, “that’s sorta the whole point.”
And it is. We call smugmug the ultimate in photo sharing, and I’m quite confident that we are. But if we don’t have to work at keeping it great, we’ll soon fall behind and cease to be great. Success can kill your company, my father always says, and I agree.
If, on the other hand, falling behind means that it’s easy for people to stop using our service, it will keep us on our toes. Our customers won’t get pissed at us because we’ve started to suck – they’ll just leave. And that hits us where it counts.
So we’ve made it easy to leave, and we’ll continue to make it even easier. It’s our way of saying that we’re committed to being the ultimate in photo sharing for a long long time – and if we aren’t, kiss us goodbye.
Time to bite the bullet: Death to IE5!
Long overdue, I’m declaring Internet Explorer 5 officially dead. The browsing percentage of IE5 (Windows & Mac) is crazy low at smugmug, yet it keeps us from doing all sorts of cool stuff. We’re going to phase it out gradually over maybe a month, but that’s it.
Firefox is free (and preferred!). Internet Explorer 6 is free. Safari comes on every Mac. IE7 is going into open beta soon (?).
Sorry, IE5, but your time has come. It wasn’t fun knowing you and we’re glad to see you leaving the building.
I think everyone will enjoy the new features we have planned for smugmug. Stay tuned.
Word-of-mouth advertising
As a follow-up to my post on Buggy Games, I think it brings up a telling point for any business and a key to smugmug’s success.
Word-of-mouth is an incredibly powerful thing.
For a video game, they have a very small window (not quite as small as a Hollywood movie, but still very small) in which to attract a lot of purchases. If they don’t, the game flops. In the case of Battlefield 2, if the game crashes constantly when your average customer gets it home, your word-of-mouth campaign comes to a screeching halt before it’s even gotten started.
With smugmug, it just doesn’t make sense to run expensive TV campaigns and the like to get our brand and product out there. We’d have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get even a single customer, who then only pays us $30 per year. What to do?
It’s shockingly simple. There’s no great secret. If you build it, they will come. Not in waves upon waves, at first, but they will come.
The end result of the above formula is a fanatical customer base who does your marketing and advertising for you. They’re so enthralled with your great product and great service, they shout it from the mountain tops.
How great would it have been if I could, instead of lamenting the quality of Battlefield 2, have told the world how great it is? Bought copies as gifts for my friends?
We’ll try to never let something like that happen with smugmug.
Speak of the devil…
Looks like Basecamp 2 is already making progress. Man, I’m enjoying using it.
And it’s great to see another product that does gradual feature rollouts like we do at smugmug. Big monolithic releases are such a pain: they break things, they require massive amounts of testing, they take longer to get out that you can possibly imagine. Our philosophy is “release early, release often” and it looks like 37signals is the same way. Good for them!
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 