I’ve had my photographs and my website for my photography business on SmugMug for over 10 years now, but I think this year, I’m finally going to migrate to WordPress. When I started my photography website, I didn’t actually even use WordPress. Over the years, I have a various times toyed with moving the photos over to WordPress but the convenience of a dedicated photography oriented platform was great enough that I didn’t mind the extra cost each year.
Today WordPress with Divi is actually easier to use and much more flexible than SmugMug for my purposes. I do regularly develop sites with WordPress so that is definitely part of the story. The functionality has also come a long way in the past ten years as well. Even little things like dragging images into your browser to upload them were cutting edge back in 2007, but now WordPress and most websites that upload photos have that feature.
Over the years I have also started to use Google Drive as the delivery solution for my photography clients, making the SmugMug part of my workflow a bit redundant. I haven’t completely figured out how Drive and WordPress are going to dovetail in my new workflow, but I am excited to explore some of the possibilities.
In the end this blog was the catalyst to actually make me take the situation in hand. Seth Godin blogs every day and promotes blogging everyday. I wanted to try that but didn’t really have a great home for doing that. My peterroise.com domain was tied up with SmugMug so I couldn’t really use that. So as I thought about the many aspects of my current situation I decided that getting my domain back and starting to use it for blogging was as good an excuse as any to move away from SmugMug. SmugMug has always been good to me, but at least for me it’s time to say goodbye. I have to admit that a big part of that is related to the fact that I am a WordPress web developer, so it won’t be true for everyone. Still, the WordPress tools are so much better today, and the benefits of flexibility and of ownership are worth considering.
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