Site Information - Maui Wall Candy
August 2008
Technologies
Hosted as a SmugMug Pro Account. More Details.
Customized with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Google AdWords to create ad campaigns.
About Maui Wall Candy
Maui Wall Candy is an online photo store where I am selling the best of my photos from Maui in both print and digital formats. It is the first site I've created for my own use that actually sells something online and uses a SmugMug Pro account to handle all the order processing as well as the printing and delivery of the photos.
How It Started
The official idea for putting this site together started back in March of 2008. I was sitting in a meeting at work in a conference room we called "the closet" because it was very small and had no windows on any of the walls. We started to have a conversation about drawing fake windows on the walls for fun, and that led to thinking of putting some of our vacation photos on the walls and making them look like windows.
We opted for the second idea and each have one or two of our photos blown up to 20 x 30 poster size. I jokingly called the photos "wall candy", as in eye candy for the wall. The name kind of stuck (I guess) and we received a lot of compliments from the photos we chose from our own collections.
Thinking of doing something similar online, I started looking for ways to sell photos. I didn't want to go down that stock photo route because I wanted to target more people that have been to and love Maui rather than someone just looking for generic pictures of palm trees and beaches. So when I found SmugMug and their Pro Accounts, it seemed like a good fit.
History
Although the first thoughts of putting this site together started in March, it wasn't until July when I really started working on it. First, we had another trip to Maui in April, so that was a pleasant delay. Also, thinking about putting the site together before our trip gave me incentive to take even more photos this time.
It might sound like an exaggeration, but I literally have thousands of photos that I have taken in just the past three years while visiting to Maui. Some are mine, some my wife took, but there are a lot. That was the next delay in getting the site officially launched, going through all those photos. At the time I'm writing this, I've only gotten through most of the second Maui trip's photos and already have 50+ photos available for sale.
Once I hit that 50+ mark, I decided to flip the switch and turn on the site for the general viewing public. I still have quite a few photos to still go through, and right now I'm trying to average 5-10 new photos a day. It will probably take me about 2-3 months to get everything upload and organized the way I want it, which should include about 300 photos!!!
Features
For all the great features that a SmugMug Pro account gives you as far as managing your photos and handling the order processing, there are significant limitations for what you can do to manage content and additional features with your account. Luckily, there is a big online community and exhaustive FAQs and examples from SmugMug to make it look like a complete site.
Besides putting up a few static pages, one of things I tried out for the first time was creating a contact form without writing the backend code to process it (since you can't upload your own code or files). One of the recommended online form creators that was mentioned was EmailMeForm.com. They have a nice interface to create the boilerplate HTML for your forms, which you can later customize, and they handle the form submission and delivery of the information from the form. It seemed painless, so I decided to use it here at webnelly.com, too.
Not being able to add a heck of a lot of custom features required me to focus more on the content of the site itself, not the bells and whistles that I usually do (that's the coder and techie in me). It was a little different, writing content for a sale-orientented site for really the first time on my own, but I think it holds up well.
This is also the first site I started using Google AdWords for, since really this is the first time I'm selling anything. It was all very new at first, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.
What's Next
I still have more photos to go through, process and upload. I created a Coming Soon page to list out all the different categories I'm going to be working on. That is going to take quite a few weeks if not longer.
I'm also planning on adding a "By Location" page, where I use the keywords of each photos to list out and link to different views of the photos based on where they were taken. The keyword settings and pages are built right into SmugMug, so it's just a matter of getting enough photos posted from enough places to make that look like a full page.
SmugMug Pro accounts are offered as an annual subscription, so I did have to put up some money upfront. I would say for all the functionality you get it is well worth it, but if after that first year or two and the return on investment isn't there, I might just take the site down.
Wish me luck.