Update Jan 5, 2012 - I have since decided to leave SmugMug in favor of Zenfolio. You can read more about my decision here.

Sometime last week I decided to undertake the huge project of starting a +SmugMug photo gallery and building it to match my wordpress site. Oh the fun it was (actually I do rather enjoy this geek stuff).

After a number of nights working till midnight I can officially say I am extremely pleased with smugmug and how everything came out. Rather than build my entire site with smugmug, I opted to keep my main wordpress site, and use smugmug for the photo gallery display and shopping cart. I did the last bit of tweaking today so that both sites closely match in design, color, and stuff.

I have almost 200 images uploaded to smugmug already, and many, many more to come as I find time to re-optimize and enhance older photos. I will leave all of the printing of my unsigned and open edition prints to Bay Labs through smugmug.

One thing I have yet to finalize is how to handle the sale of my signed and numbered prints that I print myself. Smugmug does not provide an option for sales to go through smugmug and print/ship your own orders, so I will have to look into adding separate paypal buttons to those photos that are printed by me.

Everything is live now, with links going back and forth between my wordpress site and smugmug.

After this past week, I might be considered a semi-expert now on smugmug. If anyone has any questions fire away and I’ll see if I can be of any help.