Multiple Domains

Users often write in that they have multiple domains that they want to use with their SmugMug site. It is often something like yourdomain.com and all of the .net, .biz, or .org variations.

It also can be for various spellings or business areas like yourdomain.com, yourdomainphotos.com, and yourdomainphotography.com are common.

First the bad news. SmugMug only supports one domain name at a time.

The good news is that there are ways to make this work. Some of them are simple and others are a bit more complicated.

For this help page, I am going to refer to yourdomain.com as the primary. All of the other variations are secondary.

First, you can daisy chain the domain names together using CNAMEs and or Forwarding. You set up the primary domain name using the CNAME instructions. Then forward or CNAME the secondary domains to the primary.

Warning
This does not always work. The reason it does not work is that some domain hosts send the secondary domain name to SmugMug and that conflicts with the way proper CNAMEd domains appear. Very few domain hosts do things right and pick up the primary domain and send it along.

In reference to forwarding some people have tried masking with mixed results. Most do not work.

The next and possibly the best option is to host a page on the internet somewhere. Your domain host may offer free or very low fees for simple web page space. Once you have a page, you can add this HTML to the page:
Example HTML Redirect
```
// This is pasted into the HTML of the page
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Your Page Title</title>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.yourprimarydomain.com"></HEAD>
<BODY>
Optional page text here.  I use please wait while you are redirected to my site or something like it in case there is a delay in the forward.
</BODY>
</HTML>
```
After you have that page setup, point each of the secondary domains at this page. What will happen is that visitors going to one of the secondary domains will be sent to this redirect page. Then the redirect page will instantly send them to the primary domain that is linked to your SmugMug account.

A variation on the above is to create an Intro page hosted on a web server. This page can include things like a banner, slideshow, and a link to your SmugMug site.

Example HTML Intro Page

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>


<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>yourdomain.com</title>


<style type="text/css">
<!--
body {
	color: #FFFFFF;
}
body {
	background-color: #000000;
}

//For help setting up the slideshow, please see this site:  http://wiki.smugmug.com/display/SmugMug/Flash Slideshow

<body>
<object align="middle" height="600" width="600">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.smugmug.com/ria/ShizamSlides-2007090601.swf?AlbumID=XXXXXXXX&transparent=true&crossFadeSpeed=500&clickUrl=http://www#46;yourprimarydomain#46;com">
<param name="wmode" value="transparent">
<param name="bgcolor" value="000000">
<param name="allowNetworking" value="all">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always">
<embed src="http://www.smugmug.com/ria/ShizamSlides-2007090601.swf?AlbumID=XXXXXXXXX&transparent=true&crossFadeSpeed=500&clickUrl=http://www#46;yourprimarydomain#46;com"     wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="always" allowNetworking="all" height="600" width="600"></object>

</body></html>

Another option is if you have access to the web server itself, you can use what is called an htaccess redirect. There are a ton of resources on the internet for doing this properly. Instead of rewriting the instructions, use a Google Search there are plenty of places you can copy the code for your particular server setup. Another variation on this hosted page is to create an HTML intro page. On this page you can include a banner, slideshow, and a link to your primary domain. * Once one of the above is set up correctly. You can use the custom domain swapper to change from yournickname.smugmug.com to yourcustomdomain.com URL. That way anyone reaching your SmugMug URL'd page will automatically switch to see your custom domain.

A quick warning!
Please be aware that this can present problems if something happens and your custom domain quits working. There are times when your domain may go down. Having this code in can cause your SmugMug site to be unaccessible even though it is still live. You may have to have a Support Hero remove the code until the domain starts working again.

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