Skip to main content

Rollover Thumbnail and Lazyload

Spice up your Yahoo! Store for the holiday season with these three great but underused features.

Rollover Thumbnails

Category pages typically show a smaller (thumbnail) version of the product (or sub-category) in some kind of a grid-like arrangement. These thumbnails, by definition, are rather small so you have to make sure those images are detailed and interesting enough to entice the visitor to click through.

But what if you could show an additional view of each product before the visitor clicks its thumbnail? Even without any customization every Yahoo! store already has the option to store and display an additional image for each product: a closeup, a lifestyle shot, a model, etc. You can do this by uploading an additional photo into the inset property. This photo will then show on the item detail page, but only there. With our Rollover Thumbnails you can feature these secondary images right on the category pages. When the visitor hovers his or her mouse over the product thumbnail, if a secondary image is available, the primary image will fade into this secondary image. When the mouse leaves the thumbnail, the image fades back into the original (primary) image.

Completely automatic, once this function is installed in your Yahoo! Store all you have to do is upload your secondary shots into the inset property.
Order it here and get a 10% discount.

Lazy Load Category Pages

Category pages usually have very little content, but because they often contain thumbnail images for each link, the overall download size of those thumbnails may "weigh down" the category page making it slow to load. Speed it up using "Lazy Loading"! With this feature, only those thumbnails which are visible, i.e. those above the "fold" (the visible part of the page), are downloaded from the server. The rest of the images are not downloaded until they are needed. Our "Lazy Loading" script waits for the visitor to scroll down the page before instantly displaying the images for the portion of the page which is now in view.  Only at that point does the next set of (visible) images get downloaded from the server, leading to a more efficient page load.
Order it here and get a 10% discount.

Enhanced Checkout Error Reporting
Usability experts agree, and studies clearly show that when shoppers make a mistake at checkout, they need extra help and attention to show what needs to be corrected. The fact is, people just don't read anything that's on the screen, plain and simple. What's more, if the error message is long, they notice it even less. When shoppers don't know what's wrong but can't continue the checkout process, they get frustrated and may simply leave their shopping cart - costing you business.
Our Enhanced Error Reporting tool overcomes all of these limitations. It makes the error message text larger so it's easier to notice. It shortens the error messages, showing your customer just the essential information, i.e. the problems to be corrected. And finally, it removes the miniscule asterisks and instead, puts a noticeable red border around all the fields that require the shopper's attention.
Order it here and get a 10% discount.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Catalog Request

You may have noticed that both the Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation pages are now customizable through Checkout Manager. If you have already customized your Checkout Manager pages (or had someone customize them for you), and would like to have the same custom look applied to your Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation forms, all you have to do is this: Go into Checkout Manager, click Page Configuration and then look at how your Shipping, Billing, Review, etc. pages are set up; in particular, check if you have the Top Navigation and Left Navigation enabled. Click over to the Catalog Request tab, and make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation. Don't forget to hit Save or Save & Preview , otherwise your changes will be lost. Click over to the Catalog Request Confirmation tab and there too, make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation (so if those are enabled on your other checkout p

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins

Auto-update Copyright Year

This is one of those minor, recurring questions I'm always asked (each year): to update the copyright year in sites. Whether this is the "right thing" to do or not I don't know, but here is how you can make it automatic: First, go to the Variables page (these instructions are for Yahoo! Stores), and do a search for the word "copyright" or the year that's currently displayed next to your copyright message. If you can't find it there, chances are you have a custom template and the copyright message might be coming from some place else. In that case, you'll have to track it down, but because custom templates can be set up in any which way, unfortunately you'll be on your own. Assuming you found it, replace the year with this JavaScript code: <script>document.write(new Date().getFullYear())</script> Hit Update and you should be all set!