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!

Comments

Pre-Season Checkup

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching it's a good idea to do a general checkup on your store to be sure it's ready for prime time. Below are a few things you would want to check, along with a few add-ons that are not too major in scope, but which are often neglected and give you an edge over your competition. Can you Search and Order? Every time we do anything major in a store we test two things: whether searching and adding to cart/ordering works. You can have nice, flashy pictures, cool animation effects, a very quick loading site, anything, but if the store search is broken or you can't add to the cart or can't check out then an ecommerce site is worth nothing. Can you Order? Chances are if your checkout was completely broken you'd know about it by now, but it doesn't have to be totally broken in order to scare away potential customers. So go ahead, go to your site and first do a search and make sure it works. Then, add one or more products ...

What to expect when your redesign goes live

At Y-Times we roll out new designs, redesigns and other major upgrades to Yahoo stores on a fairly regular basis. Some of the main questions our clients ask are how to prepare for a roll-out and what to expect in terms of SEO and conversions when the changes go live? For any functional Yahoo store how well the site ranks and how well it converts are probably the two most important metrics. Since pretty much ANY change you make to any page can potentially alter either or both of these metrics, merchants may understandably feel nervous about far reaching alterations to their sites. However, when those functionality and design changes and additions are done right, there is really very little to fear. First off, what does it mean for a design or redesign to be "done right?" From the technical stand point, search engines look at the underlying structure of your site (the HTML, and increasingly also the CSS and JavaScript code) to try to extract information and meaning from i...

Bookmarklets for Yahoo Store

I was introduced to "bookmarklets" by my friend, Rob Snell, many years ago at one of the Yahoo Store conferences and they are indispensable tools in my daily work on Yahoo stores. What are "bookmarklets"? As the name suggests, bookmarklets are kind of like bookmarks in your browser, except instead of leading to a web page, they execute a small piece of JavaScript code on the current page. This is made possible by the browser's support of the "javascript:" prefix. When you point your browser to a URL, the browser figures out what to do with it: bring up a web page if the address starts with http:// or https://, connect to an ftp site if the address starts with ftp://, or in the case of javascript:, interpret and execute the JavaScript code following the colon. Typically, bookmarklets are saved either in your Favorites folder or if you use them on a daily basis like I do, in your browser's bookmarks toolbar. In essence, bookmarklets are sort ...

Search This Blog