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!

With Google getting more and more aggressive about wanting web sites to be quick to load (particularly on mobile), we often find ourselves trying to find even the smallest of tweaks to nudge up that page speed score even if by a tiny bit. Here is a quick trick you can do completely on your own, without having to ask a developer, that will probably bump up your Google PageSpeed score by a couple of points. First a short disclaimer: this trick is only applicable if you have enabled the Yahoo! Badge in your Store Manager, under Live Insights & App Gallery. Before you start, you may want to check your site's Google PageSpeed (the home page is a good place to start) both as a benchmark, and also to get a glimpse at how fast (or slow) Google believes your site (or home page) is. Here is the link: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ Ok, so if you did enable the Yahoo! Badge, your site includes a small Yahoo Live Store badge, much like this: When you h...

Now that hopefully most of you you have your stores secured (if not and need help, we offer a Secure Storefront Preparation Service here ), you may have been faced with the question of how to reference files (images, CSS, JavaScript, src) if those files are stored on your Yahoo! store's web hosting account. Obviously using the old HTTP: method won't work, so something like this < img src="http://site.ytimes.com/image.jpg" /> will not work. Nor can you simply change the http: part to https: , because as of this writing, only the store editor portion of a Yahoo! Store can be made secure, the web hosting portion cannot. First a side note: if this sounds totally Greek to you because you have never heard of the web hosting part of your Yahoo! Store, you may have a legacy Yahoo! store account and not a Merchant Solution one. With a legacy store account you will only have the store editor part and no hosting account, in which case none of this applies to you. ...

You probably received an email from Google announcing that starting in October of 2017, sites that cannot be accessed via HTTPS will be flagged in Chrome as not secure. This is part of Google's push to make the entire Internet secure. To answer this call, Yahoo is working hard on making HTTPS available to all stores and it should be available shortly; definitely well before the deadline set by Google. In some cases, stores will simply be able to flip a switch and make their site secure (conforming). However, other stores, most notably highly customized ones will need extra effort making sure they are ready for the switch. What if your site is switched to HTTPS but it is not entirely secure? If - when it becomes available - you switch your site over to HTTPS but not all parts of the site are secure, visitors to the site will still see a note informing them that the site is not secure. They may, and often will, also receive popups warning them of insecure content and asking if the...

Way back when - I'm not sure if this is still true today - when you signed up for a new Yahoo! Store account, before you could do anything in your new store, there was a brief tutorial on how to use the editor. Part of this tutorial showed you how to create sections (category pages), sub-sections (sub-category pages), and items (product pages), thereby introducing to the new store owner or user the idea of a well-planned store hierarchy. This was before breadcrumbs were even a thing, but it laid the foundation for that and much more. Recently, our team-mates and I found ourselves having to explain more and more how store hierarchy works, how it affects breadcrumbs (and multi breadcrumbs), contextual navigations (more on this later) and possibly SEO, so I decided to put all these thoughts together in this brief overview and tutorial. What is store structure? Strictly speaking, store structure is determined by how your store's home page, top category pages, sub-category pages, f...

We're continuing to get tons of questions to explain the difference between responsive, adaptive and dedicated mobile.  This tells me there's still quite a lot of confusion on what these all are and which one might be best for you to choose. What are the differences? Dedicated Mobile : a dedicated mobile site is entirely separate from the desktop site with a separate URL, most frequently a sub-domain, such as m.yoursite.com . Usually a piece of JavaScript code detects that the page is loaded from a mobile device, and it makes a redirect to the mobile equivalent of the page. Responsive : a responsive site displays the exact same pages that you see from a desktop computer as well as any other device the site is viewed from, e.g. laptop, tablet, mobile phone. Using media queries, css, and/or JavaScript, the page is set up to "respond" to the screen size and/or device it is displayed on thereby making the page still usable on a smaller screen. You can typica...

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 ...