If a page on your website doesn’t load in about 8 seconds, you could be losing 30% of your site’s visitors. 30% of potential customers are lost when they get impatient and leave, likely not to return.

One cause of slow-loading pages is over-sized images. Lots of large images on a page means slower load times.

But, if you optimize each image to load as quickly as possible you dramatically reduce load times, keeping visitors at your website.

Let’s review why optimization is important:

1. What is Optimization?
2. Practical Tips

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Have you worked hard photographing or scanning products for your online store, only to find the pictures on a competitor’s site?

AspDotNetStorefront has a built-in, easy to use way to add a watermark to all your products’ pictures.

Watermarking your pictures makes them less likely to be lifted from your site and AspDotNetStorefront lets you add a simple text message or copyright notice to your pictures. You can even set the placement on pictures where the watermark will appear.

You can find this AppConfig by going to the admin side of your website and selecting:
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The default AspDotNetStorefront progress bar is an important part of the checkout progress but unless your store is pale blue, it won’t match your site.

Buy a Matching Progress Bar

• Easy to Install
• Customize Your Site in Minutes
• Over 20 Different Colors
• Only $40 with Coupon!

Coupon Code: CPB20 for 20% OFF AspDotNetStorefront Progress Bars!

Choosing the right colors is pivotal for the success of your eCommerce site.

We all have emotional responses to color – many of these these reactions are defined by our culture from the day we were born.  Pink for a baby girl and blue for a baby boy.  Bad guys wear black and good guys wear white.

Let’s explore how the use of color relates to eCommerce using a Western view of color symbolism. Each color of the spectrum is filled with symbolism and within each color the different tints and shades have many of their own associations.

Let’s take a look at where colors are used, and why.

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This article is the first in a series explaining some of the built in AspDotNetStorefront shopping cart page settings that many users don’t know about.

In this first installment, I’ll show you how to add product icons to your shopping cart.  I notice that many people don’t use this feature of ADNSF, perhaps only because it is turned off by default.

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Custom buttons add flavor and increase the impact of your site. But, firing up a graphics editor just to change some text gets old fast.

Here’s how to make custom buttons which will reduce load times and give you the ability to easily edit each button text individually.

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Why did the use of video to promote online products skyrocket by 20% last year? Because it works.

Video is educational, entertaining, and enables consumers to have a better visual understanding of the product they are purchasing, which serves to increase sales.  Video also has a far greater chance of being spread via word of mouth and attracting a much larger audience to your website.

“Will it Blend?” and a 5x Sales Increase
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Keeping up with accessibility standards makes your website usable by a much larger audience. It also allows the search engines to accurately assess your site’s content.

There are many steps to maintaining maximum website accessibility, some of which we’ll cover in future posts, but for now let’s start with arguably the most important one: Image ALT Text.

Image ALT text, contained in the ALT attribute of an image, is a written explanation of the image’s message. The text appears when that image cannot be displayed. In some browsers the text also appears as the tooltip. The HTML looks like this:

<img src=”images/vortxlogo.gif” alt=”Vortx” />

Why is ALT text important?

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After installing a new skin and getting their site just how they imagined, many of our AspDotNetStorefront clients suddenly realize that the tabs on their account registration or checkout pages don’t look right and want to know how to change them.

Here’s what you need to know about those tabs:

1. The text and the tab background is a single graphic that is not editable in String Resources or with CSS. The only way to make the tab look any different is to directly edit the graphic.

2. Each tab is a .gif found in Skins/Skin_1/Images in your site’s root directory.  To find the specific tab you’re looking for, go to the front end of your site and right click on the tab, then either view Properties to see the filename or View Image to see the image filename in the browser’s address bar.

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Product photos can make or break a customer’s desire to purchase your product.  Steer clear of these common pitfalls and get your customers one step closer to making that purchase.

Poor quality images

Manufacturers spend billions of dollars on product packaging and product image.  As an online retailer, product photos are your make-or-break chance to sell the product by visual appeal.  All too often we see photos like this one.

Poor Quality Image Example

To woo customers with the beauty of your products keep these tips in mind:

1. Don’t resample! Don’t make a small image larger with Photoshop – there is no quicker way to reduce an image’s quality. An image that is 100px by 100px was never meant to be 200px x 200px.  If you want a product photo that is larger than the image you currently have, you’ll need to get a new photo.
2. Say no to distortion! When reducing the size of an image, be sure to do it proportionally (hold down the shift key in most graphics programs) by the width and height.
3. Web resolution settings are key. Keep photos for the web at 72dpi and photos for print at 300+ dpi.  Currently monitors can’t display more than 72dpi and higher resolutions significantly increase the page load time.
4. No Photoshop Evidence!Good Photoshop work should not be visible.  If a customer sees any image retouch work they will likely assume the entire photograph was retouched and that the product may not measure up to the photograph.
5. If you are taking your own product photos keep these things in mind:
   • Use quality lighting when taking product photos (this is, perhaps, the single most important product photography lesson!)
   • Use a quality camera and tripod when taking product photos – It doesn’t have to be a fancy 12 megapixel dSLR, but it should give you the ability to control the flash, zoom, and focus.  You can’t match a tripod’s stability when hand-holding a camera and it shows!

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