Add a favicon to your store
A favicon, that little colored picture next to the address bar in your browser, is not something that you may thing is important to your store. True enough, it is not going to sell shirts for you,. It is however an important part of your overall branding and a nother way to differentiate you from the pack. It gets displayed every time your store is visited in someones browser, but more importantly, it gets put against your store in anyone's bookmark list.
A Favicon is one of the smallest images you will every create at only 16 x 16 pixels in size, yet if you get it right, it will be instantly recognisable. A favicon can be either a Gif image or and .ico file. There are plenty of tools out there to create such an image, however the one that I use is a simple, free webservice at http://www.favicon.cc. You can create an icon completely from scratch using their simple grid based tool, or you can upload a file to be sampled and converted. Either way, the control that you have over the final result is terrific.
To give you some inspiration or at least a head start, click on the yellow rubber ducky to see some of the favicons that I have created for you to use.
To get you chosen favicon onto your store, just add the following HTML: to your Base HTML in the store admin Custom HTML page
<link href="http://www.australele.com/usw/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" />
Comments (3) 08.02.2008. 04:14
Why I love CSS
Those of you that spend any time in the Printfection Forums will no that I mak no secret of the fact that I love CSS. I love the way that it listens to me, I love the way that it always does what I ask and I especially love the freedom that it gives me to be creative. For some of you though, CSS is still a mysterious thing that feels like another world. Through this site and its collection of articles, as well as the many questions answered at the Forum, I have tried to make CSS as friendly as possible for everyone, and I do see some really great examples of people taking the standard themes and changing some of the colors and the page background to end up with something pretty good.
For example have a look at Oorah Graphics store. I'm not sure who's store this is, but notice the way that they have changed the colors to suit the military designs. What I don't often see however, is people taking the standard themes and turning them into something quite different.
Continue reading Comments (1) 07.02.2008. 01:46
Speed test your store
One of the things you will want to keep an eye on with your Printfection store is how quickly it loads. Nothing turns off a potential shopper more than waiting around for a store to load. If like me, you live on the other side of the world and don't exactly have the fasted highspeed link, you will be used to things taking a little bit of time, but even so, more than about 8 seconds, and I'm away. So just how fast or slow is your store loading. You could just refresh your browser and start counting or you could use a fantastic web site tool to gain a really great insight into the true performance of your store.
One of the best sites that I have found for just this purpose is Pingdom Tools, a free set of web-based tools for webmasters and other web-curious people that can perform graphical website load time, ping and traceroute tests.
Continue reading Comments (0) 03.02.2008. 01:42
