JewelryArtistDirect (JAD) Mall Features:
Website Tour, Gallery Tour, Search
As JAD continues to evolve and add features, we will update specific requirements for those features here. Please verify that your site stays current with the requirement for these JAD features so that you can get the most out of JAD that is possible.
Last Update: 9/21/07
Web Site Tour
This feature allows shoppers to quickly preview all of the web sites. The web site tour and the gallery tour share a variable table. Your site is either in both of these or in neither of these 2 features. To be included in the website tour, you must have a reasonable load time and your site can not "pop" the JAD frame.
1) the load time must be reasonable.
We've negated this to a large part, in that the user can (and will) just click next and blow right by your site if it is taking too long. But you really should work on your site so that it is not taking longer than the other sites to load, or you will be missing visitors!
Clear out your cache, so your site is not loading fast on your PC because you already have parts of it in memory, then go through the site tour and see how long your site takes to load as compared to others. If you are slower, do some work on it. Use the "getting on the web" section of the board to ask questions of others re how to fix it.
2) no frame popping code.
The tour should work so that a person viewing the sites can move around in a site to see if they are interested or not - if not, they should be able to click next and move on. Sites with "frame popping" code mess up the tour by removing that top frame with the "next" button. You are not able to move on to see the other sites.
If your site uses frames, you need to set your targets to self, so you don't pop the frame. It is also ok to have those pages open in a new window. The test is, can the person browsing hit next and move on - if they can't, your site will not be included in the website tour (and therefore also not in the gallery tour). Please use the "getting on the web" section of the board to ask questions of others re how to fix it.
Gallery Tour
This feature allows shoppers to quickly preview work from each of the artists. The web site tour and the gallery tour share a variable table. Your site is either in both of these or in neither of these 2 features. To be included in the gallery tour, you must provide us with properly sized images in .jpg format.
You need to provide 3 images -
1 image no larger than 300 pixels wide by 265 pixels tall
2 images no larger than 220 pixels wide by 265 pixels tall
If you need help with this, please use the "taking jewelry pictures" section of the board to ask questions of others re how to size them. You can also find a link to "easy thumbnails" there.
If you want to update your existing pictures, please send them to me in an email.
Search
The goal with JAD's search feature is to allow shoppers to zero in on products they wish to purchase as quickly as possible. Just like lovely plants growing where you don't want them are "weeds", pages that are not serving this purpose are "garbage results". To cut down on these irrelevant results, search parameters are set for each site, to cull out things from the search results like link pages, non product pages, etc. If you make major changes to your site, you should ask to have your parameters reset.
To get the most out of the search feature, you need to know a little about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search is created by a "spider" or "robot" that crawls all of the JAD sites and indexes what it finds. Some things our search spider does not like, and which will prevent it from progressing through your site to index it properly, include -
1) using java applets for your nav menus instead of "real links". Our spider can not follow the applets to find the additional pages. You either need to change your nav system or simply put some "real links" on the page for the spider to follow.
2) our spider does not follow links it feels are going "off-site". If you want all of your pages to be indexed, you must use consistent and full paths throughout your site.
3) if your site spans mulitple urls, the spider has to be told about each specific one. If you are using a "splash page" and then sending people off to a different url to shop, both urls have to be added to the parameters. If we call the URL that is linked to on your A-Z entry the "primary url", then that page must have a full path link on it to the "secondary url".
Some other things you should know -
1) if you don't like how your site appears on the site map, your entry is coming from your page's title tag. Just change it in your metadata and it will correct itself the next time the spider re-indexes.
2) text contained in HREF's (links) will get indexed, but will not get considered in the search results. This prevents words that are in the nav menu from pulling non-relevant entries into the search results.
3) if your page is just images, there is nothing for the search engine to index! You must have text associated with each image if you want to see the items listed in the search results. If each image links out to a detail page for the item with text, those will get indexed. If each image links out to just a larger image - no text, that will not get indexed. If you have text both places, we will set it up so only the first level indexes, so we do not get duplicate entries in the results.
4) the spider re-indexes every Monday night.
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