Champagne Winners

Hi there Just a quick note to thank all clients for their recent efforts and to announce that the 3 lucky winners of the fantastic Ruinart Rose champagne are:

Luke Hollingworth - www.artbypeople.co.uk

Catriona Nason - www.artyprints.co.uk

Alex Sharp - www.watergatestreetgallery.co.uk

Happy boozing!

James

Christmas Opening Times

Just to let you know our office opening times over the Christmas period. We are all going to be downing tools from close of business on the 23rd December until 4th January. During this period the usual out of hours remote support will be provided for any critical issues.

Have a fantastic holiday and happy New Year.

Fix your estimated delivery date for the Christmas period

Customers are provided with an estimated delivery date during the order process, in the basket and the checkout. We realise that this can cause some problems over the Christmas period, so we have added a way for you to easily override this estimate with a fixed delivery date.

1. Log in to the MagnoliaSoft admin
2. Select the store you wish to edit (only required if you have more than 1 store)
3. From the left menu, click content and then click the snippets button
4. Scroll down to the basket snippets and click edit next to the Estimated delivery date override snippet
5. Click in the snippet content box, click the Source button and provide the exact text you want to display as your estimated delivery text, for example Tuesday 22 December
6. Click save, and reload your store using the link in the bottom right of the screen

NB: Any text you enter in this snippet overrides the estimated delivery dates, until you disable the snippet again. So don't forget to disable it when you want to revert to automatic delivery estimates!

You can update this as often as you require.

You may want to see what other snippets are available, they are an easy way to replace or add content to predefined areas on your store.

SEO first steps

There are a number of very basic SEO steps that we recommend clients perform when starting their SEO strategy. None of these activities are going to revolutionise your rankings overnight but they do form a small part of established SEO best practice:

• Submission to Yahoo! Directory Submit. For web sites that do not feature adult content or services, the Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted. For each listing accepted into the Directory, there is a recurring annual fee of US$299 to maintain the listing in the Directory for the subsequent year. You can begin this process by clicking here.
• Submission to the Annual Business.com Directory Listings. Annual Directory Inclusion listings are a simple way to list your product or service on Business.com for an entire year for just $299. You can begin this process by clicking here.
• Submission to Gimpsy for $49. If the site is not approved, you will be refunded 20 USD. You can begin this process by clicking here.
• Submission to Zoominfo for Free. You can begin this process by clicking here.
• Submission to DMOZ for Free. You can begin this process by clicking here.

Grouping items on the product picker

We recommend that you offer simple choices to your customers, otherwise sales can be affected. However, if you choose to offer a large selection of printing options, then you may want to 'group' them into logical categories, to make them easier to find.

For example, if you offer 30 different types of frames, you may wish to group them into 'wooden', 'classic', 'modern', 'light', 'dark', etc.

Magnolia Soft allows you to group sizes, frames, mounts, glazes and finishes. An example can be seen here, where the different size options have been 'grouped' according to the number of panels it is made out of.

This is easy to achieve:

1. Log in to the admin tools
2. If prompted, select the store you wish to edit
3. From the left menu, select printing options, followed by the publisher which offers the print options you wish to group
4. Select the component type you wish to group (size / frame / mount / glaze / finish)
5. Using the check-boxes, and the 'New tag' input, tag the components with the group names you wish them to appear in. You can use any names
6. Test your changes by visiting a product on your store

Additional Artist Search Functionality Released

As promised, we've improved the Artist search functionality further, allowing you to rapidly narrow down your search results using the artists surname.

The following screen grab highlights the new functionality:

So, if I am searching for an artist called Thomas Bewick, I begin typing his surname and the results are all reduced as follows:

The results then continue to filter, until there is only one possible option left.

This functionality will help improve the speed with which users can navigate through your artists profiles.

New artist page layouts designed to improve SEO

We've recently redesigned the way our core application handles the display of Artists, their biographies and their artworks.

Our primary objective was to improve the SEO of each artists name, boosting the page rank and link juice that each artist passes through to their specific works of art.

We were also keen to improve the usability and searchability for web browsers, removing the automatic pre-fix filtering we previously used.

The following screen grabs highlight the ways in which we have developed the application:

You can visit this page here.

Once you click through from the main search page, you are now presented with an Artist Summary page containing Biographies, Popular Keywords, Categorisation of works, Popular Images:

You can visit this page here.