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Ready For My Close Up

September 19th, 2018 - Posted by Ellen Hurwitch, Director of Operations - The Americas

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Earlier this year, I was asked for a copy of my bio along with a photograph. Not having a current photo, I asked my fiancé to take a new one of me. Once I saw it, I realized it really was time for a refresh. The prior bio photo was pretty dated, having been taken at least 6 years prior. This picture that you see of me on this site is the new photo. The one on my linked in page, the old photo.

One reason we all get a haircut or buy new clothes is so that we can update our look. Maybe make it more fashionable, or maybe it’s because we are just ready for a change. It’s still me, but I like to think of it as being the new and improved me! It’s also exciting! I like to see the changes and it compels me to continue to make positive changes to look and feel good.

Here’s another example: cars! When you go out to buy a new car today, there are several options now available that weren’t even thought of 5 or 10 years ago. The whole look and feel of these changes are created to engage you as a customer into making a new purchase.

OK, so do you see where I’m heading here? When is the last time you looked at the storefronts you’ve created with your web to print system and decided to do a refresh? A few years ago, we at RedTie did our own refresh which enables you to upgrade the appearance of your storefront pages. We call it Edit Print V2. It allows you the option to change the look and feel of the pages where your customers go to personalize and purchase products. More choices were added to allow for additional branding. In addition, we added a text editor and allow the option for rotating and moving images. These last 2 items may not be advantageous to B2B sites but are certainly a welcome addition to B2C sites! However, just because these new features might not be appropriate for those B2B sites, a refresh of all sites is certainly worth reviewing. The most effective reason to upgrade a BURL (branded URL) could be to boost your customers’ engagement and increase the interaction with your end users.

For B2C sites, refreshes are good for your SEO strategy. Google rewards fresh content but you do not need to do more than a refresh to keep “producing” content.

Another way to refresh your web to print storefront is with the use of HTML5, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and/or JavaScript. Each of these will enable you to make your storefront stand out from the crowd. You can use this to create pop-ups, where if you hover over a product it will pop up and appear larger, or you can even create a carousel, whereby a variety of images can be scrolled across the screen. To do this, it would be best to use a designer familiar with these tools. Because the carousel is created using html; it uses the twitter bootstrap CSS that you can set to load in the BURL settings. Now, if that sounded like a foreign language to you, I am sure your designer will be able to decipher the words with ease! There is another option as well. Our managed services team would be happy to help you with a refresh. You can collaborate on a look and feel and then our team can do the refresh for you.

Hopefully you’ve had a chance to look at my before and after pictures and agree that the refresh looks, well, fresh! And maybe it’s now time for your web to print storefronts to get ready for their closeup!