Mr. Chris asks about showing multiple product pictures on a Yahoo! Store
Mr. Chris,
See, you ask me a pretty simple question via email and I'll turn it into content for my blog! (Surf City Mr. Tom take note...)
SHAMELESS PLUG: If you want answers like this in person, you need to come to our new Ystore101 seminars coming up in Los Angeles in early April and in San Francisco in late April and on the East Coast a little bit after that. Play stump the Ystore geeks and improve your store for way less than the cost of a basic redesign! More on the seminars after I wake up...
BOOK NEWS: Finished the 2nd draft of the YAHOO STORE! FOR DUMMIES book about a month ago and I just got back from the beach.
Ahhhhhhhhhh... Mar 22 is release date of the book (I think). Buy my book at Amazon here...
MULTIPLE IMAGES ON A SINGLE PRODUCT PAGE
When I have multiple high-end products in multiple colors and I don't
want to hack some RTML, I would make a separate object for each pic
(each color) and stick that ID in the CONTENTS field of the product
page. You must be in advanced mode of the Store Editor to see these
fields, button, settings, etc.
The way these ADDITIONAL COLOR PIX (objects) will display on the product pages (thumbnails with links to bigger pics) is determined by whether or not your product pages have the LEAF setting turned to YES or NO as well as what TEMPLATE the pics pages use.
If on the product page, the page is set to LEAF=YES, these additional pics (IDs in the CONTENTS field) will display according to the Leaf Settings on the CONFIG pagw which you access by clicking the CONFIG button on the EDIT NAV BAR.
If LEAF=NO on the product page, these additional product pics will display using the CONTENTS-ELEMENTS, CONTENTS-FORMAT, COLUMNS settings on the global VARIABLES page which you can access using the VARIABLES button on the EDIT NAV BAR.
Please note: If you use the ABSTRACT button and create these pic pages by hand (yuck!) the pages will be NIL templates (instead of PAGE. templates) which won't allow folks to click on the thumbnails to see bigger pictures. If you use the ITEM button to create these additional product pages (again, yuck!) you'l have to turn off the product info, too.
ALTERNATIVE METHOD: You can always make separate products for each color of high-end products that come in multiple vartiations but doing this can create a product editing nightmare if your products change often. Also, if you have the exact same text in the CAPTION field on multiple products you can hurt yourself by falling under Duplicate Content Penalty (or filter) for Google and some of the other search engines.
Here's how I would do show multiple product images on a single Yahoo! Store product page:
* Use the CONTENTS field on each product page to show these objects on the product page
* Use the DATABASE UPLOAD feature to create these IDs / pages
* Use the PATH field to place these additional pix inside the products that they go with by putting the product's ID in the CONTENTS field
* Use the BULK IMAGE UPLOAD feature (under CONTROLS) to magically hook up the images with the objects. Name your pic image files the same thing as the corresponding page ID, zip 'em all up in a ZIP file and upload them to the CONTROLS page.
For example, if the product's ID was seatxyz I'd make a CSV file in EXCEL with a row for each pic like this:
ID, path, name
seatxyz-pic1, seatxyz, Seat XYZ Red Leather Racing Seat with KEYWORD-LOADED DESCRIPTION
seatxyz-pic2, seatxyz, Seat XYZ Black Leather Racing Seat with ...
seatxyz-pic3, seatxyz, Seat XYZ Fuschia Leather Racing Seat with ...
seatabc-pic1, seatabc, Seat ABC Purple Leather Racing Seat with ...
Then I would rename my JPEGS seatxyz-pic1.jpg, seatxyz-pic2.jpg, seatxyz-pic3.jpg, etc.
NOTE: You could always add a NOSEARCH tag to the CAPTION fields of the additional pics to keep them from coming up in your store's site search results. Use this tag: <!--nosearch--> inside the caption field of the additional product pix.
More in bit,
Rob
Rob Snell / Ystore.com
Starkville, Mississippi USA
attend Ystore101 Seminars in LA & San Francisco and buy my book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764588737/sr=8-2/qid=1140275737/ref=sr_1_2/103-4498188-6183843?%5Fencoding=UTF8
