Major Site Overhaul
Just finished a massive upgrade throughout the website. Tons of new features to make the visitor experience a more streamlined and positive one. Full details after the jump.
When I started the week out I only intended to add credit card processing directly to my website so that customers didn’t have to go through a confusing PayPal checkout after they had already “checked out” on my site. Well, one thing led to another and in the end I put a lot more time and effort into upgrading all kinds of things to enhance the user experience. Here’s the complete list of upgrades:
- Pop-up captions with enlarged text in the gallery pages. Just hover your mouse over the images in the galleries in order to see the captions.
- These image captions now contain direct links to the print store. Before, a lot of people were getting lost between the gallery and print store. Now, as soon as you move your mouse over an image, a big link pops up that says “Click here to browse prints.” Much clearer than before.
- Another mouse-hover feature: when you move your mouse over an image, a “Full-Screen” button pops up in the upper-right corner of the image. This button expands the gallery to a full page, enabling you to see larger versions of the images.
- On the shopping side of things, it’s now possible to checkout without creating an account at the print store. Previously lots of customers balked at creating yet another account somewhere, so they just didn’t bother. Now it’s much easier to checkout using the “Guest Checkout” feature.
- One Page Checkout. All customer checkouts now go through the much-simplified one-page check out. All shipping, billing, and payment information is one page. No more clicking through page after page after page to complete your order
- And the big mama: I implemented inline credit card processing directly on the site, encrypted using incredibly secure 128-bit SSL. This is a huge step, simplifying both my credit card processing, as well as the checkout for customers. Previously, when a customer confirmed an order on my site, he was taken to a PayPal page where he could use his credit card to pay. Except PayPal made it difficult to find the spot to pay with a credit card and not a PayPal account. It was confusing and annoying for me and my customers. Now customers use their credit cards directly on my site as part of the checkout process, and once they confirm the order, they are all done. Ahh, the beauty of simplicity.
If anyone has any feedback on these new features, I’d love to hear it.
