Shopfront Advice

Submitted by demirep77 on Thu, 10/09/2009 - 1:11am
My hut hits leave a little bit to be desired, so I am wondering what I can do differently (aside from move to a different hut - I have a specific one in mind but I'm involved in a "war" right now and have had to spend nearly every np to my name on weapons upgrades...so the hut move will have to wait) The hut I am in isn't -horrible- in my opinion. It is directly to the left of the Shop Wizard, so I do like that it's centralized. I've unfortunately dropped down to 3rd from the top in my hut over the last few days (which is a drag) although the top of that hut is inconsequential (they have a lupe and some text, that's it) and the 2nd shop in that hut, frankly, doesn't have as "cool" a category as I have.....SO I am convinced that it's my shop front that's the problem. My hut: http://www.neopets.com/market.phtml?type=list&limit=570 Does my "Fashion Emporium" banner at the top of my shop really suck that badly? What can I do differently? And would it be totally weird to mail the person above me in that hut to see what his/her hut hits have been like in order to see if it's me or the hut that's the problem?
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Whatever, Dmitri. Mine are currently at 3. THREE! Yes, 3.
bête noire (bet-NWAHR) noun: An object or person that is particularly disliked or that is to be avoided
demirep77 | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 12:00pm |

Ok that's terrible. Ill take a quick look in abit lol
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saudor | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 12:03pm |

and I know that yesterday was a special kind of pure evil because of the lag and all - but my FINAL hut hits for the day were 5. Which is/was unusually low even for me (I usually end out the day with like 40) oh, and someone else just bumped me down one more in that hut. the good news is that if just ONE more person bumps me down one upgrade will get me back to the top.
bête noire (bet-NWAHR) noun: An object or person that is particularly disliked or that is to be avoided
demirep77 | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 12:07pm |

Ok here goes: ****** WARNING ****** proceed with extreme caution ************* The font on the mall banner is great, but the font on your banner looks like chinese or something lol. In other words, it's hard to read. It goes well with the theme of shenku but not really effective in pulling members. Here's what i found: On this site, I used size 15 BOLD RED TIMES NEW ROMAN FONT. People STILL missed it. And it's not like I cluttered the page up with text everywhere. It was clean and right at the top BUT people STILL missed. I made it even blink too In other words, many young people are dumbasses or their bums are so freakin heavy that they cant get their arse up to read it more slowly (translation: lazy) or they just think it's fun to waste my time, or all of the above. Myriad Pro is a font that i use alot. It comes free when you install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 which is also free. It's clean, simple, and easy to read. Animation is great but not when you use it to scroll through features. Features are very important and should be avaliable in one glance and the user shouldnt have to wait to see what else is in the shop. In other words, instead of animating the text, try animating some of the graphics itself. But keep the colors around the same or else you'll get a grossly pixelated pile of junk that take 10 years to download - yuck :P Catalogues: I dont know how well it's going for you but I hate it with a passion. I used to have a catalogue (for neggs, paintbrushes) and all it did was just send people to my lookup, and then the neofriend link. (I stuck a counter that tracked a list of visitors to the petpage by #VISITOR Guess what? [code]100.00%[/code] of the people who visited my catalogue bought NOTHING. yes NOTHING. Most of them just either 1.) didnt do anything 2.) Stole the layout 3.) Begged to be my neofriend/free stuff ,etc I collected stats for about 2-3 months. Not worth the effort in my experience so i refuse to make one for wearables. EDIT: Another thing that's disturbing is, of all my noob mails, the majority of them are in portugese/spanish or something, which could mean that alot of the shoppers dont even know English, which becomes a problem as mall banners and text are in English. I might translate my mall banner to these languages and see what happens.
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saudor | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 12:09pm |

MoRep 267 / 560 Power 0% Giant Hungry Malevolent Chomby 0 / 1990 Power 100% I hate when PCH breaks early. :| (I wasn't ignoring your post, just battling) [quote]Myriad Pro is a font that i use alot. It comes free when you install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 which is also free. It's clean, simple, and easy to read.[/quote] I guess I should stop ignoring the prompts to update that (still useing 7.0.) I'll give that font a go. Although I will probably keep poking around for a shenkuu-relevant font that's easier to read. [quote]Animation is great but not when you use it to scroll through features. Features are very important and should be avaliable in one glance and the user shouldnt have to wait to see what else is in the shop. In other words, instead of animating the text, try animating some of the graphics itself. But keep the colors around the same or else you'll get a grossly pixelated pile of junk that take 10 years to download - yuck[/quote] will give that a go. maybe animate the lantern in the top lefthand corner of the banner? I've never tried animating an image before, so this could be tedious. I -really- hate making graphics, but somebody has to do it. I'm not sure if it's going to be especially difficult to do considering I am using GIMP rather than paintshop or something...I refuse to spend money on software - seriously refuse. My money is much better spent on these: http://www.fluevog.com/code/images/colour/0000002578/composite.jpg ;) Re: Catalogues. I used to (before that awful "the pant devil has stolen this page!" thing went down) have a full catalogue of every single wearable in my shop. And it actually did pretty well. The one for just backgrounds - not so much. Thanks much. I'll start playing around with the banner now.
bête noire (bet-NWAHR) noun: An object or person that is particularly disliked or that is to be avoided
demirep77 | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 12:36pm |

[quote=Dmitri][quote=demirep77]Not helpful, Dmitri. ;) Honestly. More? Less? Blinky flashy stuff that I will hate? "ONG VWN BD UC PIRATE KRAWK UFA SEE MY SHOP FOR DETAILS!!!!11eleventyone!"? The last one was clearly a joke.[/quote] Well i hear Cs4 is capable of making 2000 x 2000 pixel mall banners that blink red, white, and yellow at 100 frames per second so yeah, pretty excited about it :o @killers - i only buy software that i like ;) The rest just ends up on my hard drive from various friends, sites - magically. just like that.[/quote] yay for the software faerie :D
killercars5000 | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 12:47pm |

ewww I just found out I'm bottom of my hut o.0 no wonder I haven't gotten ANY hits today from my hut today -.- *upgrades*
killercars5000 | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 12:50pm |

actually hut 430 looks pretty unpopular :K its tucked away, I'd be surprised if I got any hits from there :K *upgrades to hut 410*
killercars5000 | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 1:00pm |

The three huts that really grab my eye every time I go to the marketplace are: http://www.neopets.com/market.phtml?type=list&limit=530 http://www.neopets.com/market.phtml?type=list&limit=420 http://www.neopets.com/market.phtml?type=list&limit=270 the one i like the best is actually 530, but the shop size it too small to be a real long term goal for me. eventually there wouldn't be enough spaces in my shop to hold all the inventory if i stayed there.
bête noire (bet-NWAHR) noun: An object or person that is particularly disliked or that is to be avoided
demirep77 | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 1:08pm |

[quote]http://www.fluevog.com/code/images/colour/0000002578/composite.jpg[/quote] Hmmm, maybe those might be better than photoshop (A) Yeah 530 was great when i was in there but it's just too overloaded so i moved on up, and kept on moving up and before i knew it, i dont have many more huts to move up to :(
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saudor | Thu, 10/09/2009 - 1:11pm |

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