Manage Home Page

Revision as of 13:22, 21 March 2012

Manage Home Page

1. In the upper left hand corner of the admin page you will see several links, Admin Home, Manage Home Page, Manage Collections\Categories, Manage Products, and Page Manager. You are currently on the Admin Home, click the link for Manage Home Page. This will bring you to the Manage Home Page.
2. If you think of your new eFashionCentral.com website as your ‘virtual store,’ you can think of your home page as your store front. In some cases it will be the first thing your potential customer sees.

Note: If you will be integrating a custom designed website with your eFashionCentral.com virtual store and you will not be using your eFashionCentral.com program to create a Home Page then you can skip to the next section Manage Collections/Categories (page 5). We will work with you and/or your web designer to integrate your existing website with your eFashioncentral.com virtual store.

1. If look at the Manage Home Page you will see it is broken up into four boxes, each one focusing on what you are changing about your home page. These boxes are called, Site Look and Feel, Home Page Text, Home Page Photo, and Featured Products. First look at the box that says Site Look and Feel.
2. The first thing you will notice is a drop down bar with different Designs listed; the second thing you will notice is that Design 5 is missing! This is because Design 5 is our blank IFrame template. This is only available to advanced users that are familiar with CSS web design programming. If you are ort plan to hire a web designer to create your own unique website then we will add Design 5 to your options. Once you select one of the Design options the colors that are available in that design will appear in the Pick a new color scheme drop down bar. If you wish to keep the Design you have selected butwant to change the color, you still must select the Design first for the colors to appear in the drop down bar.
3. In the Home Page Text box you will see the words “Your current home page text” above a white text box. Home page text is a verbal introduction to your store. This is where you will put a quick blurb about your store. If your store has a motto or a slogan this is where you would put it. If not put in a short message about the store. I would suggest no more than one sentence. Just something to catch the eye. When you have thought about what you will type in the text box, type it in and click submit. Don’t forget that at any time if you want to view the changes you are making to your site just pull up the eFashionCentral.com site and click the refresh.
4. The second box says Home Page Photo. This is where you are going to put a photo that will introduce the customer to the website. This can be a picture of yourself, or a picture of the store front, but we prefer that a picture of a dress is used as it adds a professional, elegant look to the home page. To enter a picture into the Home Page Photo you first have to find a suitable photo.
5. This next bit will explain the finer points of saving a photo to your computer. It is by no means the only way to save a photo but I believe it is the easiest way to learn. Open up a third Internet browser. In this address bar type in the web address of any of your supplies that have images on their website. Navigate the site to find the place where you can view the collection. Once you have found the image you want to put on your website be sure to access the largest image available on the supplier’s website; usually there is a click to enlarge, use that image whenever possible. Once you have the image on your screen Right click anywhere on the picture. A grey box will appear with several options in it. One of those options is Save Picture As… Click that option. A box will come up that says Save Picture. At the top of the box to the left of where it says Save in: there is a drop down box. Click the arrow and select Desktop from the drop down menu. To the right of the drop down box are several icons, click the one that is a manila folder with a small starburst coming out of the top of it. This will create a new folder. Name your new folder eFashionCentral Pictures and press enter, then click the Open button in the lower right hand corner. Where it says Save in: will have changed from saying Desktop to saying eFashionCentral Pictures and the Open button will have changed into a Save button. Click the Save button. Close the manufacturer’s website. You should now be looking at the Manage Home Page. In the Home Page Photo box you will see the words Browse to upload a new file: with a white text box next to it. Next to the text box is a button that says Browse… click on the Browse… button. A box will come up that says Choose File. At the top of the Choose File box you will see the words Look in: with a drop down box next to them. Click the arrow to open the dropdown menu and select Desktop. Double-click on the folder that says eFashionCentral Pictures and select the file you just saved. Click the Open button in the lower right hand corner of the box. Click Submit in the Home Page Photo box. There you have the basics of saving and uploading a file from the Internet to your eFashionCentral.com website. You obviously will not want to keep that picture up on your homepage, but the same format applies to saving and uploading any picture from the Internet so find one you like and, using the same steps put in on your home page photo. NOTE: the height of the picture must be big enough to reach the top of the eFashionCentral.com homepage box, if it is not it will automatically resize the picture to fill the space oftentimes distorting the picture. You should resize the photo first before you upload it if possible, the best dimensions for the home page photo is a height of 457 pixels at 72 dpi and a width of no more then 400 pixels. If you right click on a picture and click properties you can see these dimensions. The first number is the width and the second is the height. If you are uploading an image that is less then 457 height the program will resize it. If this results in a width that is greater then 400, the image will be cropped on the right side. If the image is greater then 457 height the program will reduce it. The best image to upload is one that has already been resized to a height of 457. To maximize the image on the homepage you can use a program like Photoshop to create an image with the maximum dimensions of 400 x 457.
6. It is possible that a manufacturer’s website will be blocked to not allow you to copy images. In this case it is necessary for you to contact the manufacturer and request a CD of images. Usually the images on a CD are very large whereas the images you copy from a website are already reduced to an Internet ready size. If you get a CD from the manufacturer with very large images please DO NOT attempt to load them. Contact us and we will advise you how to proceed. You may also choose to scan the images if you have the manufacturer’s catalog, but we recommend against this.
7. Next we will discuss the Featured Products Module. If you think of your new eFashionCentral site as your virtual store, the Featured Products Module is your virtual storefront window, where you display the items you want your customer to see first when they view your website. The Featured Products Module will allow you to display two items on the homepage of your site. These items can be something that is popular, or maybe something that isn’t selling too well that you want to move. What ever your motivation for putting these items up, here’s how you do it: When you enter a product into the product manager, that product will be assigned a “product id” (We will explain into the product id when we discuss the Product Manager). To put a product into the Featured Product Module, take the corresponding product id and enter it into either the “left” or “right” box and click submit. In the event that you do not wish to display any products on your homepage, for example if you are having a special event at the store and want the customer to see that instead, click the check box that says “Disable the Featured Products module by checking here,” then you can type the information regarding the special event into the text box and when you are done click the submit button.