I was fortunate to have my shop critiqued by a few pros during one of the "Pimp my shop" sessions where shopkeepers could volunteer their shop to be viewed in front of everyone on the big screen and be critiqued by the pros. The first bit of constructive criticism I got was: "Get rid of your splash page...it's a kiss of death with search engines."
Wow...that's exactly the kind of information I needed to hear! I was given some tips, then later chatted with another shopkeeper for details on how he integrated his Cafepress shop into his own URL without a splash page.
What is a splash page?
A splash page (or portal page, intro page, or landing page...it has a lot of names), is like a front door to your site. A door that people have to click onto enter your site. It's often a flash animation, a graphic, or in my case, it was my store logo with a button that said "enter site." It's a page with no other purpose than to make the visitor click something or watch something before they can enter your site.
In the old days (in internet land, that's about a year ago, I think), a splash page wasn't seen as a bad thing. As search engines have matured, however, they now recognize splash pages as void of content, and so, don't index them as high as they used to.
There are other pros and cons to splash pages, but there are more cons, in my opinion, to having one for a business site. There's no gurantee your visitor will click your "enter site" button. They may never see your products. Many people find them annoying and a waste of time. They can be good for portfolio sites when the webmaster is wanting to show off his or her skills with a flashy splash page, but other than that, I, too can no longer see a good use for them, especially for a retail site.
Why was I using a splash page?
Being that I have limited web design knowledge, a splash page was the easiest way for me to have a "real web address" instead of relying on www.cafepress.com/(my store name) for all my promotional material. I wanted a simple URL that people could remember. So I made a simple splash page on www.ibusybodies.com that lead into my Cafepress store.
How I fixed the problem:
Now, if you visit my store by typing in: http://www.cafepress.com/busybodies, you'll see it automatically redirects you to my URL, http://www.ibusybodies.com whenever you go to the store home page.
Here are the steps I took to make my shop store front redirect to my own URL:
1. Copied the source code from my Cafepress shop and pasted it elsewhere where I could edit it.
2. In that code I altered the Cafepress white header bar (OK to do since it's not on their domain anymore), fixed all my links so they linked properly to my store sections (very important!), removed nested sub-sections, and placed alt tags on my images so they have text attached to them (search engines only see text, as do applications for the bind to navigate the web). This step takes some fiddling around, but if you know basic HTML, you can probably figure it out.
3. Copied and pasted the new edited code into my HTML editor on my website (ibusybodies.com). You could also FTP the file to your index page.
4. Finally, I pasted a redirect snippet of code into my "shop description" section in the "customize my shop" (custom HTML) section of my Cafepress shop account. So now, whenever a visitor clicks on the "breadcrumbs" in my store, or my store home page, it redirects to my URL. It's important to put this code (check out W3schools or other sites for a redirect code or meta "refresh" code).
Here's what it looks like in the custom HTML section of my Cafepress account, where the code is placed:
Why doing all this should help my store's usability and findability:
• It eliminates the splash page! Customers will instantly see my products and home page.
• Google and other search engines will now recognize my URL (www.ibusybodies.com) as being a website with content and links, seeing it as more valuable.
• Every single page in my store (hundreds of pages) with the Cafepress URL, now link BACK to my URL, also giving it more value in the search engine's eyes.
So after making a few suggested changes, my shop is on it's way to more visibility in search engines.
Do you have any other methods you use for integrating your Cafepress shop into your own web site? Please share!
Technorati Tags: cafepress, t-shirt, design, redirect, HTML
