There was a famous series of Castrol GTX ads on television from 20 years ago that showed 1930’s Chicago gangsters educating motorists that ‘Oil’s ain’t oils’ when it came to a car’s performance…….and it struck me that the message is analogous to eCommerce.

Why is it when we are surrounded with so much choice we can find it hard to make decisions?

You've been asking, the  IT gurus have been typing, and it's finally time to show you what is under the hood of this year's release. With our latest release, we've tried to give you some great new features. I thought I would focus today's post on a few of my favourites.

As we move into the second half of 2016 I think it is a fair assumption that there would be very few businesses who aren’t executing or at least planning some form of digital journey in their business, whether it be a simple website with a basic catalogue or full blown eCommerce with all the trimmings.

Personalisation is important. Our recent blog post -  Why Is Personalisation Important - uncovered some reasons as to why it should become part of your marketing arsenal. Today we will be diving into the “How To” of personalisation and run through some scenarios in the BPD CMS that you can set up on your own website today.

If your website is slow.. you’re probably losing sales.

Big call right? But it’s backed by research. The friendly folks over at Kissmetrics have pulled together some stats to show how every second counts when it comes to website speed. Here at CV we’ve been focusing our people on making our software as fast as possible. The catch to it though, is that the websites running on our platform can only be fast if the content on them is correctly optimised. That means, acceptable image sizes, product lists that aren’t too large and minimising complexities as much as possible (without sacrificing features/functions).

Today I’m going to run through some best practices to help keep image size down which will help optimise your website speed.

What size should my website images be?

Good question. About this big :-)



Before we answers this questions seriously, lets first understand the key things that dictate an image size:

• Dimension - The amount of pixels that make up an image, indicated by the Width times the Height (W x H)
• Quality - The amount of compression applied to the image. The more compression, the worse the image will look but the smaller the file size
• File format - The standardised method used for saving the image - usually JPEG, PNG or similar. You can confirm an image File Format by its file extension (i.e. Picture.jpg)

Essentially, the bigger the dimensions and/or higher the quality, the bigger your file size will be.

Your stock is on its way. Eight pallets full of purple widgets of varying sizes should land in your online warehouse in the next few days. You nabbed them at a price so ridiculous you practically stole them from the supplier, but how are you going to get them back out the door as quick as they came in and make a tidy profit along the way? Digital Marketing!

So imagine this...

Way back in last century... well not way back but towards the end of the 80’s, Neil Rackham wrote a seminal book ‘Making Major Sales’ which was based on his research from over 10,000 sales engagements.