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.

Back in 2001 when Commerce Vision was founded our interactions with prospects and customers was very different from what it is today.

One of the things I talk to a lot when spending time our customers is the CMS. Afterall, it's the conduit to your site so getting it right is more than a bit important. Now, I'm not going to say we're the bee's knees (yet), but I AM going to say that we have been listening. The listening became doing, and finally the doing is done!  

Just as Hoovering became another way to talk about vacuuming, and Kleenex became the thing I reach for every time I watch Toy Story 3, Googling has become another way to talk about searching. It’s that interest in forward movement and the constant change of the web that led me to today’s post.

One of the things I love about my job is getting asked questions I never would have thought of myself. I was asked one of those recently about the search tool on a customer's site and - like it so often does - it sparked a train of thought I just needed to satisfy. So the Googling for knowledge began... 

The prospect of a new website is exciting to most people who operate in the digital space – or maybe that’s just me. There are so many opportunities to improve and innovate. But getting the launch process right can be hard. We’ve seen it numerous times, after all, it’s what we do. So I thought I’d share some of the key points we’ve found that are important for you to consider when you’re launching a new site.

To quote a very quotable man; “The secret to getting ahead is getting started”. So, let’s start at the beginning.