I Vote For Art gets an upgrade
Posted by Andrew Gunstone on April 06 2009 | 0 Comments
Now I normally wouldn’t mention when we simply upgrade or update a site we have designed, but there was a little bit of psychology that went with the recent update to I Vote For Art that I thought would be worth sharing.
In conjunction with the client, three areas were identified that needed updating and improving with the site.
Removing the unsightly “en” in the URL
The first change was a bit of a no-brainer. When the site was first launched (over a year ago now), we were new to ExpressionEngine, and hadn’t really worked out all the cool tricks and tips that you can use with it. ExpressionEngine comes out of the box assuming an “index.php” to be in the URL (i.e. http://www.ivoteforart.com/index.php/blog/). To my eyes this seemed a bit ugly, so I found a great tutorial for how to re-name the “index.php” file, and also remove the extension. I decided to change the name of the “index” file to “en”, to give it the feel that this is the “english” version of the site (i.e. http://www.ivoteforart.com/en/blog/).
Well, over a year down the track, with many lessons learned, I had worked out a way of hiding the “en” file altogether, giving us a much cleaner, and shorter URL. So now we were able to remove the redundent, and slightly unattractive, “en” part of the URL. The final URL’s are much cleaner now (i.e. http://www.ivoteforart.com/blog/), hopefully making it easier for SEO.
For further information about removing the “index.php” part of the URL for ExpressionEngine sites, visit the very popular http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Remove_index.php_From_URLs/ wiki page.
Get the site loading faster
Next issue was the speed of loading the beautiful, but very graphic-heavy pages. Over-time the site seems to have slowed down considerably, and it was time to re-look at how to speed up the loading.
This was handled in two ways. First, we removed a custom built image caching and re-sizing script (again, a lessons learned thing about EE!), and instead used a fantastic little extension called imgsizer. This seemed to re-size the images in a much more efficient way, and slightly increased the speed of loading pages. As a bonus to this, it’s an extension that someone else is developing. If things go wrong with it, then there is a community of designers and developers who can help. With custom built scripts, you are pretty much on your own if anything goes wrong.
The second thing was a bit of a big job, but has made the biggest difference. We changed hosting companies. This was not a decision taken lightly, however over the past year or so the existing hosting company seemed to have slowed down considerably. This is not just happening for I Vote For Art, but many of our customers. So we made a difficult decision, and moved to the new hosting company. This has made a huge difference with the speed of loading not only the site, but also the ExpressionEngine system interface, and also PHPMySQL.
Wow… who would have thought that shifting hosting companies would make such a noticeable difference.
Move all purchases to US Dollars
The third change was the most important to the client, as if successful, would increase sales on the site.
In the first iteration of the site, all artwork could be purchased via PayPal, but only in Australian dollars. Whilst all of us in Australia love our little dollar (it is still valued higher then the NZ dollar!), in the global community that is the web, the US dollar seems to be the ruling currency.
We made the change to US dollars only a few days ago, and bingo, sales seems to have increased! Okay, so this might be a huge coincidence… but I believe that there is a real psychological difference for a user seeing US dollars on a site, and understanding what that means, rather then Australian (or other!) dollars.
We have spoken with the client about providing users with the ability to select their currency on the site, but is this worth it? Are enough users comfortable with US dollars only? I guess ultimately only time (and sales) will tell.
You can read more about the reason for the Australia to US dollar change at the I Vote For Art website - http://www.ivoteforart.com/blog/comments/weve_gone_global/
If you have an opinion on using certain currencies on e-Commerce sites, then leave us a comment!
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