Nuts and Bolts: Storewide Facelift

The only way I had the confidence that EVERY card would be reviewed was to set the view to Tile in my Manage Cards areas and then work on them within each of the major categories: Announcements, Birthday, Business, Collections, Holidays, Invitations, Occasions – working in one section at a time and in order, so as to not miss a card. Each card was opened, checked and the following adjustments were made as needed:

Card Titles:

– Unique and descriptive without truncating to a second line when possible.

– No dashes, slashes or characters.

– Proper capitalization.

– Recipient(s) and Occasion was depicted with relationship specific identifier showing first.

– If blank “Blank All Occasion” text added.

– The word “CARD” was removed as GCU automatically adds this to all titles.

– If the card had a Photo area – “Custom Photo” text was added or Custom if only card front text was editable.

Keywords:

– Colors and descriptive words for the artwork were included.

– Recipient(s) and Occasion text included.

– Each keyword or keyword phrase separated by a comma and a space, avoiding repetitive wording.

Artist Notes (Card Description):

– Each written to register GREEN in the uniqueness factor. Remember this is key with the new SEO requirements. If your cards indicate RED “Not Unique: Not eligible for Google indexing.” This means your cards have most likely stop selling at the rate they used to due to no longer being indexed by Google; therefore your cards are not being found by shoppers when searched for outside of GCU. Green is the goal, sometimes with large series, I accepted yellow on a few.

-For those cards of mine where I wanted to offer credit to the 3^rd party creative and it was a large enough series to cause this mention of credit to skew the uniqueness factor from improving, I placed the credit in the Image By field and removed it from the description.

Inside the Card:

The inside and/or Custom Tool areas were checked on every card as well.

– Ellipsis were checked to make sure they were a) needed, b) properly spaced and c) properly continued from card front to verse area.

– Font size, choice and color were re-reviewed for legibility and professionalism.

– Extra spacing was removed and replaced with proper Message Alignment, Vertical Alignment and Line Spacing choices.

– Looked for proper punctuation and capitalization in verses.

Custom Front Cards:

– Text boxes did not touch each other, fall on or over the yellow safety line and did not overlay elements in my design which may make the customer’s text illegible.

– Photo card areas were just a pinch outside the transparent area I created for the customer’s photo, were not on or over the yellow safety line and did not touch each other if there were more than one.

-Custom text did not truncate or have extenders touching the text box.

Imagery and Typography:

Considering I joined GCU in 2009 and it was my first time creating greeting cards, I had hundreds of old cards which in addition to all of the above, really needed face-lifts – so each card was reviewed and updated when necessary for the following:

– Poorly placed or illegible card front text and/or bad font choices.

– The awful out-dated beveling effects were removed on both text, framing, borders and elements.

– Edge allowances checked.

– Imagery was spot checked and had color/contrast/saturation improvements as needed.

– Then made the same image/typography updates to all cards of the series when applicable.

The results of my efforts have already proved to be amazing. Every day I see those old cards coming through in sales notifications shortly after adjustments were made, indicating not only were the cards looking more professional, but that my meta-tag data was working!

See some of the differences below.

PID 656976 – My Santa painting itself had more detail pulled out and was then framed in a window environment with ‘snow drifts’ for the text placement. Font choice improved and all the ugly beveling gone, gone, gone!