Taking Stock

by spork_queen

While the goods your Neopian shop carries plays a big role in your sales, a second factor needs to be addressed. The presentation of your shop front plays a bigger part than you may expect!

In order for your Neopian shop to make money, it's important to keep up good appearances. A pretty background, a coordinated colour set, and a kind, encouraging message will help draw customers to your shop time and time again. However, it is possible to go overboard. While you may be proud of your HTML wonder, a dazzling array of lights and sound, one must be careful that design doesn't so overwhelm the shopper that he or she returns to the Wizard, passing over a low price in favor of a page that loads in under five minutes. Want to sell? Follow these sensible guidelines when entering your shop description.

Design: Please make sure to spell things correctly, and double-check your punctuation. Misspelled pages with incorrect grammar won't give a very good first impression.

Background: A solid-colour background or small (read: quick-loading) pattern will help visitors remember your site. However, don't go with anything that takes over a minute (at most) to load on a small modem, NEVER use an animated background, and remember to change the text colour to something readable. It's very annoying to have to highlight the page contents in order to find the Blue Negg you want to buy, and the hassle means the shopper probably won't stop and browse your other bargains.

Links: Keep them reasonable. Nobody wants to scroll down five pages to get to the merchandise, so keep the list short and sweet. If you link to a page, ALWAYS make sure it works before expecting anyone else to follow them!

Counters: These can be a nice touch--just don't harass the viewer. A message of "I've had a million visitors, tell a friend to come here or I'll kick your pet," spoken or not, won't come across terribly well.

Sound: Please, if you want to provide music, provide some way to turn it off! The code for a midi control panel is simple; otherwise, link to the file so it doesn't add minutes to loading time.

Graphics: This is a major problem in many shops. A shopkeeper graphic is fine, a picture of your pet is nice, but twelve morphing plushies, screenshots of the hidden tower, or your entire collection of cartoon dolls is unreasonable. If you want a place to show off all the graphics on your hard drive, *please* do it on your pet's page. The reasoning here is fairly simple. If you went to a grocery store and the walls were yellow with magenta polka-dots, the radio was blaring Ricky Martin, and the isles were so clogged with scantily-clad mannequins that you couldn't find the spaghetti sauce, you'd probably go somewhere else. Sure, it may be hard to keep yourself to one animated bouncing Negg graphic, but in the long run, you'll probably make more money, not to mention keep Neopia a more aesthetically pleasing place to be. What have you got to lose???

Thank you very much for your consideration.