Firstly, think about someone like Amazon. They have thousands of products for sale, but  you never feel overwhelmed as a visitor. The key to this is in the navigation. They make it easy to see what is on offer, by showing a few products, but giving a simple menu structure that takes you to other areas.

In a Printfection Store, we need to do something similar and have a sample on the frontpage and well thought out categories that the menu can link to. Maybe no more than 20 front page items (sections and products) is ideal.

Page Load Times

The other thing to consider, is how long the store's home page will take to load. Too many sections and products will slow the page down because of the number of images. Cody Lindley has some interesting research on how big the home pages of some popular online retailers are. If you can keep your home page below 500K you should be OK. If you want to see how big your page is and how fast it loads, check out Pingdom

I'm really excited by this release. For the first time, you can really start to build your own solid brand an give your customers a truly immersive experience. We've built in some great features and plan on adding more pretty soon. I'll post more on some of the specifics shortly.

Read all about it at the myPFstore home page and see it in action at Ukulele Shirt World .

Now, thanks to the newly released Printfection API, it is possible to have a dynamic list of all your open stores automatically listed, complete with a logo if available. Here is a list of my stores:

If you add or close a store, the list will be refreshed accordingly. As part of the Printvection API process, each store holder that uses this is required to verify that they wish to link the script with their account. Each person then uses a unique session ID to access it all. To enable all this to happen very easily, please visit the page here to get your instructions: TeePlates - Related Stores Link Builder

Welcome to Minilist

Introducing Minilist, a new way to have small pictures of all products from the parent section shown under the current product:

You can see this in action at: Ukulele Shirt World .

Setting it up

As with most of my addons, Minilist uses unobtrusive javascript to pull a list of images from the parent section and display them. To install Minilist, you will need to add the following to your Base HTML:

The headtext variable is the text displayed above the images and can be set to anything you like. The newsize variable is the height and width of the images. The smaller the number the smaller the images.

Style It

Minilist is completely styleable using CSS as well, so you can have it fit in exactly with your store. Use the following in your Custom CSS:

One Final note

Minilist requires that your store has a breadcrumb in it. If you don't have a breadcrumb, you will need to add one to the base HTML using the ##breadcrumb## tag.

As part of my ongoing commitment to make Printfection the best place to be for store holders, I bring to you TeePlates Themer .

Themer is a completely visual Printfection theme customisation tool that allows you the store holder to select all of the aspects of your store's look and feel without needing to know any CSS or doing any coding.

Just point, click and select the colors, fonts, borders and backgrounds that you want, and once you are happy, download all the generated CSS that you need to have your store looking just right.

Watch an Introductory Video

Themer is designed to work with the "Sandbox" printfection theme, so all you need to do is select that theme and then paste the downloaded CSS into the custom CSS for your store.

Join the community

It's more than just a design tool though, it is in fact a community driven site that allows people to create, publish and share their created themes. With your support, Themer can become a very large repository of free Printfection themes.