Answers: Homepage Favorites & Thumbnail Cropping
We wanted to address two questions about the OnRez site:
1. Homepage favorites
Our goal is not to have our favorites on the homepage, but yours. The current list is a stand-in for now. Our plan is to have rotating favorites on the homepage, but we did not want to postpone launch until this feature was completed. I do not have a hard fix on when this will be completed but please know that it’s on our list. [Note: if you think we should add the ability to prevent your favorites from showing up on the homepage, I’d love to hear your thoughts.]
We would like to start changing up the favorites on the home page (it’s a manual task at the moment). The first person who can identify the seller of this product (just reply here), randomly selected from OnRez, and who has 8 favorites picked out not of their own store, will get their favorites on the homepage for a week.
2. Thumbnail Cropping
We have not gotten many questions about the thumbnail cropping yet, but we are expecting them so we’ll try to address this now. All preview thumbnails are now cropped square (we resize the image and then crop from the center), but only thumbnails are affected. When you click through to the item, all images are shown in their original state and dimensions. Why did we do this? The primary reason was that a lot of SLBoutique customers asked for bigger thumbnails, and the best way to accomplish this and maintain the ability to efficiently review search or browse results was to fix ratio and size. We went with a square because of the prevalence of SL sellers to make sales images at 256×256px or 512×512px.
July 26th, 2007 02:30
Seller: Ninja Petion
Fav’s:
http://shop.onrez.com/item/301855
http://shop.onrez.com/item/301853
http://shop.onrez.com/item/32206
http://shop.onrez.com/item/233321
http://shop.onrez.com/item/302199
http://shop.onrez.com/item/227929
http://shop.onrez.com/item/236828
http://shop.onrez.com/item/193704
July 26th, 2007 08:27
That’s right! Sorry it took a while for this comment to show up, Vint. Because of all the links, Akismet marked it as spam.
July 26th, 2007 10:18
I can understand the desire to make thumbnails bigger, but cropping them is NOT the way to do that. I work hard to make my product images look good, and chopping off the sides makes them look like crap, and usually clips important text (apparently I no longer sell a “Stearman” biplane, but an “earman”).
Please stop cropping these images. Display them as they are intended. If sellers wish to create a square product image that fills the entire thumbnail area, we can do that.
July 26th, 2007 10:21
You could also add a function for people to create there own cropped thumbnail. Flickr for instance has a way to draw a rectangle in a photo of the area you want cropped. That way people can correct silly things like Cubey’s Manta becoming a Ant.
July 26th, 2007 16:54
I can understand the desire to use square thumbnails, it would be nice however if we could control what part of the image is the thumbnail, as Frans suggested. Or failing that, if we could upload a second image, specifically for use as a search thumbnail…
July 26th, 2007 16:59
Thanks Cubey, Frans, ZATZAi for your thoughts. I can’t promise when we’ll have additional functionality implemented on this, but there’s good ideas here.
July 26th, 2007 20:02
Instead of having the user’s favorites on the home page, why not allow sellers to purchase space to advertise their ads. Just an idea =)
July 27th, 2007 13:56
Brad, I think favorites is giving good content a more fair chance. I dislike the whole ‘featured’ system over at SLexchange, and I’d hate to see it implemented here too.
July 27th, 2007 19:02
I should add that I don’t think I would redesign graphics for every product just so that it fits the unusual square proportions that you’re forcing. I would sooner just save myself some time and remove my items.
July 27th, 2007 19:44
That’s pretty harsh Cubey….
July 27th, 2007 21:24
I’d hate to lose you Cubey and I hope you reconsider. I know how important graphic design is for you — it’s always been one of your hallmarks when you were one of the few paying attention to it.
We cannot change the system right now, but I like some of the ideas of providing some controls about cropping, just not quite sure when they might be implemented. Before we made this move, we looked at various approaches and saw that both Flickr and Etsy have taken the crop approach to thumbnails, and decided it was a compromise we needed to make. I’m not trying to devalue your concerns, just letting you know the system cannot be changed right now.