Datafeedr is a fantastic tool right out of the box – the fact that it connects to every single affiliate network and pulls the product images directly over to your store saves so much time when building a new store.
It’s not long before you realise a major problem however – the affiliates all use different sized images.
Having some small and some large images in your product lists makes your shop look weird.
This is actually caused by two underlying problems:
- The merchants on the affiliate networks all use different sized images, tall versus square, versus fat etc
- The images themselves have a varying amount of whitespace contained within them – some have thin whitespace borders and some have fat whitespace
It gets worse – for many merchants, they will have different shaped or sized images depending on the type of product, or even randomly different sized images within the same product category.
To make your store and product lists look good, you need to make your images all fill the boxes.
AWD Images Plugin
My plugin AWD Images fixes the problem above and gives you complete control over your images on your datafeedr stores.
- Crop unnecessary white space from the edge of images – this immediately makes images larger and gives a much better experience for your users
- Zoom your images – you can zoom your images so they fit the entire height of the box or the entire width
Service Installation
The service is the easiest method to use, but it’s not as fast as using the plugin locally so I recommend you use this method for testing which option looks best for your store.
Replace your existing product img tags in your Datafeedr templates with the following code:
<img src="http://www.affiliatewebdesigners.com/wp-content/plugins/awd-images/cropandzoom.php?w=240&h=240&src=[product.image direct='1' tag='0']" alt="[product.name]" title="[product.name]" />
Local Installation
This works faster since the images are cached locally rather than from my server. It just takes a little extra effort (you need to be able to use FTP).
Download the plugin files from here:
Premium Members Content
This content is for premium members only. Premium members get:
- All PHP, CSS, JS and Datafeedr templates unlocked
- Priority support over Skype or email
- Comments and commenting unlocked
- All future plugins included
Datafeedr plugins include:
Plus more to come, and you get future plugins included whilst your membership plan lasts.
Become a Member or Log inConfiguring the different options
There are 4 parameters to use:
- w – specify the width in pixels of how big the image should be – use the width of the image container for best results
- h – specify the height in pixels of how big the image should be – use the height of the image container for best results
- src – specify the URL of the image. I just use [product.image direct='1' tag='0']
- zc – leave empty for image option 1 above or use zc=4 to zoom your images to use the full width of the container
Questions?
If you have any questions about usage or the potential of this system, post a message below.
Whats the price for this plugin, and where can i buy it?
Hi Thomas,
You get this plugin as a premium member of the site.
Premium membership starts at $47 and includes all plugins made so far and all plugins made in the next 3 months.
You can become a member here: http://www.affiliatewebdesigners.com/register/
okay thanks, do you have a list of the plugins made for datafeedr sites?
Currently the image plugin and the dropshipping plugin are for Datafeedr.
On their way are another few plugins though:
Ajax search – searches all your datafeedr products, categories AND wordpress content in one search form using ajax
Product Detail Email Capture – a popover on exit from the site that will help you capture email addresses on exit to and return from the affiliate site. (So you can send them deals and alerts)
There’s a bunch of other stuff in the pipeline but those two should be ready before the end of January.
I have downloaded the datafeedr image plugin, uploaded it to the plugins folder via the FTP and changed the permisions on the cache folder, but i still cant see the plugin in the plugins directory on my wordpress installation.
The image plugin doesn’t have an admin interface – the folder just needs to exist in your plugins folder then follow the rest of the instructions on this post to use the image resizer/cropper/whitespace remover functionality.
If you want to remove the plugin, delete the folder using FTP. I’ll maybe get round to adding an interface for this one soon.