Site and shop properties

This is part of the Stockashop Manual. It discusses the things you can change when you click "Site and shop properties" in your managemente area, including default meta tags, basic colours and loyalty discounts.

Site properties

In the site properties section, you can change some important settings relating to your site.

Shop title: This is the name of your site. It is used in confirmation emails and if your site is listed in our examples gallery. It is only editable by us.

Shop domain: This is your site's main domain name, which we setup when we first create your site.

From email address: The email address which all your site correspondence is sent from. So if your customer's reply to an order confirmation email, the reply will come to this address. And if you do not have any site administrator's receiving your site's email, all order confirmations and enquiries will go to this address instead.

Title tag: This is appended to the end of all of your page titles. There is some debate over whether a very short page title (like "Contact us") is preferable to a longer one (such as "Contact us - Stockashop websites") for search engine optimisation, so this field is optional.

Keywords: The keywords you enter here are appended to any page or product specific "meta keywords" you have entered. Not many search engines use this now, but it is still useful, especially if you haven't got round to entering keywords on all your pages and products.

Description: This is the default meta description, used for pages and products which don't have their own descriptions or summaries. It is also shown as the description of your site in our examples gallery.

Headers and colours

This Stockashop feature allows you to change the header image and main colours of your site very easily through a simple interface.

Header image: You can upload a png, gif, jpg or swf (Flash movie) as your page header. This will appear within your page's "header" div, shown at the top of every page on your site.

Note that we usually don't recommend a Flash header as it can slow some browers down and the animation can distract your customers if it's on every page. With Flash headers, you may also need to specify a width and height for them to be displayed as usign CSS. For example: #header object, #header embed {width: 700px; height: 100px;}

If you do not upload a header image, Stockashop uses the header.jpg image in your images directory by default. If this is not present, a default Stockashop header image is shown.

Page background, header background and other colours: This is a list of background, text and link colours which you can change on your site. The image on the right shows where each of the different colours is used.

If your site has been designed by us or a designer, this feature is usually turned off, as it only covers the main colours on your site, and so there would be clashes if any of the colours were changed.

The site shown on the right is a "Try a Shop". You can sign up for a free trial and have a go at changing the colours of this site yourself (along with adding pages and products and all the other things in Stockashop).

Loyalty Discounts

If your site has the "loyalty discounts" feature enabled, then you will see a list of the different membership levels for your site, and the percentage discounts which should be given to each.

These membership levels are assigned to individual customers when you edit their details in the management area. The levels are browser (someone who is visiting but has not checked out or made an enquiry), customer/enqurier, member, bronze member, silver member, gold member and (if your site allows you to assign other administrators) shop administrator.

See the discounting manual for a full discussion of Stockashop's product discounting.