Use your Shapeways Shop to promote yourself, your products and your brand.
The better the images and description of your products and the more information you give about yourself and your motivation, the greater the chances are that someone with similar interests and taste will find your designs and purchase them.
1. The Photographs:
As per the photography tutorial, the importance of the images of the items in your shop cannot be underestimated. Your designs are judged online by the viewers initial glance at the image you supply. Make it a good one! Once you have good images of you design make sure the clearest image is the thumbnail seen in the gallery and also post high resolution images to Flickr with a link back to your page.
2. Title and Description:
Make the title describe your model as clearly and concisely as possible then write a more detailed description including information potential buyers may want to know about the materials, function or care. Also include a little information on the inspiration for the design, was it designed as a gift, for a specific function, is there a story behind it? This will help potential buyers relate to the product in a more personal way and also give bloggers something to write about if they want to mention your design.
3. Shop Description
Take a few minutes to write a little about yourself and your designs, you do not have to use your name, age or sex, just a little about your background and inspiration behind your designs. Again this helps potential customers understand that a sale can be a fairly intimate interaction between human beings, something not possible through standard mass production, something fairly unique to Shapeways. It also give information to bloggers who may want to mention you and your designs.
4. Detailed Description, Banner & Logo
In the detailed description reiterate your shop description with richer information, promote yourself and your designs, include links to your blogs, flickr, facebook, twitter, youtube pages whatever. Write a little more about your product designs or hobbies that feed into your use of Shapeways so people can understand more of where you are coming from and give Google a chance to pick up some more key words about your designs.
Do include a logo, even if it is simply a photograph of you or one of your favorite products. This will also help your peers and Shapeways staff to recognize you in the forums.
Get yourself on Photoshop or Gimp and make yourself a banner, whether it be text, a composition of your designs, a detail of an image, anything to help communicate the personality of your designs, your brand…..
5. Take it a step further…..
So that is the basics to keep your shop interesting and informative, to take it a step further you could really develop your own brand, with consistent images, icons and text throughout your store, use the same format for your personal blog and use the same icon as your avatar in other forums and social media pages…. This will help to build up Brand Recognition more on your personal brand soon…..
Above you can see Oskar Puzzles with a description, banner, logo and consistent images in his shop giving a recognizable ‘brand identity’.
[quote]1. The Photographs: make sure the clearest image is the thumbnail seen in the gallery and also post high resolution images to Flickr with a link back to your page.[/quote]
Could the jpg settings on the site be made less “aggressive” as this severely seems to reduce image quality. If I upload a high quality 960×690 image, it get scaled and re-compressed and artifacts appear.. If I upload lower resolution images, same problem, but worse.
Is there a imge or file size which will not be resized/re-encoded ? As this is never a good thing with jpg.
My testing shows that a 1600X1000 resolution will not produce artifacts…
lesser then that and its cropped badly.
Ok, thanks for the work-around ! (Duh, should have figured that one out myself ;-))
Any official (new) word on what the best upload resolution is ?
The Faq still says : “Please upload photographs in the format: 450×324 or 700×519. If you do this then they will look better on the page….”
http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/uploadpictures
Is this still applicable?
Hi Stijn, thanks Dizingof,
I will mention this to the graphic designer and see what he recommends..
Duann
Hi all,
The most important is that you use images with a 3:4 ratio (landscape).
This way you don’t get borders/whitespace on any side in the gallery thumbnail. I use photo’s with resolution 640×480, landscape that is. This way the zoom on model detail page isn’t too big but big enough too see possible details.
Did this help? You can always mail me or send me a PM
I tried 1600×1200 and the 640×480.
Neither seem to produce better results compared to the 960×690.
All images zoom to 640xY
See my tests with :
http://www.shapeways.com/model/130916/gyroid_bracelets.html (use homepage link below)
Anyway, all uploaded files seem to be re-compressed poorly, even if small in filesize.
I tried using super sharp pictures, all sorts of smoothed and filtered versions, but all suffer from the radical jpg recompression on the site. Especially pictures with the summer magenta.
Oh, and please update the FAQ if things change or should be different 🙂
Hi Stijn,
Can you send me an email with a picture (full size) with the photo you have problems with (the magenta for example). Then I can take a look if I encounter the same problems.
Pictures do get decompressed but I haven’t experienced problems with that. Yesterday I uploaded this one:
http://www.shapeways.com/model/133143/sample_earrings_7.html
I can hardly find differences with the original picture.
If you could send your picture to arnoud@shapeways.com I can check what the problem is and solve it.
cheers
Hiya,
Might be a moot point but… Why not remove the ‘Beta’ label on the shops/url? You might still need to polish it up but at least it won’t have a scratch…
Cheers,
Luis.
Guys, will you ever turn on the support of html codes in the descriptions? Sometimes these descriptions can be quite long but useful. Therefore it’s important to make them easier for the potential customer to read. I mean a pile of text looks horrible without any paragraphs and formating…. like here:
http://www.shapeways.com/model/133183/qr_code_bracelet__white_part__diy.html
PS. Sorry, if one CAN actually edit the descriptions with codes… I just do not know how and didn’t find anywhere here on the forum.. 🙁
Hi Dimitri,
Coding can’t be done in the description field. This way the pages stay consistent in style.
We are currently working on a small update for the description field. So in a short while you will be able to insert links and blank lines.
cheers
There are so many amazing items being made with Shapeways every day, with over 115,000 printable objects in the Shapeways database and thousands of items being 3D printed each week it is hard for us to keep track of all of the awesome things you are doi
We have thousands upon thousands of amazing products for sale in the Shapeways shops designed by the Shapeways community. We are always on the lookout for great products to put on our home page, to share with journalists and take to events to promot
We have thousands upon thousands of amazing products for sale in the Shapeways shops designed by the Shapeways community. We are always on the lookout for great products to put on our home page, to share with journalists and take to events to promot