In our previous post (Choice Pages – Leveling Up Your Affiliate Links) we teased some updates that were on the way and I’m excited to share more details as they are now available.
While our Choice Pages have been getting a lot of polish and functionality over the last few months we thought these last couple updates were important and worth a few minutes of your time.
New “Light & Clean” Theme
A picture is worth a thousand words but what about the frame? How a picture is framed and the background it sits on makes a huge difference in how we see it, even if it is mostly subconscious.
Coming out of the art world and into marketing we’ve found that album and book covers tend to look best when placed over a darker background. The general industry standard in framing these pictures was to take the cover art, blow it up, then blur it a bit, and maybe even darken it a bit and call it a background. This works well in those industries but weren’t ideal for product images.
Consumer products are often photographed on a white background with subtle shadows and thus tend to look a whole lot better on a white background (with a subtle fade).
With a recent update we’ve given you the choice between the all-new “Light & Clean” look and our traditional “Dark Art” theme with the darker, blurred image background. With a quick toggle you can choose what looks best for whatever it is that you are promoting.
It’s important to note that existing choice pages will keep their current theme. Further the Light & Clean theme is new default for first time users, however, the theme will default to your last-chosen for subsequent Choice Pages.
What do you think? Look a bit better now?
Custom Buttons
Our first iteration of Choice Pages, introduced about two years ago, had a few dozen different destinations we’d recognize. For these we added in the appropriate button.
For those destinations we didn’t recognize we tried to get scrappy. We’d grab the Favicon from the destination and then listed out the domain. Needless to say, it worked but again was not optimal for every destination.
In the past two years we’ve added the logos for hundreds of recognized destinations but there are still thousands more that deserve an inviting button to click so we’ve provided another option – you can now upload your own custom button images!
This new feature update also allows you to override our default button images in case you want to offer different options of a product at the same retailer. One of our favorite music clients had this exact use case where multiple YouTube and Amazon destinations were needed but duplicate buttons would have been confusing.
To add or override a destination’s image button simply click on it as you are editing the link inside the Geniuslink dashboard. That will load our image editor where you can drop in an image, navigate to it on your computer or simply add the URL of an image from another online source. Detailed instructions on adding images and buttons can be found in our Knowledge Base.
Bonus: Cropping
While most of us can hop into an image editor and eventually get an image to pop out that is the right size, it’s often kind of a pain in the butt. It becomes a real pain in the butt when you have to deal with obscure aspect ratios like our 1:2.25 for buttons.
With this in mind we are happy to announce we’ve just released a cropping tool that is built into the image uploader so you can finess your image, logo, or buttons to your liking!
And of course for buttons, we’ll make sure they are set to the right proportions, too. So for best results just upload a high resolution image and then use our tools to quickly fine tune the image to the perfect resolution and aspect ratio.
What’s next?
We’ve got some big stuff planned for later this year but while we are working on those please let us know what tweaks or tools could help make your Choice Pages even better.
Thanks!
-Team Geniuslink