Photo Finale 9.6 & 9.6.1 Release Notes

[h1]Photo Finale 9.6[/h1]

The primary focus for PF 9.6 is on search engine optimization (SEO) — improving your site’s visibility on search engines, leading to higher organic search results and increased traffic and revenue.

[h4]Store Location Pages[/h4] One of the best ways to build SEO is through local search hits — someone searching for a product or service nearby to them.  Your Photo Finale site now features a dedicated page, with an SEO-friendly URL, for each of your customer pickup locations.

The new Store Location Page functionality include a new “Locations” link from the site footer:

A new Store Locations page (/stores), shows all customer pickup locations available for your site.  The list is organized by State/Province where applicable, and provides links to the individual store pages.

Individual pages for each store location, which each include:

• Store name, address, directions, phone, email and hours
• Google Map of the location
• List of up to three nearby locations

[h4]Site Map XML[/h4] A sitemap is a file containing an exhaustive list of pages on a website, to be used by search crawler bots for indexing.  Without a sitemap file search bots can only find pages which are linked from another known page.  This can often lead to overlooked pages and lower search index scores.  Photo Finale now provides an individualized, custom sitemap xml file for each and every site so that search bots (Googlebot, Bingbot, YahooSlurp, etc.) can better index the sites and provide greater search index hits.  The sitemap file includes the standard Photo Finale pages as well as the links for the new store location pages for each pickup location that your site offers.  For Photo Finale Enterprise customers, the sitemap file also includes a full list of all content pages from Umbraco and is automatically updated when you add or remove content.

[h4]Improved SEO-Friendly Shopping URLs[/h4] We’ve enhanced our request routing algorithms so that all of your shop-by-category and shop-by-occasion links can use SEO-friendly URLs, even categories and occasions with punctuation or other symbols in the names.  Check out the release notes for myLab’s new Web Links feature for easier access to these shopping URLs.

[h4]Aviary Editor v3.0[/h4] We’ve integrated the new version 3 web widget released by Aviary.  Highlights of v3 include:

• Gorgeous, streamlined interface
• Greatly improved performance and responsiveness for users
• Improvements to a number of tools, including Enhance, Crop, Draw and Text
• Better top and bottom toolbars

[h4]Fixes[/h4]

Improved handling of “preserve aspect” photo spots, used in certain designs such as the Quick Look Books.  The panning icon and north, south, east, and west drag handles are now hidden.  The way that photo spot borders are drawn has also been reworked to produce better results for “preserve aspect” spots.

Fixed a problem with “invalid width/height” error messages shown to customers when opening certain projects.

[h1]myLab 9.6[/h1]

[h4]Web Links[/h4] To go hand-in-hand with our improved SEO, your myLab portal now features a new “Web Links” page within Store Management.  The Web Links page gives you easy, direct access to all of the relevant URLs for your Photo Finale site.  You can use these URLs for links on your corporate site, marketing and ad banners, email blasts, etc.  The list of links is broken down into sections, and includes:

• Standard Pages — basic pages such as Prints, Create, Sign-in, My Projects, Order Tracking, etc.
• Print Category Links — these take the user directly to the Prints workflow with a specified print category pre-selected
• Creative Category Links — these take the user to the Creative product browser at a pre-selected category or sub-category
• Shop by Occasion Links — these take the user to the Creative product browser in “By Occasion” mode for the selected occasion
• Generate a Product Link — search for a product by name or Product ID and myLab will give you a direct link for that product