Tag clouds can look good on a blog or web site. The size of the words in the cloud represents how often those word are used on your site. However sometimes the graphical interpretation of the popularity of a word is not always the best use of a tag facility.
Tag lists are better than clouds in ecommerce shops.
Online shops, for instance, may use tags to highlight various function of products that they sell. I do on my shops. For example on the mobile phone site phonelingo.co.uk I tag each phone with it’s main option or facilities – is it an Android phone or a windows mobile phone? Does it have TV reception or WIFI capabilities? These are some of the options that people look for when buying a phone and to give them the ability to browse by the options is useful.
But the tag cloud presentation s not the best way to do this in this situation. A more straightforward list that is the same styling as the other sidebar items is much more effective. You can easily find this out yourself using split testing analysis. I’ve split tested using the web site with both cloud display of tags and straightforward list display of tags and the links in a plain list display in a shopping cart environment is used almost 3 times more than the links in a cloud. If people are more comfortable with using a basic link then they are more likely to stay on your site and more likely to purchase.
Use tags for product functions and list them for easy browsing.
One of the benefits of people being much more likely to use the browse tags function is that it reduces your bounce rate and that helps you to maintain and improve your position in the search results. But better search rankings is just a side bonus. The real benefits are improved usability and that leads to more sales.
You can test the situation on your own site by running experiments using either Google Optimiser or setting up experiments using Google Analytics (or any other statistical package that allows you to set tracking and goals on your site). I have every confidence that you will see similar results that I saw in my experiments.
While some people like all the flash and design features when they go online the vast majority of people who are shopping online are looking for the quickest way to the details of what they want to buy. Sometimes being a bit bland and boring is the most effective way to increase sales because your web visitors can get straight to what matters without having to think too hard or get too distracted.
Change wp ecommerce tag cloud to unformatted list.
The basic tag widget that comes with WP Ecommerce 3.8 is the tag cloud. If you want to change the display of the tag cloud to a list then it’s very easy to do. I’ve hacked the relevant file that you need to replace in your own wp ecommerce 3.8 installation. All you need to do is unzip the file and ftp the file over to your web site. Alternatively if you are not able to ftp just copy the contents of the file and use the plugin editor of WordPress to replace the contents of the file on your server.
Tested and working in WordPress 3.3 and WP Ecommerce 3.8.7.6.2
The hack to display tags in wp ecommerce 3.8 as a list costs just £5.00.
