It can be very time-consuming setting up text templates. You have to decide on the perfect font and sizing your text box just-so. You have to decide what exactly you want the placeholder text itself to say. You have to label the field if you don't want the default Text 1, Text 2, etc. You have to make sure the URL parameter is different, or the same if you want multiple fields treated as one, and make sure they are presented in the right order on the product page when a customer clicks to Personalize. But that was the old way where clicking to Personalize opened a template panel on the product page and the ONLY thing the customer could do was edit the text characters. If they wanted/needed to change anything else, size, color, font, position .... they had to click to 'customize further' or 'continue with Design tool" or whatever the button said. The template panel was to make it as easy as possible for the customer to personalize right on the product page without having to open the full scary editor so we took a lot of care in setting them up.
But that all seems redundant now, a waste of time, because with the new interface, once they click to Personalize they are on a screen where they have 100% editing control of all the details with a very obvious menu bar for changing color, font, size etc etc.. There is no longer that intermediate template panel over the product page that restricted them to just editing the text itself. And here's the thing that got me pondering if setting up templates will even be necessary anymore - they get this easy full control whether it's template text or not.
Here's a sample design I made. When they click "Personalize this Design" from the product page they get
The non-template lines aren't included on the left menu of fields to edit but all they have to do is intuitively click the text on the image pane ("Click on the design to make changes" as directed) and it becomes very obvious they can edit that any way they want, too.
Here's a real product, where Smile! is NOT template text.
And here's a real interesting case of a product where none of the text is template. Here, the button on the product page for the viewer says "Edit this Design" instead of "Personalize this Design" but :
This new format makes it so easy for customers to edit/format text whether it's a template field or not, I'm really wondering tonight what is the point of making something a template? Is it now an outdated old-fashioned step in the design process that's no longer necessary? And since people can now intuitively click right on the design to edit as much as they want, will Zazzle eventually decide to just do away with the "template panel" fields on the left?
What are your thoughts? Is it time we stop thinking of "template text" as being special and worth the time to set up since they get global personalization ability now regardless?
Great thoughts, @ColsCreations
It would certainly make life easier. I'm really done with the ping pong of making texts templates.
Interesting thoughts. I hadn't clicked on the text tab before... here's the interesting part. If you have a mixture of text fields that are templates and text fields that are not, the text tab only shows you the non-template fields. Hmmm...
I'm not sure what the best approach is in terms of how I'd ideally like them to make it work, but given the way it's currently set up, I do think that I'm going to change my approach a little bit and only make templates for the fields that most folks are gonna want to change.
A lot of my wedding invitations have all of the text as templates - but it can get confusing for the stuff that includes special characters (like the characters with the swashes on the ends of the letters). But... some folks might not want it to say "together with their families" they might prefer "together with their parents" or something completely different like "with great joy and happiness" so I want to leave it accessible. So I'm thinking that since they can easily access the text another way, I'll just make the stuff they really need to change into templates (names, date/time, venue) so that the form is less cluttered.
This is why it is SOOO helpful to be able to see and interact with the design in exactly the same way as the customer does.
Anyhow, after making those changes to this invite, you end up with the form looking like this:
...and the text tab looks like this:
I think that's an improvement in terms of cutting down on the confusion factor. Then again... one never knows exactly where the clear vs. confusion line is gonna fall, so hopefully this approach won't confuse anybody even more! 😉
