Fashion 2.0: How To Make Your Website Blogger-Friendly.

I can’t even tell you how many times I was pitched for a product/store/designer/collection, loved it, but gave up on featuring it on my fashion blog because it was impossibly frustrating to collect relevant materials from their website.

Assuming nothing is obvious in this complicated tech world, I would like to share with my fellow designers/publicists/marketers/programmers few tips on how to make bloggers life easier your website blogger-friendly:

1. Allow Grabbing Your Images. This is probably the most important rule, and most obvious one, but I still see many websites who are not allowing to simply right-click and save their visuals on user’s computer. Flash and sophisticated zooming tools work great for consumers, not so great for bloggers. Even if your website is Flash based, there is a way to include html/jpegs in a separate window.

2. Include Large Images. You’ve seen most of fashion blogs – they love big chic photos. Make those available, even if they require additional click for the full size image.

3. Make Text Copyable. There is no worse time waste than retyping text from the screen. Not to mention typos. Again, even if the site is Flash based, there is a way to make the text copyable.

4. Create Individual URLs for Products. Many dynamic sites do not create individual links for products, so when bloggers want to feature a specific product, they are forced to link to the homepage, which leads to bad user experience for their readers.

5. Make Videos Embeddable. Why say it in pictures when you can say it in motion? Almost any brand has video content these days- some post it on YouTube, some exclusively on their sites. Not all videos include embed code that can be easily copied and posted. You will do bloggers a huge favor by providing this code, unless of course you don’t want your videos going viral…

6. Include Personal Background. Behind every product (almost) there is a person who created it. It’s easier to connect to a brand with a face and might be especially relevant for bloggers, who include personal angles many times. In this case especially, don’t forget rule #3.

7. Include Previous Work. Especially when featuring less known designers it’s important to see previous collections and understand the general direction, as well as see signature style and trends.

8. Update Press Section Frequently. We do want to know who else has blogged about you and when.

9. Add News Section. Although bloggers are different from news reporters, we do love to write about news worthy stuff. Make sure to include new launches/releases on your site.

10. Add a Blog. Without going too deeply into advantages of blogging for a brand, just the concept of seeing a designer/boutique store/ retail brand with a blog creates immediate connection with bloggers. If DVF, Isaac Mizrahi and BlueFly can do it, you can do that too.

Please feel free to comment and add more tips to the list!