I thought I'd drop a few words about Vistag as we've tested the tool a little bit on two of our now interactive websites (not e-commerce, yet...). The first website did not work due to, what we believe was Slider Revolution interference. Vistag and Slider Revolution tandem renders our website completely unusable. Therefore, we decided to switch it off there.
The second of our interactive websites, a static WordPress site, was (is) much better. We're still testing it there but performance is all good and Pingdom/GTMetrix/PageSpeed did not mark any meaningful drops in loading speed scores. Even with 10+ or so tags thrown on two web pages.
Vistag Highlights and PROs
To cut to the chase, I really like the visual presentation and interactive aspects of Vistag. Objectively looking at it - Vistag WILL make you and others hover, click, poke, fondle and (hopefully) buy-through those flashing gems. There is just no way around it given how our brains and eyes work.
However, at this point in time, Vistag isn't finished tool yet and many fundamental options are missing.
Vistag's missing features (or rather Not-There-Yets)
Some of the things we'd like to see rather sooner than later include:
- "mailto:"/"tel:" and other HTML special links to enable CTA's (Call-To-Actions) for anything that is not e-commerce
- images within the tags that could be fed from WP Media / external URLs
- CSS selectors and more customisations
- global UTM trackers
The dashboard and interface would also benefit from some conscious cleanup and re-planning for easier navigation. The User experience (UI) is a bit all over the place on the admin side.
I've also looked at this new "Lookbook" feature, which allows to add images to tags. I'm sure this is probably my pure ignorance, but I still don't get it. Again, it could be lack of my attention but how is this better or more important than just feeding and tagging pictures from WP Media or external URLs. The link on the dashboard takes me to some vague Documentation on how to make it work, but nothing else.
I've mentioned CSS customisations already but let me reiterate the fact that the default font size and colour (light-grey on a white background?) is just unreadable. To change that you need to do some CSS gymnastics on your website. But it seems to be in development now, so fingers crossed that we won't wait long for this must-have feature for interactive websites to work as intended.
Your images. Shoppable. Create visual content that sells like crazy.
Vistag - an ultimate web design enhancing tool?
At this point, I can't give it a 5-stars review because Vistag is incomplete; clearly in beta stage, and an exorcism on their bugged code is yet to be performed by the developers. However, I can confidently score this tool 4 out of 5 because this brilliant, yet simple idea serves you a ready-made link between human behaviour and computer science that you can use to your sales advantage, this very evening. And all this without the need of getting two PhDs in the respective fields trying to sweat something like that in your own basement. A fine marketing tool with great potential to make your plain web become one of truly interactive websites.
You simply install Vistag, place tags over your e-commerce images and the job of selling fidget spinners and made-in-China "what-have-you's" is done for you.
