Being involved in the portal project planning has made me think about a few things, and one of them is the use of galleries. It seems a lot of people are churning out galleries to traditional formats, and they aren't really thinking about the reasons for using them. I took a step back, and looked at the aims that we have as affiliates. Our job is to find and warm up surfers, and then persuade them to take a tour for a paysite, we hope that the paysite will close the sale, and that we will get the credit for introducing that sale.
Once you accept that your job is to get the surfer hot and taking the tour, then you can start to think of ways to do this, and galleries are just one of the methods you can use. I've started to think of building tour introduction pages which I'm going to call TIPs. TIPs can be a sequence, and they should be a flow forward to the signup page, you don't want the surfer reversing if you can help it in case you lose him. If you want to convert a basic gallery into a TIPs format, then you should stop using a simple jpeg for the big picture, and you should use an html page with the jpeg embedded into it - include some sales text to try to carry the surfer forward onto the tour. Another alternative is my fours up clusters, these allow surfers to move through a small collection of pre-sales pictures, and there is always an attempt to lead him onto the tour. Yet another approach is a story, and make sure you include "calls to action" in the text. If you add a few thumbnails with links to larger pictures, then make sure that the surfer loads an html page with more sales text on it.
Mini-reviews and video pages are further options, but make sure you design a forward flow for the surfer onto the paysite tour.
Now who doesn't agree with me?
