I hate busy work. In November, I went through my entire image basket (over 3500 images at the time) and got my tagging in order and my sections organized. I had been putting it off for a while, because I hate “busy work”. Luckily, this was about the same time I decided to re-design my site, so I had a few other tasks to complete in each section.

• Consistent section naming conventions. I am going to eventually have CP Shop installations for all of the Lekker Shops. In order for the sections to sort the way I want them to, I needed to make sure section names were consistent.
• Update product descriptions. It’s one of the 7 habits. I just needed to go in and freshen them up and make sure every item had one.
• Update product names. Another of the 7 habits. In anticipation of moving over to CPShop based sites in the future, we needed to get things named properly to sort the way we wanted and keep like designs together, if possible.
• Update/add tags. We had a lot of images that were uploaded in the olden days when there wasn’t a marketplace or image tags.
• Organize image basket. Taking a cue from Success with Cafepress.com, I created a system allowing me to find images and keep them organized.
• Update thumbnails. I used to have thumbnails that were branded. But, that was just one more step I had to take to get a design stocked. We now use an image from the image basket. Easy Peasy.
• Set all section defaults. pricing, names, descriptions & images.

So, how did I make it to the end of the tunnel without going (more) crazy? Copy and pasting is a pain. But one little tool can make it a lot easier. You’ll need to get the Yahoo! Widget Engine (Windows or Mac), and then download the Scribbler 3.0 widget. it allows you to save multiple snippets to paste later. - basically an interactive clipboard, like they have in MS Office. What I would do is set everything up in the section info tab - names, descriptions, thumbnails, etc. I could then copy and paste the description from that tab, go to the contents tab and make the changes with the bulk change drop down. It saves a step, and it’s a lot easier than using a text editor to keep all of my copies, which is what I used to do. It would also come in very handy when I was tagging. I use this little guy every single day. They have a lot of other widgets too - email tracking, clocks, system tools…