Making stuff is hard as is, and sometimes store page customization slip our minds right before launch! Don't skip out on it though: a good thumbnail and page design can get more people to interact with your content. Here's a few scattered tips to help you make your life easier and pages look nice~
Stop Re-Uploading Your Entire Projects To Fix One (1) Typo!
Get familiar with butler, itchio's command line tool for uploading projects more efficiently (it works a bit like pushing updates to GitHub)! Here's a nice Youtube tutorial by Skyride Studios about how to install butler for those who need some visual help.
If command line is a bit intimidating, you can try Sean S. LeBlanc's GUI Butler tool to see if it works for you.
butler's very handy if your internet upload speeds aren't where they should be or you're in a game jam with a tight time limit. To do this, make a page and set it to Draft or Restricted so it exists. Then, if you upload a base file of your game via butler, you can save a lot of time on the next upload as butler will recognize reused code and only push differences on the respective channel. As a bonus, players who download your game via the itch app will automatically get all the updates as they go live.
Customize Your Page Assets!
Are you uploading enough screenshots and filling in the information for the Metadata of your project? While you can release a project on itch.io without messing with that stuff, it definitely will help your project look more professional. See Easy Releasy by Jannik Boysen or Itch Game Page Image Guide & Templates by Star West for some tips on this.
Having trouble getting images down to 3MB each? Compress and optimize .webp, .png, and .jpg images using TinyPNG, and your .gif animations with ezgif.
If you're fancy and know your way around CSS, you can email itch.io support telling them how you plan to customize your page using CSS and they'll be able to activate it for you. Be sure to follow the best practices! There's even a handy live editor on CodePen to play around with it.
As far as thumbnails/cover images go, there's been multiple informal studies/tests that show that having a thumbnail that clearly shows a character's face and a legible logo gives a boost to CTR percentages. .gif thumbnails do even better with this. Ones that loop cleanly are pretty nice.
List Your Content Warnings!
Due to the nature of this bundle, some projects might have sensitive content that people might like to know before they go in so they can mentally prepare themselves. It can be a little hard to figure out what all to list though, so take a look at this article by Sisters in Crime. Remember: depiction is not always endorsement.
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Got any other tips for everyone else? Feel free to leave them below!