Store design - Please rate!

[Guest]

Hi there,

 

First of all can I just say a big sorry to the admin if I have placed this post in the wrong place and that if they need to move it then I won't mind.

 

I was just wondering if people could take a loot at a design I am currently working on for osCommerce using the 'Simple Template System' and a little bit of jiggery-pokery with the PHP files.

The store is located (for the time being) at http://www.helitorque.com/clients/bsr/store/

At the moment none of the product images are in there but it is just to get a feel for the template. The About Us page works as well.

 

Please could people be honest and mark this out of 10 as I am thinking about maybe selling osCommerce templates on the internet but would like to know what people think of the work so far.

 

Thankyou for your comments.

 

Regards,

 

Mark Bowen

[burt]

Looks good, I like it a lot.

 

Footer needs some work, I would extend the right/left shadows to full depth of the page. Give the footer some padding to make the text look better.

 

Other than that, there's nothing glaringly obvious that needs work.

 

7/10. Designing for STS is a mistake, the market for STS Templates is very small.

 

hth

[Guest]

Hi Gary,

 

Thanks for the reply and the helpful comments. I have added a couple of spaces before and after the text in the footer as you said. I had actually already done this but I did it on a test site on my localhost and never reflected the changes online, whoops!

 

As to the shadows, very good point. I will work on doing that although I am not too sure how to get a table to extend the full length of the page. I used topmargin="0" in the body so that the tables would push up flush to the top of the page but I am not too sure if there is a html entity for bottommargin? Would you happen to know if there is?

 

Also you say that designing for STS is small. Why is this. I thought nearly everyone who used osCommerce and had made their sites look different to the standard install used this system. If they don't could you possibly show me some sites that aren't using STS and let me know how they did it as I would really like to learn all I can about modifying osCommerce to sell templates for it. I thought that using STS would be the best as it changes (as far as I could tell) the least amount of files without too many modifications to the core osCommerce code. If I am wrong then please don't hesitate to let me know your thoughts on this as I am very interested.

 

Thanks again for your kind help.

 

Regards,

 

Mark

[RyanSmith]

Hi there,

 

First of all can I just say a big sorry to the admin if I have placed this post in the wrong place and that if they need to move it then I won't mind.

 

I was just wondering if people could take a loot at a design I am currently working on for osCommerce using the 'Simple Template System' and a little bit of jiggery-pokery with the PHP files.

The store is located (for the time being) at http://www.helitorque.com/clients/bsr/store/

At the moment none of the product images are in there but it is just to get a feel for the template. The About Us page works as well.

 

Please could people be honest and mark this out of 10 as I am thinking about maybe selling osCommerce templates on the internet but would like to know what people think of the work so far.

 

Thankyou for your comments.

 

Regards,

 

Mark Bowen

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

I really like your search (magnifying glass) icon. Thats pretty sweet. Over all I like the site.

[burt]

In your code you have this:

 

</table>
	 <br>
	 <br>

 </div>
 
</body>
</html>

 

Which is near the bottom of your STS HTML Layout page I'd have thought. If you remove those two <br>'s the gap should disappear.

 

Have a look through the live-sites listing, I'd estimate that 99.9% of those are made without STS so you can see varying qualities. Have a hunt in Google for oscommerce templates - there are 5 or 6 good template makers out there. Know your competition ;)

 

The benefit of not using STS is that you are learning the ins and outs of osCommerce, and your clients won't have the hassle of trying to add contributions (which is a real PITA)...also note that MS3 should have it's own templating system pre-installed...

 

Well, anyway, good luck!

[npn2531]

Hi there,

 

First of all can I just say a big sorry to the admin if I have placed this post in the wrong place and that if they need to move it then I won't mind.

 

I was just wondering if people could take a loot at a design I am currently working on for osCommerce using the 'Simple Template System' and a little bit of jiggery-pokery with the PHP files.

The store is located (for the time being) at http://www.helitorque.com/clients/bsr/store/

At the moment none of the product images are in there but it is just to get a feel for the template. The About Us page works as well.

 

Please could people be honest and mark this out of 10 as I am thinking about maybe selling osCommerce templates on the internet but would like to know what people think of the work so far.

 

Thankyou for your comments.

 

Regards,

 

Mark Bowen

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[Guest]

Hi everyone,

 

Ryan, thanks for your comment. It has just reminded me that I need to change over the standard osCommerce magnifying glass icon for the search box to my own so thanks for that.

 

Gary, I can't believe that I missed those two <br> tags!!! I am even using a WYSIWYG html editor but I just kept on overlooking them, silly or what!!!

Thanks for the link. I have taken a look at a lot of the sites in the live-sites listing but most of them don't really use any kind of template at all and just go with the standard look. I found a couple but I am pretty sure that they are using STS.

 

Thanks for all the help though. It is much appreciated.

P.S. Do you know where I can find more information on the new templating system you were talking about and also when MS3 is being released?

P.P.S. I was just reading your blog and I was wondering if you yourself had any osCommerce sites that you have produced for clients without using STS that I could possibly take a look at to give me an idea of what to create??

 

 

Regards,

 

Mark

[dblake]

Have a look through the live-sites listing, I'd estimate that 99.9% of those are made without STS so you can see varying qualities. Have a hunt in Google for oscommerce templates - there are 5 or 6 good template makers out there.  Know your competition ;)

 

The benefit of not using STS is that you are learning the ins and outs of osCommerce, and your clients won't have the hassle of trying to add contributions (which is a real PITA)...also note that MS3 should have it's own templating system pre-installed...

 

Well, anyway, good luck!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

My client adding contributions? Not trying to sound rude, but 99.9% of clients that need a website built, have no clue on html let along adding in a contribution. I use STS obviously, but I have learned tons about OSC. But I didn't take STS for the basic either, I went in and stripped out tons of coding and added custom code ontop of it, but I guess to a normal user you would be right.

[burt]

P.P.S. I was just reading your blog and I was wondering if you yourself had any osCommerce sites that you have produced for clients without using STS that I could possibly take a look at to give me an idea of what to create??

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Well, here's my own site which does not use STS: http://www.a1jewelrystore.com (it's very much a work in progress). I can show other sites all made without STS, but I would prefer to PM you the URLs if that's OK?

[Guest]

Hi Gary,

 

If you could send me some URLs via PM then that would be excellent thanks. As many as you can send would be great so that I can get a real feel for osCommerce and what can be done with it in the right hands.

 

Thanks again,

 

Mark

[Guest]

Looks good, slow load on dialup, don't like to scroll right/left.

[virose_pt]

I liked the front page. One question: I?m trying to do the same thing in index.php, but all I get is some errors. Can you tell me what you did to put imagens in the front page?

 

Burt: In your page, do you use some kind of "featured products" contribution? Wich one?

 

Thanx

[burt]

I liked the front page. One question: I?m trying to do the same thing in index.php, but all I get is some errors. Can you tell me what you did to put imagens in the front page?

 

Burt: In your page, do you use some kind of "featured products" contribution? Wich one?

 

Thanx

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Did you mean the products area in the front page which have a description and read more|add to cart buttons? If so, that's something that I made myself. Would you like the code?

[thecodingmonkey]

I give it an an F it doesn't even pull up kind of hard to grade that

[virose_pt]

Did you mean the products area in the front page which have a description and read more|add to cart buttons?  If so, that's something that I made myself.  Would you like the code?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

If you dont mind... I really like it, I woul like to give it a try.

 

;)

[Guest]

Ignore posts from the coding monkey. His name explaines himsef. He should be banned from this board.

[barefoot_boo]

Did you mean the products area in the front page which have a description and read more|add to cart buttons?  If so, that's something that I made myself.  Would you like the code?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Any chance I could have a squiz at your featured products code too please?

 

cheers

boo

[burt]

They're not featured products...it's just a rework of the standard "new products" module to include "buy it now" and description.

 

I'll try to get it packaged and uploaded today anyway.

[General Martok]

Looks great.

So which files are edited and what tools did you use?

[Guest]

tough to read the categories titles, store info titles, etc as they are very dim. try to bump up the font size a bit make it easier for us older people to see things