Guest Posted February 14, 2005 Share Posted February 14, 2005 Hi all, I would like to welcome all of you to my site to check it out. Any ideas or critiques would be really nice and much appreciated! It's live, so please no test transactions. Thanks! NaturalSamba Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AfterDark Posted February 14, 2005 Share Posted February 14, 2005 nice color choice. cant say i like the stock osc look tho. best of luck with your venture. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MysticBlues Posted February 14, 2005 Share Posted February 14, 2005 Great information and intro pages... you need to do a lot of work to the 'store part' yet to make it flow with your other pages. You seem to be off to a great start and if you designed those other pages yourselves you shouldn't have much trouble at all bring the rest of the site up to par! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 14, 2005 Share Posted February 14, 2005 Sorry to not leave you a link! Here it is: NaturalSamba.com Thanks MysticBlues and AfterDark for the responses so far. I'm not sure how much more to customize the catalog, I believe I've changed colors, images and the simple stuff as much as I can. I believe to go much further requires changing php, and I'm still learning the language so a little chicken to change much until I learn more. I've been looking at some modules to add, but not sure what would be best? Anyone having experieces to share would be great to hear from. Any other ideas would also be great. Thanks to all! NS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_other_mac Posted February 14, 2005 Share Posted February 14, 2005 As you may realise, your landing page is one huge graphic. That means it looks pretty, but takes ages to load. I shudder to think what it's like for dialup users... You should really try to get it replaced with a "real" html page - or better still, when you're happy with the OSC home page, just re-direct visitors straight to the OSC site. Depending on how ambitious you are (or whether you know any friendly talented CSS designers), reusing the actual design of your landing page would be a wonderful aim for the OSC home page. (There are various ways of doing this, including a couple of lines of simple HTML if you don't have full control of your hosted domain; to an .htaccess redirect for the more technical; or changing the nameserver data with the company that registered your domain.) Your current home OSC page is also quite large. I think you need to use the autothumbnailer contribution. ThaiGecko.com - wholesale Thai crafts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_other_mac Posted February 14, 2005 Share Posted February 14, 2005 >I believe to go much further requires changing php, and I'm still learning the language so a little chicken to change much until I learn more. Some contributions (modules) are as simple as uploading a new file in place of an old one. Most modules contain very careful step-by-step instructions, along the lines of "find text 'blah blah blah' on line 42, replace with 'baa baa baa'". Before you make any changes, search the contributions.... there are thousands, and chances are, someone wanted to do the same thing in the past. I also didn't know any PHP when I started, and wasn't planning to learn... (although I am a fairly technically-minded person). I think I'm doing fairly well now, although my shop isn't live yet! Using other people's contributions is an excellent way to quickly learn practical PHP. Most of the really hard parts involve understanding the parts that are already there.... In the meantime, I ended up learning PHP well enough to write what will be a contribution as soon as I get around to testing and documenting it... If you do change any code, do it on a test site, and make endless backups! It's probably a good idea to store regular date-labelled snapshots, even if your changes seemed successful in case you find an unexpected bug a week later. Another thing I wish I had done from the start is carefully document every contribution I installed (although I did at least put comments in the code). It can get to the point where one contribution wants to modify code that was already modified by a previous one, and you want to be sure you can spot that.... Contributions are the real power and flexibility of OSC. If you can follow instructions and copy and paste some code, you can use them, and your site will end up being far more usable. There are even contributions to make your site easier to find on Google.... ThaiGecko.com - wholesale Thai crafts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 15, 2005 Share Posted February 15, 2005 Thanks the_other_mac for the replies! I started making more changes. Added a module, and made lot's of other changes thanks to your imput. Thanks for the help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moonlitsun Posted February 15, 2005 Share Posted February 15, 2005 Header image is beautiful. GREAT job on that. You'll want to customize the footer, as it's rather non-existent. I like how you've modified the nav buttons as well. I'd suggest removing the languages infobox altogether from column_left.php. Good job. :) Carpe Carp: Seize the Fish. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KaiAnimation Posted February 15, 2005 Share Posted February 15, 2005 Hi NaturalSamba- I don't mind the OSCommerce look. I think the color choice works great for your product. I like how the OSCommerce buttons are brown, now. I'm on a DSL line and the pictures still seemed to take some time to load. Although this sort of thing doesn't usually turn me off to a site. I like internet punishment. But a dail up customer may go crazy waiting. You called your logo: http://www.naturalsamba.com/catalog/images/oscommerce.gif and the "alt text" says OSCommerce. This can be fixed in includes/header.php it is about 50 or so lines down. Just search for oscommerce and make your changes. You can call your picture naturalsamba.gif instead of oscommerce.gif and you can fix the OSCommerce "alt text" to Natural Samba. Of course make sure you have your picture named properly in catalog/images. The includes/header.php line will end up looking like this: <tr class="header"><td valign="left"><?php echo '<a href="' . tep_href_link(FILENAME_DEFAULT) . '">' . tep_image(DIR_WS_IMAGES . 'naturalsamba.gif', 'Natural Samba') . '</a>'; ?></td></tr> In your includes/languages/english/privacy.php file you'll need a space, just for symmetry, after two of your parentheses. Boy, this makes me sound so picky. One is the line with Use of Information and the other is Contact Natural Samba. Maybe your plans are to increase the number of languages and types of currency you'll accept, but I don't think you need those boxes. They can be // commented out in includes/column_right.php. Now that I've bounced around your site, the picture that I've been to load faster, but the pictures I haven't seen yet still load a little slowly. I wish you well with your business. Danny If I'm giving advice, it is based on what path I would take to fix your problem. My path may be wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 15, 2005 Share Posted February 15, 2005 Hi all! Again, thanks for taking the time to look at my site. The feedback has been GREAT! To moonlitsun, I changed the footer, and I agree about the language and currency boxes. I removed them, and noticed how empty the right column looks without them, and put them back for a little bit. I'm currently looking at some contributions I can add to that column to make it more useful and to look better w/o the unnecessary boxes. Thanks! To KaiAnimation, thanks for the in-depth feedback, believe me I don't think you are being picky! I fixed the spaces in privacy.php, re-named the header and for the boxes see the above. I'm contemplating the issue about load time due to big pictures. I feel like if I make them smaller, the customer would have to click on each item to get pop-up image in order to see it well enough. I'm actually also looking for a contribution to add to center of page, replacing the what's new feature. Not really a feature that I think adds to my main cause. Would love to add pages to catalog, adding info pages out of catalog into it, and then using the center area to those pages. I'm sure I'll be looking for a similar contribution, or maybe with all this new found confidence I can start writing my own? Thanks again to all for bringing the power to the people! NS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_other_mac Posted February 17, 2005 Share Posted February 17, 2005 I'm contemplating the issue about load time due to big pictures. I feel like if I make them smaller, the customer would have to click on each item to get pop-up image in order to see it well enough. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What's happening at the moment is, the customer is already downloading the full-size picture, and then their browser shrinks it to fit into the space. Each pic appears to be 125x100 pixels on the screen, but in fact it's the full 600x480 version. I just looked at one example, the black bracelet. It's 174kb. That's what your customer must download just to see that one little picture. I resized it to the same size as it actually appears in my browser. Now it's 2.7kb, or 1.5% of the original size. And there would be no visible difference to the customer if my resized pic was used... A thumbnailer automatically creates the small version of the pic, while also keeping the original if they choose to click to view up close. It just saves you the work of making two versions of every picture. ThaiGecko.com - wholesale Thai crafts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
julianpuje Posted February 17, 2005 Share Posted February 17, 2005 Hi I like the general stock look of the site and the colours and images you've used. They work well together. But i have to agree with some of the other comments. The speed of your site is way too slow, i only waited to see it for the purpose of writing this. If i was a buyer i think i would have left before it loaded. I would start by removing the product count next to the categories, this slows the site load time with all the database requests to count everything. Be brave, do a back up and try installing an image contribution. The worst that can happen is that you have to restore your back-up if it all goes crazy. The images will look exactly the same as they do know but will be around 2k instead of 150k+. You can also optimise the images you are using, as i think the size of them is far too big for the image produced. May also be worth using a cache contribution. The site looks good though, great job up to now. :thumbsup: Julian A little knowledge is dangerous, I SHOULD KNOW. If Life Begins At 40, What ends???? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
julianpuje Posted February 17, 2005 Share Posted February 17, 2005 Forgot this bit, sorry. You have two // at the bottom left of your index pages. Check your index.php to get rid of them. Julian A little knowledge is dangerous, I SHOULD KNOW. If Life Begins At 40, What ends???? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 17, 2005 Share Posted February 17, 2005 Thanks again for the responses! The Other Mac - that explains a lot, thank you. I changed image sizes in admin and noticed it didn't really improve the speed of load. Now I see why. Setting out on that problem now. Any suggestions on a specific thumbnail contrib.? I know I saw a few of them, I'll look at them again. Julian - I'll also remove product count from categories. That was a good point. First, I'm off to remove the // from index.php. Thanks for the ideas, they are great! NS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 17, 2005 Share Posted February 17, 2005 OK, I added image thumbnailer. Seems to be working great. Thanks the_other_mac! NS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 17, 2005 Share Posted February 17, 2005 I noticed a problem, and not sure where it is coming from. When there is not supposed to be a category image in heading (/catalog , /login , etc.), a black background is shown in heading. Anybody know how to remedie this problem? NS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 17, 2005 Share Posted February 17, 2005 Hi all, OK, found the problem, and fixed it. I'm wondering about something, though. It seems that the thumbnailed images are not as good of quality as the pics were before using thumnailer, even though they are displayed at same size. When I increase the size of photos in admin, then the thumbnails are really bad (even though I erased all photos from imagecache before changing size). There must be a way to solve this, does anybody have any good ideas? It sure does make a difference with speed!! Thanks again for all the help! NS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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