JCoyote Posted December 1, 2005 Share Posted December 1, 2005 OK, so having mad some modifications here and there, and applied a number of strongly suggested alterations to osc from around the forums, my site is up: CynikGear.com Our site is basically for selling printed black t shirts, and we maintain ties with poet community as well. I've noticed one tweak I'm going to have to make later today, but still, I'd love some feedback. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarafina Posted December 1, 2005 Share Posted December 1, 2005 OK, so having mad some modifications here and there, and applied a number of strongly suggested alterations to osc from around the forums, my site is up: CynikGear.com Our site is basically for selling printed black t shirts, and we maintain ties with poet community as well. I've noticed one tweak I'm going to have to make later today, but still, I'd love some feedback. 1.The background and font are both white when you go to create account so nothing is seen. 2.Get rid of the cartoon looking stock oscommerce icons, write a review. 3.The blue footer at the bottom doesn't extend all the way to the left. 4.Prices in the product listings are missing. 5.I like your copy, it fits in with your theme. Contributions installed: Purchase without Account / STS/ All Products/ Header Tags Controller Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 1, 2005 Author Share Posted December 1, 2005 1.The background and font are both white when you go to create account so nothing is seen. -This and 4 are the same problem. There seems to be an issue in the general layout of osc that expects if you have a light background you'll have light boxes, and vice versa. 2.Get rid of the cartoon looking stock oscommerce icons, write a review. -Yeah, I'll probably just delete those, they are superfluous and text in teh end is more relevant to the concept. I have a couple customers writing reviews for me. 3.The blue footer at the bottom doesn't extend all the way to the left. -I'm not sure what to do about this, it happened when I adjusted the side columns. I'm still trying to figure out why it's doing that. 4.Prices in the product listings are missing. -See 1. 5.I like your copy, it fits in with your theme. Thatnk you, take a look at the Conditions of Use page. ;) Thank you for your help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 1, 2005 Author Share Posted December 1, 2005 1.The background and font are both white when you go to create account so nothing is seen. 2.Get rid of the cartoon looking stock oscommerce icons, write a review. 3.The blue footer at the bottom doesn't extend all the way to the left. 4.Prices in the product listings are missing. 5.I like your copy, it fits in with your theme. UPDATE: 1. Fixed, along with 4. Had to add new css class to define text in boxes as separate from "main", then some selective search & replace. I THINK I got it all. 2. Done. Replaced with transparent single pixel gif's. I would abandon them altogether, but decided against in favor of leaving the option of adding my own graphics in in certain cases. 3. Still stuck on that. 5. More to come. :) Personally, I would like to add a gift certificate system, to use in promotions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 2, 2005 Author Share Posted December 2, 2005 OK, I fixed the footer issue. Everything seems nice and stable, and other than making a change for alternate images for enlargements... to show the full shirt instead of just the design... and content that's going to be added weekly/biweekly. Anyone else have any advice? Think its ready for primetime? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gty Posted December 7, 2005 Share Posted December 7, 2005 on your contact us page the text color is the same as the backgound and you can't see unless you highlight it..customers will not know where to type there email address or subject.And the paypal info box and shopping/review box is not straight. same thing as above about the text color on the privacy policy page for your email address(can't see it) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chance Posted December 7, 2005 Share Posted December 7, 2005 The stock gray-blue bars are kinda ugly bro- Change the stylesheet. Your site is too wide for 1024x768- The max width on your store must be 955px to fit properly inside a 1024x768 window. Since 70% of internet users are on 1024x768 or lower resolution, you are really shooting yourself in the foot here. People hate horizontal scroll bars. My advice comes in two flavors- Pick the one that won't offend you. Hard and Cynical: How to Make a Horrible osCommerce Site Warm and Fuzzy: How to Make an Awesome osCommerce Site Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 15, 2005 Author Share Posted December 15, 2005 The stock gray-blue bars are kinda ugly bro- Change the stylesheet. Your site is too wide for 1024x768- The max width on your store must be 955px to fit properly inside a 1024x768 window. Since 70% of internet users are on 1024x768 or lower resolution, you are really shooting yourself in the foot here. People hate horizontal scroll bars. Actually I kind of like the gray bars, they break up the site without being distracting from the images. I'm trying to think of a good color to do what it's doing without wrecking the balance between the black grounds with white text and the white tables with black text. Darkseagreen (8FBC8F) seems ok but too close to pastel for my tastes. The problem here is the product is in most cases white-on-black, and I really don't want the bars on the site to draw attention away from the product. Red might actually work decently, but it does severely draw the eye, AWAY from where the action is. In my case, product, or most specifically the design on the product, takes precedent. I'm trying to have it so my customers can choose whatever design they want to wear, and then choose how they are going to wear it, ie t-shirt, hoodie, and I'm going to add in girl's t's and longsleeve t's in a little while. If anyone can suggest a smoother way to go about that, I am open to suggestions. It doesn't seem like there's really a perfect solution for that. I COULD have them entirely separated with different categories for t's and sweats, etc, but that seems like a more cumbersome interface to me when all designs are available on any of them. At the same time, this creates a problem because I would like to add multiple images for each product to actually show them on various shirts; however, I'm worried that could cause customer confusion about which shirt style they are buying if they click the purchase button too quickly. I'm trying to fix the horizontal issue; it occured with the adding of the paypal logo to the site. It only happens on the index page. Also, the index page has the right column spaced down somewhat. What's driving me crazy about this is it ONLY does this on the index page. Something about how index.php interacts with column_right.php isn't working out. This is getting frustrating because I DO want that paypal logo up there. It's very convenient and adds makes it clearer what payments we accept and how before a customer starts buying. My part numbers on the product pages aren't visible, but I doubt many customers even care or notice they are "missing". I mostly entered them for my own internal tracking purposes anyway. But really, thanks Chance and gty, you guys are awesome! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 15, 2005 Author Share Posted December 15, 2005 Ok, I've tried a different blue-green color for the box headings. It is nice in that it gives good definition to both white and black text which appear in these. I just hope it doesn't overpower or distract from the rest of the site. www.cynikgear.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 17, 2005 Share Posted December 17, 2005 I like the color scheme. I'm on dial-up and it loads lightning fast, too. Big plus there. But, I really dislike all that scrolling on the main page. That photo you have of the shirt off to the right of your text is the culprit. It's shoving the other boxes in the right column over way too far. The scrolling from left to right stopped, however, when I clicked on other pages where the shirt is absent. Interesting thing I noticed: when I clicked on your Privacy policy, your site went into SSL mode. Why? I wasn't trying to create an account or login or doing anything that would be considered 'sensitive' or require the site to kick in to SSL mode. Then when I tried to go back to the landing page, I received the popup about secure and nonsecure items. The only pages that should be secure, IMO, are those which require data transfer from customer to storeowner. Create Account, Log-In, Checkout, etc. Did you do that on purpose? Andrea Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 17, 2005 Author Share Posted December 17, 2005 I like the color scheme. I'm on dial-up and it loads lightning fast, too. Big plus there. But, I really dislike all that scrolling on the main page. That photo you have of the shirt off to the right of your text is the culprit. It's shoving the other boxes in the right column over way too far. The scrolling from left to right stopped, however, when I clicked on other pages where the shirt is absent. Interesting thing I noticed: when I clicked on your Privacy policy, your site went into SSL mode. Why? I wasn't trying to create an account or login or doing anything that would be considered 'sensitive' or require the site to kick in to SSL mode. Then when I tried to go back to the landing page, I received the popup about secure and nonsecure items. The only pages that should be secure, IMO, are those which require data transfer from customer to storeowner. Create Account, Log-In, Checkout, etc. Did you do that on purpose? Andrea The fast load times are partly because most of my shirt designs are ultimately highly contrasted line art, most of the graphics I use for the main presentation are gif's. I'm working on adding more graphics of each shirt, but those are going to be on the product_info pages. I think this works better in the end because A: it shows the designs clearer and more legibly than jpeg's B: it allows my customers to browse faster for what they do want C: it reduces my necessary bandwidth overhead for people who just browse What browser/os/resolution are you using? It fit on my screen but mine's set to 1024. I'm not sure what to do about that picture. I WANT to have a picture there, to make it visually a bit more clear on the first page the kinds of things we sell, as well as create a link to the Screaming House shirt which helps raise money for our local slam team. I'm probably going to change the jpeg; one of the members of the poet community is a model (she modeled for Hot Topic in the past) and has offered to model for us gratis... well for some shirts. :) But I'm deciding if I would rather take the picture against a blank background and halo it for definition against the rest of the page, OR take the picture against a decayed urban background like I did with Jake the Mannequin. Actually, apparently I left most of the site set to secure. Hmm. Hadn't really noticed! I think that is also another impact of the gif's: secure transactions take more time but the sites so streamlined it hardly matters. So now I have some work to do, because with the shared SSL on the navigation line in the browser it doesn't show as my domain name directly. I don't like that. I'm trying to do branding here... Thanks so much for the input Andrea. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 17, 2005 Share Posted December 17, 2005 I think my monitor, itself, is 17 inches. The screen resolution is set to 800 X 600. I changed it to 1024 X whatever the default is and I'm in pain. Everything is tiny; impossible to browse or read. Two of the false assumptions a lot of people make are: Everyone uses the same screen resolution as I do AND everyone is on high-speed DSL Internet. Not everyone has a big, wide-screen monitor to play with. Heck, most people have a 15 or 17 inch monitor, IMO, and half the country is still on dial-up, as I am. When I change the screen resolution to accomodate the settings you're using on your own monitor, the site is tiny and unreadable. In current 800 X 600, that photo is what is messing it up; forcing me to scroll. Whatever looks good in 1024 X whatever should look equally good in 800 X 600. The browser resizes everything to fit. It appears you've only set it up to accomodate the higher resolution...and I'm left scrolling for miles. In my opinion, you don't need that photo. You're using the New Products for X month box on your landing page which perfectly spells out what you're selling. T-shirts with an attitude, shall we say? That other photo doesn't even fit in. And besides, it's screwing up my view. Forcing me to scroll all the way over only to discover; it's just info-box stuff in column_right.php Nothing special, in other words. I'd lose the photo. If you didn't intend for non-secure pages to be secure, I'd contact your webhost and ask what may be going on. Your landing page isn't secure....and it shouldn't be. The goal should be for guests like me to browse away and look at this and that and that padlock shouldn't be showing...and slowing things down like it does...until I attempt to view a page which requires data transfer of some kind between me and you. Create an account...login...checkout...those are the only areas where I should be seeing this. Again...you don't need that photo. Your New Items box absolutely tells the customer what you're selling. Andrea Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 17, 2005 Author Share Posted December 17, 2005 I removed the photo. Actually before reading your post... I've been trying to figure out why exactly my column_right keeps placing below the headline, but only on the front page. Still haven't nailed that one. I think it's something in the table handling but I can't figure out what. Comparing the code to other pages has yielded no luck. The rest work right; the other doesn't. As for resolutions... hehehe... I know I'm not normal, I run a 15" screen at 1024. I have for a very long time too. But my eyesight exceeds 20/20 so... Unfortunately I'm not sure waht to do about that; to be readable at much level the gifs have to be around 200 px wide; with the 3 in the listing and the 4th in the special in left_column that's 800 off the top. I'm experimenting with 125 on it right now, but it definitely looks like the designs won't hold up that small and I'll need some form of thumbnail contribution much sooner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 17, 2005 Author Share Posted December 17, 2005 OK, added the Big Images contribution. Resampled images larger than the old ones for the popup display; using 125x100 for the small images. Seems to all work fine. Tried it in 800 as well as 1024. I don't really like the amount of open space it leave in 1024. Anyway, this works out well because yesterday we came up with something that just wouldn't have shown up on the old system, but this way it will in the enlargement. Now I need to get to adding designer profiles. And then better links for them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 18, 2005 Share Posted December 18, 2005 loaded nice and fast on my cable connection :) the aqua green does not match the site at all looks too stock oscommerce. you need to work on the overall layout more than anything Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 18, 2005 Author Share Posted December 18, 2005 loaded nice and fast on my cable connection :)the aqua green does not match the site at all looks too stock oscommerce. you need to work on the overall layout more than anything The color is a problem; there isn't a color that matches. Not one that won't draw the eye away from the products, where attention belongs. I mean, the first thing to draw the eye on the site should be the product images, not the box header bars. The stock oscommerce thing brings up a good question. Is our general issue with things appearing "stock oscommerce" really worthwhile? In other words, are customers going to notice or even care? I mean granted you don't want things saying oscommerce lying around but for that footer. I might be more inclined to rearrange it, but then again "cliches" aren't necessarily bad in ecommerce. I agree with "don't make your customer think", or at least any more than they have to. My site already involves some level of brain activity, I don't want site navigation to distract them. Am I trying to make my website a piece of artwork, or a piece of equipment? Do most customers in physical stores complain that Wal-Marts, Targets, K-Marts and even grocery stores all tend to share the same basic arrangement? Or do they even care? The particular arrangement has developed over the years to get people to buy efficiently. Many consumers don't even like unaccustomed arrangements; they have to think about the arrangement when what they want to be thinking about is buying the product. At the same time, does that mean the existing layout is ideal? I doubt it is; e-commerce as an endeavor just hasn't been around long enough to develop heavily tested general layouts like physical stores have. The general layout of oscommerce though is used by many, many major sellers on the internet. TigerDirect uses the same basic format, This leaves me trying to figure out how to get the "necessary" number of links on the page without overwhelming users. This doesn't deal with what is there now; it deals with things that are going to be added on the site in the coming month or 2. Articles, poems, rants, reviews, even video of events (another good reason for a lean first page). Anyway, I'm probably going to remove the right column altogether. The left column is so standard in ecommerce of all types it seems very ill-advised to remove it. Pretty nearly every customer expects to have store navigation on a bar on the left. So aside from reworking the colors, order and box shape, that should be there. I would say it should ALWAYS be there and to be honest when I don't see that I don't feel certain I've found a web store. Other econsumers feel the same. I'll probably put the links in column right in a bar over the top with drop-down menus. Maybe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 18, 2005 Share Posted December 18, 2005 The color is a problem; there isn't a color that matches. Not one that won't draw the eye away from the products, where attention belongs. I mean, the first thing to draw the eye on the site should be the product images, not the box header bars. you need to create some sort of a theme with your website to avoid that problem. space-like? give it a "space" look (it sounds fairy-ish, but you could go very far with this if you have an imagination)... and i'm only using that as an example :lol: think of something, and go with it. Is our general issue with things appearing "stock oscommerce" really worthwhile? In other words, are customers going to notice or even care? as the internet population grows and gets around more -- YES. more and more people are creating stores and doing nothing with them (being lazy), do you want to be lumped into that? now that i am familiar with oscommerce, i would NEVER buy from a site that uses the stock osc (or even something remotely similar) to it. because if they're too lazy to make their site look unique, you can rest assured that they are protecting your buying information in the same fashion. (i'm using myself as an example here. to be fair, you should ASSUME all of your visitors are familar with oscommerce. it will help differentiate yourself from the stock look) generally, i tend to find shops that don't put the time or effort into their site layout very amateurish... i'm sure i'm not alone with this :) Do most customers in physical stores complain that Wal-Marts, Targets, K-Marts and even grocery stores all tend to share the same basic arrangement? Or do they even care? it's a completely different ball-game when you're online. people want things to be fast, attractive; yet non-intrusive. online, that's the polar opposite of what it's like in the stores. The general layout of oscommerce though is used by many, many major sellers on the internet. TigerDirect uses the same basic format, i am a huge buyer online of entertainment-related products (shirts, cds, etc. - since '98)... and i have never heard of that company Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoyote Posted December 18, 2005 Author Share Posted December 18, 2005 i am a huge buyer online of entertainment-related products (shirts, cds, etc. - since '98)... and i have never heard of that company TigerDirect doesn't sell those things. They are a computer equipment store, they have been selling on the internet since before almost anyone else; and were a major computer catalog source since long before ecommerce even started. http://www.tigerdirect.com Newegg and ZipZoomFly are also big, but they are johnny-come-lately's compared to Tiger. Notice on their site, left column navigation bar, top bar with logo on the left, right column with shopping cart, account, etc, then new products/specials in the middle. They sell a lot... "It's a formula Dennis but it bloody works!" ZipZoomFly and Newegg do not use exactly the same layout but very close; they both use the right column to list ads for specials. The thing about these sites is they are all computer equipment sites; their customers have traditionally been extensive users of ecommerce as a demographic. And their customers continue to patronize their sites extensively; perhaps the customers are more interested in prices than anything? Perhaps; they are more a commodity than what most of us are selling. These are pretty much what people expect from layouts. Now if you are talking about other issues like altering the page's graphical presentation, that I can agree with. I have a couple ideas for that. But layout really only applies to the very general arrangement of elements relative to one another; most ecommerce layouts have a lot in common even with different underlying software. No matter what exactly the page looks like, customers do tend to look for certain features in particular places on a given page. Many internet users only "see" a very limited portion of a website, which has been generally trained to be middle of the page; the rest tends to be on the very periphery of their awareness unless they need to find something. This is fine. When they want to find something though, they reflexively look in particular places where they expect to find them. Is it bad to put what they are looking for where they will look for it? I could go nuts and create nice graphical headers and footers that are locked at the top and bottom of the page so they don't scroll, and put all my navigation, user account and other links on those and have the center of the page just be product display/text; it would be different. But would it be a good idea? There are users who would definitely get frustrated by it; is the benefit to the users who appreciate the different design worthwhile compared to the number of customers who will get frustrated by it? First thing you need to understand, and that ALL of us here need to understand, is that ultimately none of us are average econsumers. NONE of us. The very fact that we create stores sets us apart in how we look at stores. We are all web designers/developers as much as web users. We will never look at things like 99% of our customers will. (This is like when I first started taking marketing classes, you had to realize shortly after starting to take them you weren't going to think like other consumers anymore.) I can tell you for fact there are things I have seen on websites that from a technical standpoint make me say "WOW! HOW THE HELL???" when other people near me take a look they have no idea why I care; I understood why what I saw was difficult, they had no clue or even thought it was boring! That's the point of usability; most people are more interested in that something works, and hardly care how it works. Have you ever read "Don't Make Me Think"? It has a lot of points about simplicity in web layout complementing usability. Especially for e-commerce. Now this still doesn't mean a "lack of work" on our part by any means; but it does mean our goal shouldn't be neat site design or breathtaking web coding tricks so much as making things easy and comprehensible for our customers. And I will give you a big, huge caveat on all of this; my general customers aren't likely to be "average consumers" either so some of this is moot. Graphically I need to do something with my site. I just have to be very careful because the center of attention needs to be the product, NOT everything around it and the product has a black field AND has designs that need to be relatively readable in the thumbnails to some degree. This paints me into a graphical corner of sorts; I could display full shirts and thus have background colors/imagery behind them, but that would either reduce the shirt's designs on the thumbnails beyond any comprehension, or it would increase the size of the thumbnails and cause issues with crowding/page width. Those thumbnails would also have to be jpg's instead of gif's and since they would have to be over 300 and perhaps even 400 width for legiblity with the extra surrounding elements, my page load time would go down the toilet AND no design would be visible on loading the page with any reasonable amount of welcome/news/events text at top. Rock-Designs-Hard Place. :( But I like a challenge thats why I'm talking about it here. :) How does this sound? Change the color of the box fields to a light gray instead of white. This will allow the images to pop still, reduce the amount of contrasted white glare I'm pushing out of the monitor at viewers, AND hopefully give me some room flexibility for other colors on the page. I remove the column_right and instead create a set of links in a bar beneath the current header. I create a bar of gif graphics, perhaps black with white or color continuous designwork that run up the far left, left of left_column, and turns horizontal below the header to integrate with the new menu bar there. Perhaps integrate the box headings on left_column graphically into the far left graphic. (That part might be ill advised though given differing monitor resolutions.) That could integrate into the design of my page and add a certain flow to the elements, without being overly distracting. Sorry if I tend to ramble on these things, but I appreciate your comments and these are important discussions to have for ecommerce in general. 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monito Posted December 19, 2005 Share Posted December 19, 2005 I like the OsCommerce design...Most people that I talk to about my website likes the fact that it is simple to navegate. I believe that simplicity has been the intent of OsCommerce... Does the site looks similar to others, so what...as long as you make the sales... Just my opinion, Monito Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timon Posted December 21, 2005 Share Posted December 21, 2005 Hi, I just had a look at you site and I think it looks good - I think youv'e pretty much covered everything. Good pics, good descriptions and good prices. overall I think it will do well in the right target market. In return I would really appreciate if I could get some feedback from you too - My website has been running now for 3 months and has had thousands of unique visitors, but no one has ordered. Can you please give me any feedback of what you think about the products, prices, and the website in general, I would really appreciate it!!! The website is - www.naturalbodyskincare.com Much Appreciated and Merry Christmas to You! Cheers Timon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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