Assault Shirts Official Store

[ttoomey]

This is my fourth OSCommerce store and I have to say I'm quite proud... It's all mine and has a ton of mods. Too many to name and it's highly customized. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you all think. Feel free to ask questions and I'll answer them the best I can.

 

Also feel free to buy some t-shirts if you're in the US.

 

Assault Shirts Official Online T-Shirt and Apparel Store

 

Here's a rundown of what I can remember installing:

 

FlickR image sidebar (supplied by FlickR)

STS

HTML Emails

Newsletter manager with HTML emails and Simple join

RSS scroller from Dynamic Drive.com

Content Slider from Dynamic Drive

SEO-G and Mod_Rewrite for clean URLS

Paypal Payments Pro for payments

SIFR Font replacement for headers in custom fonts

Multiple Images addon (can't remember which one)

Ajax Attributes manager

USPS Mailing Labels

USPS real time shipping quotes

Custom Contact form with CAPTCHA

Custom Upload form so users can submit images and t-shirt designs

GoDaddy SSL certificate

Server side HTACCESS password protection

Products RSS feed

javascript popup in case they forget to choose a size of t-shirt

I also cleared out most of the tables and TR TDs and made the site run with DIVS and CSS (mostly)

made it so the site validates with the W3 (most pages)

[voided]

Awsome, really. Nice to see good stuff like this around here once in a while :)

 

You got the shopping + really good social networking going there AND a blog, brilliant... i can already tell you that site will do _very_ well. excellent.

 

 

P.S i'm so stealing ideas from you (yes its a compliment) ;)

[ttoomey]

Thanks for the kind words! I personally will be zipping up what I have here for everyone to download and see what I did.

 

It took a long time to strip out most of the tables and bloated code, but it's well worth it. The next version of OSCommerce (if there is one) needs to use the new web standards and divs/css

[burt]

Really nice work! I'm not a great fan of the "grungey" look, but for a t-shirt store, nothing is better. Good.

 

Like the stripped down code a lot - I've been trying to do the same. Good work.

 

There's 2 things cosmetically, that really stand out like a sore thumb.

 

1. this line in your footer "Copyright © 2008 Assault T-Shirts and Designer Shirts. Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Products RSS Get the Products RSS Feed". Could you put that on the back/red background - in other words have the graphics extending right to the very bottom of the webpage.

 

2. Same for the very top of the header. The black background doesn't look quite right - coule you maybe fade the "assault" graphic into the black bar? Or maybe, do you even need that top bar? If you have a think about it, it's not adding that much of value?

 

Overall, great work.

[Chance]

Top notch store.

[ttoomey]

Thanks for the feedback.

 

The top bar was put in late, mostly to get cross linking between the blog and to have a headline type story on there to post specials and special coupon codes and such, otherwise the only outlet to the blog besides a link to comment from product pages is the link in the menu, this was a good SEO approach to getting our headlines on the page and making sure that our homepage was changing as constantly as our blog.

 

 

Most people probably won't even see that top bar. As far as the bottom goes... I think at some point during the process we did have the store footer on the colored background, but ultimately decided to seperate it out to draw some attention to the products RSS feed.

[ttoomey]

I just wanted to let everyone know on the forum that we got the Shirt.Woot side deal of the day!

 

We're giving 30% off the entire order for customers who use the coupon code WOOT at checkout. Feel free to cash in!

 

Thanks for all your help and feedback everyone!

[frankie4260]

Very nice store. Most excellent work!

 

What contribution did you use for the coupon processing?

[jazzboe]

Which release of osCommerce did you use - I like the URL's - tried SOE on my v2.2RC2 site and really messed up links - especially thumbnailer images.

[ttoomey]

I believe I used 2.2 RC2 (whatever is currently on the downloads page)

 

I used the discount coupon codes contribution. (not the credit and gift class voucher)

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,4269

 

I had several problems with it at first, but they were resolved in the forum topic for that particular contribution:

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?sho...&hl=ttoomey

 

I also posted a tip on a basic outline of how I made my links the way I did and how I optimized everything for search:

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=293699

 

 

If anyone needs more details or wants more tips on how I did everything let me know and I'll post

[Obewanz]

I must admit, I'm quite impressed... I didn't like it at first as it was a bit too busy, or so it seemed.

After I actually looked at a product, the site design seemed to grow on me and I began to see things... differently. I think it was either Caitlin or Shan that caught my attention on the site first, it was one of the designs in the photo stream block. If I were into the designs you have, I would certainly order from your site.

 

I did run in to one problem though - I tried to place a shirt in the cart and got the cookie usage page. I haven't had this problem with any other sites except CRELoaded's support forum - though it doesn't say anything, just logs you out, and VistaPrint's website - which does show the cookie page. I don't know what is really causing this as I have had NO cookie problem or problems adding items in other osCommerce stores, even my own which is also running on a GoDaddy server.

 

Oh, the tag "Hot Chicks X People Wearing This Shirt!!!!" doesn't quite look right when a guy is the shirt model ;)

[ttoomey]

I must admit, I'm quite impressed... I didn't like it at first as it was a bit too busy, or so it seemed.

After I actually looked at a product, the site design seemed to grow on me and I began to see things... differently. I think it was either Caitlin or Shan that caught my attention on the site first, it was one of the designs in the photo stream block. If I were into the designs you have, I would certainly order from your site.

 

I did run in to one problem though - I tried to place a shirt in the cart and got the cookie usage page. I haven't had this problem with any other sites except CRELoaded's support forum - though it doesn't say anything, just logs you out, and VistaPrint's website - which does show the cookie page. I don't know what is really causing this as I have had NO cookie problem or problems adding items in other osCommerce stores, even my own which is also running on a GoDaddy server.

 

Oh, the tag "Hot Chicks X People Wearing This Shirt!!!!" doesn't quite look right when a guy is the shirt model ;)

 

 

I've never had that cookie usage complaint. In fact I don't think I've ever seen that page at all.

 

We're also not on a godaddy server, we only use their SSL certificate.

 

The tag hot chicks is crossed out so technically it's okay that we have a guy there :)

 

We just need to get some pictures submitted of people wearing our stuff and we'll put them up there!

[Obewanz]

Tim,

I went back and tried again with FF and got the same result. The page I'm getting is http://www.assaultshirts.com/cookie_usage.html.

Hmmm, Interesting - I created an account and went back to the shirt and was able to place it in my cart without getting the cookie page. Never seen it behave that way before.

 

I guess you got me on the Hot Chicks issue, but it still seemed a bit funny to me.

[ttoomey]

Tim,

I went back and tried again with FF and got the same result. The page I'm getting is http://www.assaultshirts.com/cookie_usage.html.

Hmmm, Interesting - I created an account and went back to the shirt and was able to place it in my cart without getting the cookie page. Never seen it behave that way before.

 

I guess you got me on the Hot Chicks issue, but it still seemed a bit funny to me.

 

 

Can you check it again. I made some edits with seo-g.

[Obewanz]

Still same issue;

I cannot place an item in the cart, unless I create an account or login, at which point I can place items in the cart.

 

I know this is not the stock function of the cart - not being able to create a visitor cart - but the cookie usage page, given the observed behavior would tend to make me want to check your config.php file between the cookie settings for ssl and non-ssl cookies.

 

it should look something like this;

 

define('HTTP_COOKIE_DOMAIN', '.assaultshirts.com');

define('HTTPS_COOKIE_DOMAIN', '.assaultshirts.com');

define('HTTP_COOKIE_PATH', '/');

define('HTTPS_COOKIE_PATH', '/');

 

If those are correct, it must be something with your SEO Url's or maybe some other contribution that you've added. (maybe PWA if you're using it)

Oh, and don't miss the leading period before your domain name - it allows subdomains to access the cookie as well - just in case.

[jazzboe]

I believe I used 2.2 RC2 (whatever is currently on the downloads page)

 

I used the discount coupon codes contribution. (not the credit and gift class voucher)

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,4269

 

I had several problems with it at first, but they were resolved in the forum topic for that particular contribution:

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?sho...&hl=ttoomey

 

I also posted a tip on a basic outline of how I made my links the way I did and how I optimized everything for search:

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=293699

If anyone needs more details or wants more tips on how I did everything let me know and I'll post

 

Thankyou for the info - I will follow up on these links.

 

Also - I tried to place a shirt in the cart and I had no problems at all - no cookies issues. I was using Firefox if that helps. I hadn't created an account either - It just worked...

 

Cheers,

-J

[Obewanz]

In light of Jazzboe's post, I'm completely baffled by this now - can anyone else shed some light on what is going on?

[ironspider]

hey, nice site . i really like it-nice job and good luck with the orders

i have a lame question - how did you match the theme of your web site with oscommerce add to cart/checkout pages? i know how to use the oscommerce catalog but i dont want to go through it.

thanx in advance...

[ttoomey]

You mean how did I template them and make them look somewhat customized?

 

If that's what you're asking then the answer starts with STS. (Simple template system) to get a base template around all your pages. From there I basically opened up the checkout pages and stripped away as much of the BS and tables as I possibly could. It's alot of grunt work but it was well worth it.

 

I personally think that it's time to revamp some of the classes and way that OSCommerce is structured since it's completely done with tables. I still have to use tables in some areas of the site, but have for the most part gotten rid of them. A good portion of the tables code comes from infobox and box classes. I find it hard to believe that this hasn't been implemented in the core of OSCommerce yet since barely anyone is using tables anymore.

 

I cut down the size of my store considerably and simplified the CSS making my site much more streamlined than a default OSCommerce install. I do plan on eventually putting my source up on my blog, but out of the box it won't work for most people since I have a customized .htaccess file and httpd.conf file for apache to get my URLs and site working the way I wanted.

[ironspider]

thanx for the info i think is pretty clear for me what to do now + i found good info here: http://guide.oscdox.com/

thanx again

btw i saw that you are using ssl certificate from godaddy . i checked them and i was pretty surprised -15$ a year man that's cheap. So tell me how they are so far with your site.i think i'll purchase the basic ssl offer- what do you think?

[ttoomey]

I believe I used the 17.99 dollar a year one. Saved me a ton of money and it works great so far. Takes a little bit of skill to get it right, but it works just like a 300 dollar one would from Verisign.

[ironspider]

I believe I used the 17.99 dollar a year one. Saved me a ton of money and it works great so far. Takes a little bit of skill to get it right, but it works just like a 300 dollar one would from Verisign.

 

thanx and much respect :thumbsup:

[maxxxie]

This would have to be one of the best osC sites I've ever seen. Well done :)

[dub3325]

love your style man, I think the grunge effects would have looked neater if they had more of a vector finish to them. Some of the background graphics have a pixelated edge around them, I'm assuming you did that for filesize sake, since you have a lot of graphics on the page....other than that, I applaud you for your work. I am working on an STS based custom site right now also and am bookmarking your page as inspiration.....welll done.

[ttoomey]

Thanks for all the kind words guys...

 

The pixelated edge is partially due to filesize, and partially because we're using transparent gifs with mattes.

 

If you look at the sites's filesize it still comes in fairly low, around 340k or so on the initial page and then after everything is cached on that page it takes even less time for subsequent pages to load. It's been completely optimized.