Appreciate comments on my online shop

CCTV_Ireland

Hi guys I'm brand new to boards.ie, so hopefully this post doesn't break any rules!

I am setting up an online shop and would appreciate any comments/hints/tips/.

The site is:
http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/index.php

I'm almost a novice to web design, but have bought programs such as ftp Pro and Adobe Creative Web Suite Premium CS3 to help. I'm very familiar with photo editing.

The shop is created in Zencart, which is very powerful, but quite difficult to modify. When I initially setup the site I didn't create any custom folders/ overrides and am now terrified to even udate it to the latest version. My version is 1.3.7.

So comments please, even brutually honest ones!

Thanks

tricky D

The pages could be wider by about another 220 pixels (mainWrapper).

Grey navigation menu has poor contrast.

The main content below the 'Home' breadcrumb mostly repeats what's already in the header or contains low value content (thank you, welcome to, are implied anyway). I would dump most of it but keep something to say please call until we get the shop up and running (which you need to do soon as it looks like a shopping site so it should be one up and running). Then put the monthly specials there above new products as specials and discounts are more effective placed there. Do this for the category pages and special at bottom of right hand column too.

The following 2 paras deal with stuff not yet implemented and give error messages which create a bad impression.

Currently there are add to cart prompts on product pages when firstly you say call us as shop is not fully implemented and secondly the security cert isn't working.

Link to homepage (http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/) gives 'Directory Listing Denied' so point it to http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/index.php or better make it so that http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/ brings up the http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/index.php page.

http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/ and http://www.cctvireland.ie/ are not the same.

Try to avoid blinking text (it annoys), light grey text and center aligned text (easier to read left aligned text).

Try to make the URLs descriptive: index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=19 has no search engine optimisation value compared to something like /CCTV-Recorders/Leviathan-8-Channel-500Gig-HDD-Cube.php

Proofread the text as there's a few words running into each other e.g. upto, 12frames and spaces missing after sentence endings e.g. technology!Unbelievable

There's a stray dot on line 50 which displays grey to the right of the logo banner.

Some pages use font tags which would be better formatted using css style sheets. They also use Times New Roman font when they would be better as verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif like the rest.

Some pages (http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=39) have the product info as one big block of text which is more difficult to read than a list format (they have list type buttons anyway). See http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=1

Doesn't say how you actually buy gift certs.
Page 4 under more information needs to be removed.

Set up a 404 page and put the sitemap content in it.

gl/hth

daymobrew

CCTV_Ireland wrote: »

I'm very familiar with photo editing.

You should look at Zen Cart's Image Handler 2 add-on. It will resize your images so that you are not sending large image files only to have them displayed as thumbnails. For example, on the home page the "Leviathan 16 Channel 2,000Gig HDD Cube" image is 300x279 but displayed around 100x100.

CCTV_Ireland wrote: »

The shop is created in Zencart, which is very powerful, but quite difficult to modify. When I initially setup the site I didn't create any custom folders/ overrides and am now terrified to even udate it to the latest version. My version is 1.3.7.

Zen Cart is many times easier to modify than osCommerce (on which Zen Cart is based).
It looks like you are using the default theme.
What files did you modify?
You should update to 1.3.8 because it contains a number of security fixes.

CCTV_Ireland

Tricky
Thank you so very very very much for taking the time to go through the site looking for problems!
I will address all of the issues you mentioned.
I have finally managed to widen the page, to 970px. However, I never figured out how to remove the original image from the header banner, and it now shows beside my banner, which I will have to make wider now. I had spent hours last week trying to widen the page, but tried again tonight and it was easily, done, I had been trying to edit the wrong css.
Also on the banner: the “.”, I don’t know how to get rid of it either! (line 50)
You’re right about the grey, I’ll have a look and see how to change it
Page 4 is gone, renamed. I spent hours trying to figure out how to change the page names for the three “More Information” pages. Quite a bit of work for something that seems so simple. One thing to note though, I had to rename “tmp_Page_2_default.php” to “tmp_How_CCTV_WORKS_default.php”. This is in /includes/templates/template_default/templates. I presume this means my template override isn’t working.
This is the override path that doesn’t work: /catalog/includes/templates/CCTV_TEMPLATES/templates
Here is one template:
<?php
/**
* Page Template
*
* @package templateSystem
* @copyright Copyright 2003-2005 Zen Cart Development Team
* @copyright Portions Copyright 2003 osCommerce
* @license http://www.zen-cart.com/license/2_0.txt GNU Public License V2.0
* @version $Id: tpl_page_3_default.php 3464 2006-04-19 00:07:26Z ajeh $
*/
?>
<div class="centerColumn" id="pageThree">
<h1 id="pageThreeHeading"><?php echo How_To_install_CCTV_Kits; ?></h1>

<?php if (DEFINE_PAGE_3_STATUS >= 1 and DEFINE_PAGE_3_STATUS <= 2) { ?>
<div id="pageThreeMainContent" class="content">
<?php
/**
* require the html_define for the page_3 page
*/
require($define_page);
?>
</div>
<?php } ?>

<div class="buttonRow back"><?php echo zen_back_link() . zen_image_button(BUTTON_IMAGE_BACK, BUTTON_BACK_ALT) . '</a>'; ?></div>
</div>

On the three information pages I am now getting this displayed: Home :: NAVBAR_TITLE

And on the heading I had to enter: How_To_install_CCTV_Kits, (it’s red on the template above)
When I don’t put the underscores in, (spaces only), the page doesn’t load and I get this error:

Parse error: parse error, expecting `','' or `';'' in \cctvireland.ie\catalog\includes\templates\template_default\templates\tpl_How_CCTV_Works_default.php on line 13

Before I changed these page names, from page_1, page_2 etc, the navbar_title and page heading were working perfectly.

http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/index.php?main_page=How_CCTV_Works

I will try to figure out how to put the monthly specials up higher on the page, your comment makes huge sense

I have no idea how to change the order of the panels on the right/bottom right. I presume it’s in “Layout Settings”, but can’t identify where exactly and I am afraid of messing up the site.

I bought the Zencart book and have spent days going through the tutorials, but in reality, I'm still very slow when it comes to making the necessary changes.

I know that it looks very unprofessional that there are “add to cart” buttons when you can’t buy online yet, I hope to implement this soon, but am kind of afraid to go fully online.

The cert is out of date. I didn’t want to renew it until the payment module was set up. I’m waiting for a merchant ID from the bank, etc. My current hosting company charge me €125 for the year: does that sound about right for the cert?

I have tried and tried to get the “home” button to work. I have spent ages on the FAQs, tutorials, and forums and made all the changes specified, but, as you say, you can’t go to the homepage. This is very annoying and I don’t understand what’s going on!

“Try to make the URLs descriptive: index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=19 has no search engine optimisation value compared to something like /CCTV-Recorders/Leviathan-8-Channel-500Gig-HDD-Cube.php”

Is there any easy way to change the page name from “19” to “Leviathan-8-Channel-500Gig-HDD-Cube”? It’s taken me hours to do the three information pages, and they still aren’t right. I presume that it is very important for adding extra weight to the ranking and I really want to be up near the top in Google.

I have proof read the entire site and I think that I have corrected most of the typo’s. I will be more careful in the future and be on the watch for more existing errors. It is amazing how easy it is to miss them!

“Some pages use font tags which would be better formatted using css style sheets”
I have no idea how to do this! I have borrowed some books on css and .php, but it’s gobblegook to me really, I am just starting to get some idea how css works, but I’m not sure I’ll ever understand php. It’s thirty years since I learned BASIC and COBOL in school,(wasn’t there Fortran too?), so I am extremely rusty.

I have changed just about every page to Verdana and spent time changing page headings etc. I may have missed one or two, but as I come across them I will change them.

“Some pages (http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/in...products_id=39) have the product info as one big block of text which is more difficult to read than a list format (they have list type buttons anyway). See http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/in...&products_id=1”

I have gone through the site and hopefully this problem is now resolved and I think the listings are more uniform across the site now. On about ten listings in “CCTV recorders” there is some unusual formatting that I couldn’t get rid of, even though I cleared it. Every time I changed the text to normal it would jump back to bold. The only way I could get it to change was to edit it line by line, which was very cumbersome.

“Set up a 404 page and put the sitemap content in it.”

I thought I had set up 404, and even added an apology and a way to inform me of the problem, plus my logo, using the define pages editor, but I didn’t realise it wasn’t working. Do you mean put the site map in the actual 404 page? I never thought of that. I wonder if there is a way to automatically display it on the 404 page, as well as the actual site map page. It’s dynamically generated, so I can’t just do a one-off copy, or can I?

http://www.cctvireland.ie/catalog/index.php?main_page=site_map


Daymobrew:

Image handler 2 looks excellent, But it will take me a while to install it.

I have only just installed the “display VAT” module. I had wanted to install it for ages but was afraid to. But in the end I bit the bullet and after just a few long hours of panicking I got it to work.



Hopefully you guys will see how seriously I have taken your invaluable advice and it is hugely appreciated, so, once again: Thank you very much!!!!

I will continue to work on your suggestions and hopefully it won’t be too long before CCTV Ireland goes fully live.

Paul

Liam Byrne

Too cluttered and too many varying sizes of text for my liking.....try to standardise the font, colour, and size so that it's less intense on the eyes.

p

Personally, I really hate online shops that are called what they are. It's hard to build a brand that way.

Also, you're online, so why paint yourself into a box by purely targeting the Irish market. It's easy for you so shop to the UK & EU, right? I probably wouldn't but from CCTVdenmark.com, but I might consider CCTVworld.com (for example) if the price was right.

cormee

p wrote: »

Personally, I really hate online shops that are called what they are. It's hard to build a brand that way.

Also, you're online, so why paint yourself into a box by purely targeting the Irish market. It's easy for you so shop to the UK & EU, right? I probably wouldn't but from CCTVdenmark.com, but I might consider CCTVworld.com (for example) if the price was right.

They may be bad for branding but they're great for SEO

CCTV_Ireland

Branding is very important, but in 2010 SEO is King! I'm happy with the name CCTV Ireland, it says what it does on the tin.

A nice catchy name and logo with no relevance to the product looks great, but having your product name in the domain name gets you extra ranking points. If the business takes off I will expand it to cover other countries.

On another note, I finally got the custom overrides to work, it's taken me a long time to figure it out and I'm chuffed, but my head is still spinning. Now that I have it in place I feel more confident about updating to Zencart 1.3.8

I still have lots more work to do, but I'm getting there

lostprophetsie

Hi CCTV_Ireland,

just something quick I noticed earlier,

your breadcrumb navigation doesn't work when you click on the home button, it just gives an error that "Directory Listings are denied" this is possibly because the default document types in your hosting package are .html, .aspx etc. You would just need to add in .php as the default document type.

There should be an option to add this in your hosting control panel.

*Edit - On rereading I see Tricky D has already pointed this out, apologies.

cormee

CCTV_Ireland wrote: »

Branding is very important, but in 2010 SEO is King! I'm happy with the name CCTV Ireland, it says what it does on the tin.

A nice catchy name and logo with no relevance to the product looks great, but having your product name in the domain name gets you extra ranking points. If the business takes off I will expand it to cover other countries.

On another note, I finally got the custom overrides to work, it's taken me a long time to figure it out and I'm chuffed, but my head is still spinning. Now that I have it in place I feel more confident about updating to Zencart 1.3.8

I still have lots more work to do, but I'm getting there

You can also try the B&Q approach - they use the domain diy.com but use the B&Q brand.