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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

About to go Live


TracyS

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We are getting ready to go live, hopefully Friday 3/23, and I need people to help test and make sure everything looks like it is working properly on the site.

 

If anyone has a chance to visit http://mmherbs.dreamhosters.com any feedback would be greatly appreciated. I am still working on the content, and there will be more images added over time - but if all seems functional we want to get this baby live :thumbsup:

 

You can PM me with feedback if you'd rather not post it here :D

 

Thank You!!!

~Tracy
 

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I am not a huge proponent of fluid design as your site will look different on various browsers. I am on a computer with IE 7 and here is what I noticed. The header navigation is off. When I mouse over for instance My Account the whole sub menu is shifted right. Other then that I noticed that your site does not have SSL. Also, the text on the button seems redundant as it is found on your conditions of use page. The parse time is unnecessary and only should be there for testing purposes. Finally under testimonials, I would remove that brown old paper background. The text just spills over it on IE 7.

Andrew Yuen

osCommerce, Community Team

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Following on from the IE comments - if the browser is shortened using Restore Down, the javascript menu vanishes.

 

I like the layout and colour contrast - it does need fixed width though to make it look more compact and neater. It is a bright and user friendly site what seems easy to navigate. I would question the size of the fonts on various parts of the store from the menu to the header navigation but if you feel that is ideal for you then stick with but I would make the larger font sizes smaller.

 

Good luck

Upon receiving fixes and advice, too many people don't bother to post updates informing the forum of how it went. Until of course they need help again on other issues and they come running back!

 

Why receive the information you require in good faith for free, only to then have the attitude to ignore the people who gave it to you?

 

There's no harm in saying, 'Thanks, it worked'. On the contrary, it creates a better atmosphere.

 

CHOOCH

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I like the site, the only thing I noticed that wasn't mentioned was that when I click on a link, it shows me your IP address instead of the URL, that could make some people leary and or confused.....

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I am not a huge proponent of fluid design as your site will look different on various browsers. I am on a computer with IE 7 and here is what I noticed. The header navigation is off. When I mouse over for instance My Account the whole sub menu is shifted right.

 

Yes - it does that on IE 7, I'm just not sure why. It is the Son of a Suckerfish code that runs the horizontal dropdown menu, so I'm guessing maybe it's a difference in how big an "em" is to IE vs FF ??

 

 

Other then that I noticed that your site does not have SSL.

It does now, I just hadn't turned it on until late yesterday afternoon. It now has SSL on in both the Admin and the Cart :thumbsup:

 

Also, the text on the button seems redundant as it is found on your conditions of use page.

It is redundent, but due to FDA regulations regarding herbal supplements we need to have it posted in several places, so we put it in the footer, the terms/conditions, and you have to accept the terms/conditions in order to place an order.

 

 

The parse time is unnecessary and only should be there for testing purposes.

Yep - turned it off, was on for my testing purposes :blush:

 

Finally under testimonials, I would remove that brown old paper background. The text just spills over it on IE 7.

I've been talking with someone else about that too - and from their screenshot it seems to me that it's happening when the screen resolution is set higher than 1024 x 768. So maybe a fixed width on the body of the page would solve that? Will be working on that today ;)

 

Thank you very much for all of your thoughts - I really do appreciate the input :D

~Tracy
 

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The site is way too slow and i think the header being 74k does not help.

 

I agree - it's a big header. I will see if I can get it to shrink anymore without losing too much.

 

I've been working on the queries and trying to speed it up - but I'm at a point now that I'm not sure where to optimize next. I was following Chemo's threads on site optimization and have utilized the tips there. I also changed the products listing in Dynamenu so that it's only 1 query to get all the products now. Through the optimizing process I've removed over 250 queries so far, just on the home page. I'm just not sure where to go next with optimizing - any ideas?

 

Thank you very much for your input! :)

~Tracy
 

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Following on from the IE comments - if the browser is shortened using Restore Down, the javascript menu vanishes.

Wow! I hadn't noticed that one before :blink: I will definitely be double checking on that today and seeing if there is a fix :thumbsup:

 

I like the layout and colour contrast - it does need fixed width though to make it look more compact and neater. It is a bright and user friendly site what seems easy to navigate. I would question the size of the fonts on various parts of the store from the menu to the header navigation but if you feel that is ideal for you then stick with but I would make the larger font sizes smaller.

 

Good luck

 

Thank you for the compliments! I will be double checking the ability to set everything in the body to a fixed width as I think this will help solve some other issues on different screen resolutions as well. I also need to go through the stylesheet and change all font sizes from px to pt - they seem to render more accurately in different browsers if set by pt rather than px - I think this is causing them to appear larger in IE than in FF or NN ;)

 

 

Thank you very much for your comments! I appreciate the assistance :)

~Tracy
 

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I like the site, the only thing I noticed that wasn't mentioned was that when I click on a link, it shows me your IP address instead of the URL, that could make some people leary and or confused.....

 

I agree! That will not happen once the site is live though. Currently we do not have a domain name pointing to our site, so I have the IP address in the configuration files. When I make the DNS switch with our domain name I will also correct the configuration files so they will use the domain name rather than the IP :thumbsup:

~Tracy
 

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The site is way too slow and i think the header being 74k does not help.

 

Allright - I turned the parse times back on for testing and just utilized the latest changes in this thread:

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?s=&...t&p=1047999 which knocked out a good number of extra queries in some of the category pages.

 

If you put output=1 behind the ? in the URL (instead of the osCsid= bit) it will show you the queries that are happening on each page. Do you see anything blatantly plain to you that I may have missed while going through the optimization threads? This is my first osCommerce store - so I'm still learning how to tweak it all :blush:

 

Thank you again!!

~Tracy
 

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I re-saved the header image, it is now only 34k so that should help page load times.

 

I tried adding a table for the entire body so I could center it all - while it did constrain the width, it refused to center. Unfortunately, that means I basically have to re-design the templates and stylesheet in order to accomplish the same look, but be able to have it centered and not exceed 1000 px. This will have to be after we go live tonight as there are 72 template files currently :( With some of the other changes we've made recently I make be able to lower that number.

 

In the mean-time, I someone else looked at the site too and said that I have a relatively low number of queries - but that the parse times are high. So I'm working on figuring out what is causing that :thumbsup:

 

Thanks again for everyone's input - I look forward to reading more :blush:

~Tracy
 

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Very friendly looking site.

 

I did notice a few things:

 

1. In the testimonial box on the left, the text overflows the background.

2. On the Contact Us page, the text on the left overflows the form on the right. I think it might easily be fixed by putting the form under the text, in stead of beside it. That would also keep it from looking crowded.

3. On the All Products page, it still has the standard "replace this text" bit at the top of the page.

 

Overall, it's a very nice site, and it's obvious you have put a lot of work into it.

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Very friendly looking site.

 

I did notice a few things:

 

1. In the testimonial box on the left, the text overflows the background.

2. On the Contact Us page, the text on the left overflows the form on the right. I think it might easily be fixed by putting the form under the text, in stead of beside it. That would also keep it from looking crowded.

3. On the All Products page, it still has the standard "replace this text" bit at the top of the page.

 

Overall, it's a very nice site, and it's obvious you have put a lot of work into it.

 

Thank you! On item 3 - I had to laugh when I saw that! I figured I'd forget something :lol: Thank you very much - I have added a quick blurb there so at least it has something until we figure out what we want it to say - LOL

 

The issue with the testimonials box seems to have to do with the screen resolution. It works on some the 1040something by 768 resolution - but when you get higher than that it stretches the Div out too far - everything is set by percentages with layers and CSS for layout. I will be messing with that box today to see if I can do something to set it's size by pixels and yet keep it where I want it positioned ;)

 

As for the Contact Us page - I am going to see if I can figure out how to change it to rows rather than columns as I agree that it's quite cluttered looking.

 

Thank you very much for your comments - they are greatly appreciated ! :thumbsup:

~Tracy
 

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Thank you! On item 3 - I had to laugh when I saw that! I figured I'd forget something :lol: Thank you very much - I have added a quick blurb there so at least it has something until we figure out what we want it to say - LOL

 

The issue with the testimonials box seems to have to do with the screen resolution. It works on some the 1040something by 768 resolution - but when you get higher than that it stretches the Div out too far - everything is set by percentages with layers and CSS for layout. I will be messing with that box today to see if I can do something to set it's size by pixels and yet keep it where I want it positioned ;)

 

As for the Contact Us page - I am going to see if I can figure out how to change it to rows rather than columns as I agree that it's quite cluttered looking.

 

Thank you very much for your comments - they are greatly appreciated ! :thumbsup:

 

Ok - testimonials box and contact us should both be corrected now :blush:

~Tracy
 

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I like the resolution your site appears in, but then again I'm a fan of adaptive width designs.

 

There is one very serious design blunder I noticed. On your product pages, users must currently enter in a number value for the number of products they desire to purchase. If they click 'add to cart' without entering in a value, they are taken to an empty product details page. This is a horrible design mistake - I guarantee that it is dragging down your conversion rate. I highly recommend making these two changes 1) select a default quantity of 1 for people who don't enter in a quantity and 2) use a drop down menu, or another contribution, so that quantities can be selected with the mouse alone. Requiring the person to enter in a value via their keyboard is a bad move.

 

On a different topic, I think you could benefit from tweaking your button graphics. While you site is very aesthetic, your buttons aren't as attention grabbing as they should be. Tweaking the graphics could be an easy way for you to increase your conversion rates.

 

Small SEO point: make sure to include a privacy policy link on every product page.

Best Regards,

 

 

Victor Wise

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