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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

Dog Equipment Store (collars & harnesses)


mtepaa

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Hello, I would be very grateful if people can give me feedback about my first website. Tuffdogz (selling dog collars and harnesses to the strong breeds). My friend called it oscommerce stripped bare :blink: Like most people I see posting here I am an absolute newbie.. but all the hours on the forum an documentation are starting to pay off.

 

www.tuffdogz.co.nz

 

I managed to get around the account creation part fairly well, as I absolutely despize customers needing to fill in unnessecarry details and go through too many pages. I understand it being relevant and useful in some situations, but not straight retail consumer products!

I was lucky in the small size of my shop and flat shipping rate to 1 country, it made things alot easier for me to deal with than most shops, and I was able to get away with inserting static html content into places that would normally use php variables.

The site seems to run lightening fast in New Zealand, as that is where the customers are, and the server is based in NZ.

The contribs I used were: STS, FEC, Easy Meta Tags, Ajax attributes..

 

WHAT TO IGNORE (due to it not being finished)

 

- Product images (I put a few in, but am getting proper ‘backdrop shots’taken)

- Home page and info page content (just a temporary graphic in place)

- Also the faq and product info’s are straight from the first draft, so they will be revised.

WHAT ISSUES I CAN ALREADY SEE:

 

- Using my hosts SSL. I will get my own certificate very very soon!

- Image Thumbnails. Though I have optimized my fullsized product images to around 80kb, I am guilty of using those as my thumbnail images, on my product info thumbs, again, I will make them very very soon.

- URLs not search engine friendly. I tried the module in the admin section, but it didnt seem to work, wondering what is the best contribution for this.

- Meta tags – I added ‘easy meta tags’ contrib, but i’m unsure of what it does exactly. And more importantly I’m 100% clueless when it comes to SEO, and tags etc. So thats my next venture of learning.

- Product listing columns fixed width. I want the product listing columns to be a fixed width, cos if you flick through the categories, you see, the columns are at different margins.

- Short description. I tried to add the contribution to achieve this, but it didnt work, so I’ll try again.

- Shopping Cart. I want a colon or dash between the product option titles, and the option the customer chose. Eg, ‘size: small’ .... instead of ‘size small’ ... (just need to figure out the scripting)

- Also a big naughty (again I was lucky cos of my small sized shop) but i totally ignored the css, and manually set the fonts on each page (css is another thing i’m clueless about) yes I will learn!

- Unneccessary files. Because I ‘skipped’ the account creation, there are a bunch of pages that are not used eg, login, create_account etc, im just a bit cautious that some files might need to call up a script from one of those files.. but ill give it a try.. just incase some smartass decides to type the url to see what he gets.

Please fire your criticism at me, cos I need it!

 

Tuffdogz K9 Gear

 

Thanks so much!

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Hi Matt,

 

Hold your horses. I looked at it briefly this morning but a paying engagement got in the way. Now I have free time.

 

Your site design has a delightful back to the dogz basic approach. Now that I have seen it, I couldn't imaging it any other way. The design seems matched to the number of products.

 

On create_account.php align the text boxes please. It is a tiny tic in the out-of-th-box osCommerce. The page will look nice then. Also too, since you only hav New Zealand, then default the 1 country dropdown to New Zealand or hard code it into the page.

 

Following your suggested guidelines leave little to complain about. <grin> You have a nice design and simplicity concept. Good work so far.

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Hi Matt,

 

Hold your horses. I looked at it briefly this morning but a paying engagement got in the way. Now I have free time.

 

Your site design has a delightful back to the dogz basic approach. Now that I have seen it, I couldn't imaging it any other way. The design seems matched to the number of products.

 

On create_account.php align the text boxes please. It is a tiny tic in the out-of-th-box osCommerce. The page will look nice then. Also too, since you only hav New Zealand, then default the 1 country dropdown to New Zealand or hard code it into the page.

 

Following your suggested guidelines leave little to complain about. <grin> You have a nice design and simplicity concept. Good work so far.

 

Thanks a lot mate!

 

Good point and good point. I'll find the appropriate coding for the country box, no doubt it will be on the forum somewhere. And yes I shall align the boxes right now.... i'd actually thought of both those things previously but forgot to add them to the list.

 

Yeah, she's a simple design alright :) ..

 

cheers,

Matt Te Paa

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