About to go live - need your comments

[timbeckham]

My partner and I are putting the finishing touches on our website for ornamental ironwork. The opening date is set for Saturday, October 18.

We will appreciate any comments, criticism and reviews. This is our first effort using OSCommerce, so any guidance you can offer will be of great help.

 

http://www.ironwork.com

 

Tim Beckham

Artisans of the Ironwork Guild

[timbeckham]

We are live!! Opening date was last Saturday, OCT 18. If you go to the site, please be careful, because if you place an order, you will be buying for real!!!

 

There is a lot of information to share with OSC'ers about our development of this site, that I did not include with the original message, so let me supplement with the following:

 

First of all, this is a heavily modded site. It is based on Milestone 1.0, so the original code is now about 8 months behind the current release. I printed out all the source code, reformatted it to suit my taste, and made a lot of revisions, (and drank a lot of coffee) in order to implement the graphics we wanted. (My wife/partner does the graphics and copy; I do the programming.) We were trying to duplicate the look and feel of an older, HTML version of the site, so we had to get into the nitty-gritty of OSC's code to make that possible.

 

We did use one contribution that I can think of - the Authorizenet ADC Direct Connection. It has worked like a charm. Anyone considering using Authorizenet should, IMHO, consider using the AIM direct connection method that this contribution implements. It is simpler and more secure than the other methods available.

 

The first page of the site was created using CSS absolute positioning, instead of the table layout that predominates in the regular OSC code. We had to use absolute positioning, because the buttons had to be exactly, precisely and reliably placed in relation to the ornate background; and that was neither easy nor consistent between browsers using a tabular structure. For that reason, the first page will not present properly in older browsers, such as Netscape 4.x, which does not support CSS particularly well.

 

All the other pages are tabular in structure, however, in keeping with OSC's usual format. We rearranged the table structure in several of the pages, but the concept of how to lay it out remains the same. Most of the SQL is intact, but there were some fields and tables we had to add to the database and the SQL was modified accordingly in those cases. Corresponding admin adjustments were made, mostly to categories.php.

 

The left index bar was implemented with drop-down sublevels that extended the "cPath=???"(Marketplace) and "manufacturers_id=???"(Artisans) concept to what we call our "Craft" and "Business" sections. To do that we created a new field for the URL we called "tig" (The Ironwork Group) and assigned it values, depending on which main level we wanted to expand into sublevels. For instance, when the visitor is in the "Business" section, the URL includes a "tig=business" name/value set. That tells the left column to extend that level into sublevels. This could be applied to all the navigation links within the Business section, insuring consistency in presenting the left column.

 

One feature we are particularly proud of is the navigational "PREV" & "NEXT" links at the top of the product_info.php pages. This allows a visitor to move forward and backward through the products belonging to the category or artisan that he/she was visiting prior to coming to product_info. This seems to be a logical idea for a contribution (unless someone already did it), but our site is so individually and heavily modded, that I am sure it would break anyone else's code. If someone wants to take on the task of producing a more universally applicable contribution for this feature, I will be happy to share the code we developed for our site.

 

That is about all, as far as the main features are concerned. From now on we will mostly be adding new artist/blacksmiths and more product.

 

Criticism and suggestions are welcome.

Incidentally, no orders yet.

 

Tim Beckham