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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

Site Check Please


rag

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After 2 solid weeks of upgrading from MS1 -> MS2 plus lots of redesign I'm ready for some constructive criticism. Please be nasty!!

 

At the moment I can't get the new support contribution working at the bottom of the page but that'll have to wait until tomorrow.

 

The DHTM menu was a bit of a pain as I couldn't get it to center. This created chaos between different screen resolutions. I worked around it but I'm not entirely happy with the <div> absolute positioning. SOME HELP MAYBE?????

 

OK, the new MS2 is at http://sirius.mgs.vic.edu.au/~rag/catalog/

The old MS1 is at http://musicplace.com.au

 

Any macromedia people recognise this layout??? Just borrowing it I didn't steal one line of code from them. First I studied their site for weeks (an incredible feat in tableless, datadriven, ecommerce enabled and more site), then I tried my own tabless site and gave up. Mine is a tabled version modeled on macromedia...not that I'll admit it or anything :o

 

Ok let it fly because I want to go live in 2 weeks. Cheers,

Rob

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I've added the Powered By osCommerce to my old MS1 site just for a compairison to the new one. The old site is http://musicplace.com.au

 

HOPEFULLY the images and stylesheet are showing, 'cause they are all there in the directory. I must have stuffed up the config.php file going from my laptop localhost to my testing server.

 

Hope it's up now!!

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Hey JonoB thanks for the SIDKiller advice. I've often wondered about that and actually thought that was solved in MS2 but here I was ASSuming again. Thanks heaps!

 

http://sirius.mgs.vic.edu.au/~rag/catalog/

 

I noticed in Netscape 6 that the menu bar plays up. Look at the mouseout code below and you'll see that there is no background color of the parent menu - to let the image show from under the menu <div> If you view in (Windows) IE or Mozilla it's fine but then look in Netscape 6 and the menu is a mess. Any ideas?

 

	MENU_STYLES['onmouseout'] = [
 'background', ['', '#cfcfcf', '#cfcfcf', '#cfcfcf'],
 'color', ['#ffffff', '#ffffff', '#ffffff', '#ffffff'],
 'font-weight:bold',
];

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http://sirius.mgs.vic.edu.au/~rag/catalog/

 

Have another look please. I've been busy on this site and now can't see the forest through the trees.

 

1. Please comment on the "featured products" boxes

2. Please comment on the "category" boxes -> http://localhost/catalog/index.php?cPath=111&name=Woodwinds

3. How are the colours? I think I have too much orange #ffcc33 in the menu and header , then the boxes are a lighter orange almost yellow and it bugs me a bit.

4. I REALLY want the search box in the header but it inherets the infobox CSS and things get ugly. Any help would be appreciated!

 

There are still numerous things to fix but I basicall want to get the index.php page sorted out as well as the category pages.

 

I'll be adding a news module for the top of the front page and a few other hacks. BOY THIS IS TIME CONSUMING but very addictive!

 

All other general comments will be appreciated too. Cheers,

Rob

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::ooohs::

 

Teach me, Master...

 

Man, I would love to crawl into your head and see how you figured all this out. I am lucky I didnt blow my entire house up with all the steam and screaming I blew out trying to do a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g on the site I made, which was my first, quite possibly my last!! Rounded tables are a beautiful touch. HOW did you get each individual featured Item, (Much less that in and of itself!!) to display as they are, with each its own little pretty box??

 

How, if you would share :), did you get the infoboxes to appear as they do?

 

I love the footer infobox. How did you do that? it looks so different, the entire site as a whole!

 

lol ok enough sucking up..

 

You missed the Login/Sign In and Buy Now Buttons when you changed your buttons..

They are still stock.

 

The Feature products bar fades out tOO much. It goes almost completely away. Maybe altering your bg to something other than white? Perhaps a very very pale yellow or orange? That way the gradient doesnt become a fade.

 

 

And the dropdowns are very cool :> but, On the "Print Music" dropdown, the word below "Instrumental" is covered...

 

For some weird reason, the table-header image for the Flutes cat. looks... crooked??

mebbe its my eyes :)

 

 

Do you want to keep the "Lets See what we have Here" wording for your cats?

One of these days, I will actually understand what I just changed...

 

But reading the Manual DEFINATELY helps...

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Tariq,

Thanks for your words of encouragement. I'm a jazz musician/teacher and "wannabe" web designer so I work by myself in a vaccume and REALLY appreciate the comments.

 

I've decided to use the contribution STS1.8 which is a templating system. It allows you to move your info boxes around the pages easier. There is another one called BTS (Basic Template System) which allows you to create different designs for each info box. I ultimately would like to use the two templating systems together but I can't get them working together. Anyone?

 

How did I get the round box thingy? First of all I studied what I consider a great benchmark site in both useability and design (even though I'm in expert in neither) http://www.macromedia.com Use a browser like IE6 and save the whole web page. Then open up you IDE HTML editor (like dreamweaver) and the first thing you'll notice is that it is a tableless site. All done in <div> tags, which is a great study! But I love their rounded rectangle approach. I think many designers want to get away from the boxy feel that you get from tables. But with a little framing you can get the results. I'll send you the source image and you can see how I sliced it. PLus there is an exported HTML page from fireworks.

 

I've put together a zip file for you with the source image all sliced and diced plus the html file I used. Send me a Private Message with your email address and I'll send you the 114kb file. Howzat?

 

I've changed the main menu and reduced the font size so that should fix the problem of long category names. Please check if it is readable...guess it helps.

 

Think I should use that gel button throught the site??, or is it too much. Guess there is only one way to find out.

 

I'll fix the above plus buttons and header bar and upload to my testing server asap http://sirius.mgs.vic.edu.au/~rag/catalog/.

 

Thanks again for your help,

Rob

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http://sirius.mgs.vic.edu.au/~rag/catalog/

 

I just put my hammer down after a long day and would like some comments please.

 

1. How are the buttons in general now?

2. Does the "Buy Now!" work for you?

3. I want people to get straight to the sub category so I really need the DHTML menu...what do you think?

4. What about the logo?

5. Lots of blue links but I think it maybe ok that they jump out. They are supposed to be signposts...what do you think?

6. How is the speed?

7. On my screen I get intermittent (sp?) black lines down the left hand side of the screen. Scroll up and down and they move or leave...I haven't had drugs for a long time so I can rule that one out!

 

Any/all comments appreciated.

 

Cheers,

Rob

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I like the redesign. The dropdown looks very clean, and is higher contrast now, versus the grey back that was on them before. Looks good :>

 

ok, so you made the Buy/View buttons in the gold just for the Featured Products, right?

 

And the other Button, the Buy, is now different on the rest of the products, NOT on the featured items?

 

Got ya. Interesting approach : The Buy button is... kinda well, its definately different :)

 

I personally dont like it all that much myself. It really doesnt blend with the rest of the site at all, but it still is definately an eye-catcher.

 

I DO like the new Sign In button. doesnt look like a button at all now lol

 

The header is very small, and displays well. The DHTML menu is a good choice for you because of the depth of products you have. On my site, we have 2 main categories, and only one of those has subs right now. So yes, keep that. It works very well.

 

Lots of questions, PMing now :>

And you are MOST welcome :)

One of these days, I will actually understand what I just changed...

 

But reading the Manual DEFINATELY helps...

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I think I have all the contributions I need:

allprods_2.3

article_management

auspost

CategoryBoxEnhancement_v1.1

categories_description_1.4

customer_testimonials_v1.2

DynamicHeaderMenu

FAX_PHONE

FeaturedProduct

HEADER_TAGS

infopages

LoginBox5_2_wfc1_0

new support_v1b

PurchaseOrder

sid_killer

Specials on Default

STS-1_8

 

 

I want to add PDF catalog too.

 

I'm braindead and would appreciate any and all comments. Especially some hints on how I should handle the CSS for the Tutorials.

 

Are the buttons tooo much the same?

 

Anyway here it is in the final version before launch...and some more copy and paste content.

 

http://sirius.mgs.vic.edu.au/~rag/catalog

 

Rob

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Still a little slow loading :<

 

Couldnt get the glass buttons all the way through? If not the ones you made are better than the old ones. Little "stocky" looking for the design, but the color goes pretty well with the site :>

 

oooh you added rollover on the menu for color :)

Nice touch

 

Yer making me more and more jealous every time I look at your site, yanno. Gonna make me not look anymore eventually cause I know Ill never get to that point..LOL

 

Hrm

Think you could use a change from the Whats New HERE thing, to maybe, Whats new with us? or something of the sort...

 

Still keeping the Whats New table image, but wording it to your own wants. Same goes for the "Lets see what we have here"

 

For some reason, the side images leave a little line in IE, but they show seamless in Netscape. Im having some weird prob between them with it showing right in Netscape and SO wrong in IE on my site too ;/

 

MM Search box is a little big. Lot of dead space in it. Tighten that up some?

 

The Testimonials, are you allowing pics of the customers to go in there?

 

Also you have two Manufacturers boxes..

 

Other than those few things, it still looks Kick!!

 

::eyes you jealously::

One of these days, I will actually understand what I just changed...

 

But reading the Manual DEFINATELY helps...

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Great looking site. Just a few thoughts:

 

The image in the Testimonials box is missing.

 

I would change Top in the breadcrumb to Home. Most visitors know what Home means but get confused with Top, IMO.

 

Did you know your Shipping & Returns, Privacy Notice, etc. are empty?

 

On your contact page, I think you should have a link to your E-Mail address instead of forcing the user to use your form. Some people like to use their own e-mailer so they can keep track of mails sent.

 

There are a number of problems on the Instrument Hire page. It needs to be proofread. A couple of the mistakes are: Where it reads "Easy to play, sound great and," should be sounds great. And "Included ast no" should be at. There is a large white space between Purchase Option PLace and Purchase Price. The Purchase Price table is not aligned properly.

 

HTH

 

Jack

Support Links:

For Hire: Contact me for anything you need help with for your shop: upgrading, hosting, repairs, code written, etc.

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Thanks for all your replies. I've been working hard and implementing all the great logical ideas. White space is now solved, spelling/grammer corrected etc... on my local laptop.

 

I'm having a hellofa time getting this site uploaded to my host. I'm on WIN XP and my host is linux redhat. I'm losing bits and pieces of files in the transfer. I've tried using PowerZip to make a .tgz archive but when I try to untar it ising SSH I get "this is an invalid archive". So I'm having some major troubles and would appreciate any pointer to help.

 

I'll post back here when I've sorted out this ;) problem and then I'll beg for some more criticism.

 

Happy Holidays from Australia,

Rob

----------------------------------------

I'm Dreaming Of A Hot Christmas

----------------------------------------

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Another boring, standard looking Oscommerce Shop. However at least you have done something worthwhile to your header area - I kind of like your tabbed interface.

 

But your site does not fit in 800 x 600 - the tabbed menu breaks the site.

 

Are you going to do something to move away from teh boring look of Oscommerce ?

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Thanks Burt! You're looking at my old boring site. I'm talking about my NEW boring site with just about every file hacked. No tabs now just boring ol' drop down DHTML.

 

The testing site at http://sirius.mgs.vic.edu.au/~rag/catalog is currently down due to school holidays and as I said above I'm losing packets due to my slow dialup when I FTP up the new site. So at the moment I'M PULLING OUT MY HAIR trying to get a site up so it CAN be checked.

 

My fault you're looking at the wrong one.

 

Merry Christmas,

Rob :P

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Looks great, everything fine with IE 6.0.28 xp service pack. The only problem I have found and now I see it's not my host is the first time you load a site with an osc system it is sloooooooooow! Yours took about 40 seconds to even display anything on my cable modem. After the that its pretty quick. I thought maybe my host was a bit slow but my ftp uploads at 300kbs+ and straight html pages load super fast.

 

 

Looks great though..good luck in the New Year!

The Wiki Docs: Read them, live them and be thankful for them!

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OUCH!!

 

 

Loading time results for: http://www.musicplace.com.au

 

Loading test content results

Number of graphics/scripts: 131

Total graphics size: 327800 bytes

Total HTML size: 51734 bytes

Total page size: 379534 bytes

Load time by modem speed

Modem speed: Download time:

14.4k  229.46 seconds

28.8k 123.99 seconds

56k 72.26 seconds

ISDN (128k) 42.26 seconds

T1 (1.44 MB) 20.71 seconds

 

Warning!: Your loading time is much too high! Your chances of indexing in major search engines is slim and you will find very few viewers willing to wait that long for any web page to load!... You must reduce the size of your page! 

<span style='font-family:Courier'>If you can't fix it Perl it!!!...</span>

******************************

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Menus work fine in Mozilla 1.4 on winXP.

 

I would suggest that you look into making some changes in your logo and your "No Image Available" image. I find it hard to read (particularly the word Place) and suspect that I would not be alone. Not a big deal, but worth looking into when you have time. I would probably like the logo more if it was bigger. With the default image, I would suggest using something other than your current logo in it as it hard to read.

 

Hth,

Matt

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Thank you,Thank you ,Thank you trendyfashion, jello1 and iiinetworks. I'll put this site on a diet, optimise the database and look in "tip and tricks" forum for some help.

 

jelllo1 where did you get those statistics from????? Great resource!

 

Cheers,

Rob

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