Online Store Development
At this point, we are tackling the development of our own online store for our new website. Considering this is a major topic for us at Practical Ecommerce I thought I would post about it during development to share what we come across.
To start with, we are lucky in that we are not relying on our ecommerce software to support our entire website. Rather, we are developing the main website framework on our own, and the online store is simply one portion of the site. Because of that, our work with the store software is really geared towards getting it to look the way the rest of our site looks.
Which brings me to the point of this post. I have been knee-deep in "skinning" our software to match the rest of our site. While the software that we chose (to remain unnamed) has a great CSS based layout, there is still a lot of template work to be done. Since the process is similar with many ecommerce solutions, as well as with many blog platforms, I thought I would outline the process.
To start with, we create a new "theme" or "skin" or whatever the particular software calls a template system. Rather than playing with the default template files, we want to copy them into a new template so that we can always refer back to the originals. The next step is to find out how the software pieces templates together to create pages. In the case of our software, there are a couple of global wrapper files and a bunch of page content files (around 30) which all need to be changed. The reason that we needed to change them is that the markup provided in the original templates wasn't sufficient for us to make the changes by using CSS alone. So we are tasked then with going through all the files one-by-one and making the needed changes. I recommend making a static HTML file of your layout to refer back to.
Another area that is emerging as something that we will need to spend some time on is the checkout process. Of course we want the usual: secure, easy-to-use, etc. However, there is always a give-and-take when you choose a shopping cart software. While we can rip into the layout relatively easily, changing the core files that run the store can be a bit invasive. What I mean by that is if the software is set up to have a template system, those files are usually separated out. The allows updates and such to be done on the other files without affecting the template files.
In the end, it comes down to finding the best solution that you can. And even then in every case you will be faced with the decision of either living with the shortcomings (since they outweighed the shortcomings of the other solutions you looked at) or getting in there and making it do what you want. We haven't made any decisions yet, but no project is without surprises.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: shopping cart, css, theme.
