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What is your experience w free/$$ site templates? |
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simplyathleticgear 
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Joined: 26-October-2009 Location: Toronto Status: Offline Points: 0 |
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 Topic: What is your experience w free/$$ site templates?Posted: 26-October-2009 at 8:18pm |
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Hello Everyone:
I'm very excited about ProductCart as I plan to deploy my first site over the next few months  . My background is in development, but my concern is that I don't have much experience with image editing and site design. In short, I'm comfortable diving into the ASP to customize at will, but creating the site layout is a whole other ball game.
This brings me to my approach: My hope is to use a template for the site (free or purchased). With this in mind, I have a question for all the brilliant minds that reside in the forum. What is your experience with using HTML/CSS templates to integrate with ProductCart? Is there anything in particular that I should be aware of or watch out for? E.g. Are there certain layouts that do not lend themselves well to ProductCart? Thank you all in advance for your help and wisdom on this topic. Cheers, Martin. |
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Greg Dinger
Certified ProductCart Developers 
Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238 |
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Posted: 26-October-2009 at 8:41pm |
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Unlike some of the other carts out there, there is no repository of standard templates for PC. There's the basic template that comes with the cart so that there is *something* wrapping the pages, but it's pretty simple. Most serious merchants and developers throw it away and design their own.
We did some work for a client who selected a Magento template and asked us to implement that over PC. It worked out ok - took about a dozen hours or so. Might take longer for someone not accustomed to working with PC.
In terms of our experience, it's a great platform. We create a design that is custom for the client, reference the appropriate code into the header/footer, and voila - instant site. Well, not exactly instant, but you get the idea.
There are plenty of tricks and techniques that experienced developers use when building stores, but I'm not sure how that could be easily summarized in a forum post.
Since you are looking for *free*, I guess you are running with a thin budget. But if the budget allows, and your client wants a professional design, you may want to consider partnering with an experienced developer to help with that aspect of the project. If you'd like to discuss possibilities, feel free to call me.
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Posted: 26-October-2009 at 10:24pm |
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Hi Martin,
Not at all uncommon -- rather actually the norm -- that we developers aren't great at graphic arts and the finer elements of site design (myself included; which is why my partner is the lead on graphic arts and design). However, designers should be well aware of/familiar with the application they are designing for. That is, you'd do well to hook up with a designer familiar with ProductCart.
There are quite a few talented designers in the ProductCart community, and a few who really know their XHTML/CSS and have serious talent. PM me and I could make some recommendations.
As for "free" or "low cost" templates, in our experience, as they are not designed for the application in hand, they often take as much time to redesign for the intended application as it would cost to take a concept you like and design from scratch for the applicaton you want to apply it to -- in this case, ProductCart (I sense this is similar to Greg's reference to ~ 12 hrs to integrate one of these types of design templates).
Keep in mind that these kinds of templates are not taking into consideration the unique functionality of the application you are wanting to apply them to, and can typically be more struggle to get them to apply than is worth the effort.
What's more, IMHO, templates almost always look like . . . well, templates. Unless your clients are seriously scraping the bottom, it's almost always better to consider their business first, and then design a site theme for that.
Finally, while ProductCart is rather independent of design, at some point you do have to maintain design coherency once you get into the shopping cart functionality. It's best to have a design concept that will work consitantly accross the entire site from home page to order confirmation.
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simplyathleticgear
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Joined: 26-October-2009 Location: Toronto Status: Offline Points: 0 |
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Posted: 26-October-2009 at 11:29pm |
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Gentlemen, thank you for your replies. I echo your thoughts...that a successful site must have a rock-solid design and layout.
The eCommerce site that I'd like to deploy is not for a client, it's something that I've wanted to do for the longest time so I'm finally getting around to getting the job done! I owe myself the justice to at least inquire at the cost to have a professionally designed template/layout for the site...thanks again. Regards, Martin. |
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Martin
http://www.simplyathletic.com |
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simplyathleticgear
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Joined: 26-October-2009 Location: Toronto Status: Offline Points: 0 |
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Posted: 28-October-2009 at 11:53am |
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Hello All,
Alright...I will attempt to do something that I have never done before - create my own site layout.
As eluded to by Sean above, I imagine that many people are strong in one skill and perhaps weaker in the other (development vs design). As such, what I can do is use this thread to give everyone a running account of my progress from a developers perspective (on creating a site layout)? Mind you, I do have a full-time job, so this is really a pet project, but nonetheless, hopefully I can deliver a site sooner rather than later (although it may still be months away as I need to develop my buiness model
 ). Thoughts are more than welcome... |
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Martin
http://www.simplyathletic.com |
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katharina
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Joined: 25-October-2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 0 |
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Posted: 28-October-2009 at 12:04pm |
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I encourage you to try. It is not that hard. I'm not a developer nor a designer. What I did was create a look in my webpage editing program (netobjects fusion), with buttons and all. I've also created the links from the buttons to various parts like new arrivals, customer log in, and support pages. These links can be get from the back office, and also compare them to what is in the template as for linking. Create other files like your terms etc in the back end so it also creates links for those files. Add the few tags EI has for the header and a place note for yourself as where to split the html file later into the header and footer asp pages. Basic html knowledge with help when it comes to reading html tags in the final file. I think it took me less then one hour for my first template with an older version. For the last one I needed a little bit more, due to cascading styles. Good luck.
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Katharina
******************* www.GermanPlaza.com ******************* |
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simplyathleticgear
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Posted: 28-October-2009 at 8:56pm |
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Hello,
Before I embark on the endeavour to create a layout, I need a starting point. With that said, I'm on a mission to create a logo. With a logo I hope to be able to ensure that the layout is in cohesion with the company brand. As mentioned above, I'm no graphic expert. Therefore, I'm looking at using a third party such as Logo Design Team (http://www.LogoDesignTeam.com) to come up with a logo. I'm looking at their $149 package...seems more than reasonable for five designs and unlimited revisions. Until next time... Cheers. Edited by simplyathleticgear - 28-October-2009 at 8:56pm |
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Martin
http://www.simplyathletic.com |
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Posted: 28-October-2009 at 9:23pm |
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Excellent approach. We always start with the logo as it communicates SO MUCH including color scheme, "mood", "character", etc. The logo is our cornerstone for site design.
And frankly, serious logo design is an art in and of itself. There is a lot of skill and experience that goes into it, and you really want a deliverable that can be used effectively in all manner of media.
A logo design house is a good option, but one word of caution whith these logo design services -- you will almost get upgraded to a more expensive package than you were likely expecting. However, even then you won't typically come out any more expensive than when dealing directly with a logo design artist.
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Andy @ Landmarq
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Joined: 12-November-2008 Location: London Status: Offline Points: 0 |
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Posted: 02-November-2009 at 6:38am |
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Not being the most gifted person artistic wise, I went with the template method and grabbed one from here http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
It took a couple of hours to spread the rough layout into the header/footer and content style for product cart and about a day to convert the rest of the pages and I'm forever tweaking it about just to pretty things up and add new features but the end result looks good. The template I went for was originally intended for a blog site rather than a shopping site but the colour scheme fitted what we wanted and the layout was quite smart so templates can work if you can find one you feel will sit well with your sites content. |
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Need a bespoke PC built to order? come to www.landmarq.co.uk
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intour
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Joined: 30-June-2006 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 0 |
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Posted: 06-November-2009 at 5:21am |
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There is another option which saves a lot of time and money and can save you being totally dependent on a preconfigured design.
You can buy or get for free a CSS layout tool. This creates you standards complaint CSS layouts so you have your basic 2 column or 3 column layout, fluid (to fill the screen) or fixed width centered etc etc.
You do need some CSS knowledge but it's not too difficult to learn the basics. You can than tweak the layout to suit your design, add header, footer and background images and then add your code and menus.
Even for experienced website designers these type of tools are great timesavers.
Nigel
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