DSF

sorry JSR im not very good at explaining the "back room stuff" suffice to say that my friend who works in the industry is very impressed with some of the security / back up features that are in it, rather than the stuff the customers see.
He looked at many of the carts before giving me this one to work on and i must say i am finding it re-assuringly easy to work on. i hope to have it up and running in the next week.

Karen. wrote:I know that with us we wanted a basic template, so chose that over all the fancy ones. I personally do not like the flash, all singing, all dancing 'busy' website templates.

I've got to agree with you there. There's nothing more off-putting than a distracting website. If the customer just wants to order a mug and they're inundated with flashy graphics, they may not bother.

On the other side of the coin, there's a practical aspect to it. If your site relies on Flash for graphics (or, heaven forbid, actual operability) then you risk eliminating a proportion of your potential customers.

These days everyone is browsing websites on all manner of devices from smartphones, to iPods, to all manner of different OSes. The more non-standard your website, the less likely it is to work on these devices. Apparently there are something like 75 million iPhones and iPod Touches sold - and these will not display any Flash from your site. Likewise, these devices do their best to scale websites to suit their tiny screens but if you force your site to display with large graphics or animations, all you're doing is giving the customer another reason to click away. And no one's going to want to spend ages waiting for your site to load if they're using 3G broadband and paying by the MB.

mrs maggot wrote:sorry JSR im not very good at explaining the "back room stuff" suffice to say that my friend who works in the industry is very impressed with some of the security / back up features that are in it, rather than the stuff the customers see.
He looked at many of the carts before giving me this one to work on and i must say i am finding it re-assuringly easy to work on. i hope to have it up and running in the next week.

Thanks anyway. I think I'll stick with what I have until I'm ready for a major overhaul (which won't be any time soon! ).

It is usually 50-250 items, this can be 50 different orders or ten orders for 20 items each.
The vast majority of them is through the website, although it is being updated at the moment, so a lot of them are contscting usthrough the website, but ordering direct at the moment.

Karen. wrote:I know that with us we wanted a basic template, so chose that over all the fancy ones. I personally do not like the flash, all singing, all dancing 'busy' website templates.

I was talking about the basic template for both carts.
to me I can tell its a zen cart the minute it appears, not that theres anything wrong with that and if its not broke dont try to fix it.
But for someone new to looking for a shopping cart the basic layout template differences, without any flash stuf, are interesting.
Of course, I am not experienced to say if one cart is better than another cos I have yet to have one.

I think I will buy the e version of the book "EE-Start your web store with zen cart"

Does anyone else have it please?

so I bought the book, downloaded zen cart and xammp and cant get it to work on my local host...anyone run a locALHOST CART BEFORE GOING LIVE PLEASE?

Is it Apache that won't run ? If so you need to go in to services and stop the IIS service.

No it's not that, Ive added the correct lines to hosts in order to make example.com work on my local server but it doesnt work.
The messages i get are from the merlcury web server.

Does your server support the script - some don't