Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Delicious button Digg button

Moving to Magento

Your competitor has a new website with a modern, individual look and many useful functions. You have an open source 2 or 3 column standard layout that looks like any other shopping site available and offers only basis functions  Which website is a customer going to browse?

While osCommerce and ZenCart are not difficult to use or to understand how they work, are they rather dated and unable to do what customers require of a modern shopping website? I think its time to move on and I have chosen Magento.

It is a challenge. Magento works very differently and offers many more functions  with more ways to customise than either ZenCart or osCommerce could hope to offer. The downside? It’s complicated.

Rather than go live, I have installed it at home on my own server in order to test and understand how to manage the front and admin side.

My aim: to run 3 websites using one installation of Magento with one database, offering a selection of products through sites that look and feel different.

I am starting with the free 1.4.1 version and I’ll keep you updated on how i get on. Hopefully if you are a Magento beginner like me it will help you too.

In addition, the importance of SEO cannot be emphasised enough for any website. As well as marketing and promoting your online store, your cart software has to have great SEO compatibility and I think Magento is over and above ZenCart and OsCommerce.

Multiple Pages and Website Optimiser In ZenCart Part2

Google Optimiser gives  a piece of code to insert at the beginning and end of the original ez-page and another piece of code at the end of the 2nd alternative ez-page. This can be easily copy and pasted using the ZenCart admin.

Now for the tricky part.

Having selected the add to shopping cart stage as the ‘measurement of success’ page i placed the tracking code in /includes/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/template/tpl_shopping_cart_default.php. This file will need to be copied from the template default and uploaded to the server in YOUR TEMPLATE folder.

This file has 2 functions: display the cart when an item is added and display the cart when it is empty. So, to measure page success when something is added to the cart, the Google code needs to go in the middle of the file before the ‘cart is empty’ function.

I inserted the code around line 174  in tpl_shopping_cart_default.php just after the shipping estimator section as shown below.

Once edited upload the file to your server and save an additional temporary copy to your desktop.

Validating the file.

Google will not be able to validate the performance success page so this needs to be done manually with the saved copy of tpl_shopping_cart_default.php as illustrated below.

Verify all the information in the optimiser and let your experiment begin.

It may need some tweaking but now the pages are in place I can edit the ez-page easily through ZenCart admin section as long as I don’t disturb the Google script allowing experimentation with the page content.

Get Serious About SEO: 2 Word Length and Relevancy

Again it is basic but have you checked the length of your descriptions, meta descriptions, key words and their relevancy to your content?

Try this meta tag analyser and have a look at your own website.

In my own example, before working on it, word length is fine but word relevancy needs some work.

Get serious about SEO and do it.

In the next article I will talk meta descriptions in Zen Cart. I changed mine manually and Google noticed the improvement.

Resources you must read when re-designing a web page.

I admit I have neglected my websites look recently and decided it was time for a spring clean. A fresh new look and some SEO love.

There are thousands of web pages dedicated to web design and SEO, here are some worth looking at:

For choosing colour palates I use this scheme chooser and colour scheme generator. They make it easy to select complementing colours.

You can also check your colour scheme used in CSS with this free and easy to use colour contrast tool.

iWebtool have a page dedicated to free on-line tools to analyse your website.

CopyBlogger offer some useful tips on copy writing for SEO success.

If you are unfamiliar with the jargon of web page components there is a a good basic guide to SEO web essentials at webconfs.com

My favourite page is Web Pages That Suck. It’s a humorous and attention grabbing title yet packed with loads of information. By showing you how NOT to design a website you can learn how to do things the right way. It was this site that provoked me to get rid of my red and green theme. They offer a detailed check list to apply to your own web-site design and then suggestions for further action.

And finally if you need some new buttons for your Zen or OS Commerce cart then Advance Software have a free on-line tool where you can create and download an entire button set with correct labels for simple uploading to your site.