Integrating with an existing website.

[dhanesh]

i am planning to use zencart in my existing site as shopping cart.
it mainly consist of one page,say a product display page.
The rest of the site the ,index page other pages are entirely different in designs and layout.

is it advisable to use zencart?Can zencart be customized to this extend?

One solution i am planning is to create a sub folder called cart or something and install zencart there for the shopping page.

is it a good idea?

[RunnersDen]

We customized the colors/artwork in our zen cart to match those on our normal flash page. The customer can go back and forth between the "two" sites without it being too obvious. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out:

www.runnersdenaz.com

Click on the "Shop Here" link in the left hand navigation column to see zen cart pop up.

[dhanesh]

We customized the colors/artwork in our zen cart to match those on our normal flash page. The customer can go back and forth between the "two" sites without it being too obvious. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out:

www.runnersdenaz.com

Click on the "Shop Here" link in the left hand navigation column to see zen cart pop up.

Great!!!!

How do you do the top links?Is it Easy pages or just design pages?
It really works seamlessly with the main site.
Great work.

Seeing this i got an idea.Can i design the whole site in zencar with index page being seperate?
this is the link of my site.
www.ahtel.com

[RunnersDen]

"How do you do the top links?Is it Easy pages or just design pages?"

The links across the top of the page are from a template we purchased. Just google "ZenCart Template." I edit the buttons themselves through ftp access and a text editor. The content of the pages is edited through either the Admin/Tools/Define Pages Editor function or the Admin/Tools/EZ Pages function. All basic html.

"Seeing this i got an idea.Can i design the whole site in zencar with index page being seperate?"

Absolutely. Keep your home page as it is, but just direct the links to appropriate zen cart subfolders.

[stevesh]

Absolutely. Keep your home page as it is, but just direct the links to appropriate zen cart subfolders.

Not quite. Having a home page outside Zencart with links to internal pages inside Zencart will cause sessions problems for your customers.

RunnersDen's site has a link on the home page to the Zencart index page, and Zencart is in a subdirectory (/store). If you want to keep your current page, that's the way to do it.

Before you take RunnersDen's advice about Googling 'zencart template', please search this forum for "Template Monster".

The design of his store could be duplicated without spending a lot of money on a template that may not work.

[RunnersDen]

Not quite. Having a home page outside Zencart with links to internal pages inside Zencart will cause sessions problems for your customers.

RunnersDen's site has a link on the home page to the Zencart index page, and Zencart is in a subdirectory (/store). If you want to keep your current page, that's the way to do it.

Thanks for clarifying that. I just re-read the post and I wasn't as clear as I should have been.

Before you take RunnersDen's advice about Googling 'zencart template', please search this forum for "Template Monster".

The design of his store could be duplicated without spending a lot of money on a template that may not work.

Our template was very inexpensive, and saved us a ton of time in getting our site up and running. I would definitely do it again.

[bobthemolder]

We customized the colors/artwork in our zen cart to match those on our normal flash page. The customer can go back and forth between the "two" sites without it being too obvious. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out:

www.runnersdenaz.com

Click on the "Shop Here" link in the left hand navigation column to see zen cart pop up.

This post convinced me to just add zencart onto the site instead of trying to integrate it. It's a great example of designing zencart to match your site.

[dhanesh]

I think the whole idea is mistaken.The fact that one is asking about the integration is that nobody knows HOW TO.

Because of lack of Documentation.I was surprised to see that nobody is interested in this.One has to look into OScommerce,Joomla and Magento on how far they have gone to make their products friendly.

you can even see their VIDEO Tutorials on How to sections.

And I am sad to say that if zenners decides to go in the futures this way....