Need Some Help!

[rhg74]

Hi everyone,

This is the first store that I bought, I want to change some of the colors as it has to much white in it (http://ritualchest.com) as you can see. Between the logo and the categories and all the way down to the bottom of the page I would like to make it black with the wording ( Home, Copyright , Powered by, etc.) white on all the pages, the centre and The New Products..... I haven't decided on any colors yet but might want to change them in the future.

My problem is I don't know how to do it, I am new to this and I know I will mess the store up. I have been reading the posts but I am lost when they say stylesheets or how to find them or change them, I have just bought the Zencart manual and am reading it but can't quite figure it out yet.
The site does well in sales (5 - 10 sales a week) I just want to make some changes.

Can someone help an old guy out, who got his first computer 4 years ago.

My Zencart version is 1.3.8a and I use smart FTP

Sorry if I broke any rules in this forum but I'm learning

Thanks so much for reading my post

Peter

[afo]

How have you been making changes so far? A lot of customization has already been done? What you're asking for isn't that difficult. If you look at the Fan Odyssey store in my sig, I have white text on a black background (I'm using an image, but it'd be the same idea in the CSS).

[stevesh]

Your first order of busines should be to install the Firefox browser and the Web Developer plugin. That will allow you to make temporary changes in the stylesheet and see them in real time without messing anything up permanently. When you get Web Developer installed, hit CTRL-SHIFT-E and an editor will appear with your stylesheets loaded. CTRL-SHIFT-Y will allow you hover over an area of the page and see the CSS in the box at the top of the page.

The area you want black is #mainWrapper, so start there.

[rhg74]

Hi Afo and Stevesh,

Thanks for the reply, the site is the way I purchased it, the previous owner must have made the changes, the only thing I can do is from the admin area, I did download Firefox and installed Web Developer and it work fine, I played with it and figured out how to change the colors but I don't like the way it looks.

Maybe a background image would be better, is it the same way of changing it or is there something else I have to do?

Thanks again for all your help.

This forum is a great source if information.

Peter

[afo]

Hi Peter,

First, welcome to Zen Cart.

If you don't already have these tools, I suggest you get them.

1) a good text editor like Notepad++ or Crimson Editor
2) an FTP client like Filezilla

All are free downloads from the net.

Here's what I would do in your situation.

I would connect to the site with the FTP client and download all the Zen Cart files and folders to my local computer. Why? It gives me a backup of the site and allows me to edit files easily which I can then upload to the site to make the changes permanent. If anything happens to the host, I still have a current copy of the store. (backing up the database is another matter, but that can come later)

Once you do that, you'll be able to see the folder/file structure Zen Cart uses and people's suggestions about where to find and edit things will be clearer.

You can use a different background image by adding it to the appropriate places in the stylesheet. I've done that on the Fan Odyssey site in my sig.

[rhg74]

Hi Afo,

Check out my site now, its coming together.

I took all your advise, got Firefox and the Web Developer tool, they really helped. This forum is a great database of knowledge. Thanks so much. I've done a lot of reading here and set up my store the way I want it in the last week. I live in Canada and with the help in this forum I was able to set all our taxes. This is actually fun. I still need to do some tweeks to the site, but i'm happy with it now.

There are a couple of things I need help with.

On the main page, the Who's Online box the wording is to big can I make it smaller to fit in the box?

Also at the bottom of the page the 2 lines Copyright and Powered By the links at the end are black and hard to read, when I went to change the font color, it changed, but also changed the font color throughout the site so I changed it back. Can I just change the 5 words?

Thanks again for your help and time

Peter