Right column overlapping centre column?

[schoolboy]

Ah ha that would explain a lot, thanks schoolboy.

Trouble is now I've got a fatal error stopping the entire site from loading!



The result of trying to implement a facebook fan box in the right column, any ideas?

Is this something that is going to encourage or stimulate sales?

Will customers fill their carts with products because of this feature?

Does it add value to someone's purchasing experience?

If not... why are you doing it?

Clutter is one of the main reasons why sites are slowed down, and why customers get distracted and led out of a site.

If your site is there to entertain people, then pepper it with junk like this. Make it look like a pinball machine on steroids if you want to.

If your main objective is to sell goods, make a profit and earn a decent living, then everything on your site should be designed to encourage sales and draw in customers. Components that do not achieve this are superfluous and unnecessary. Be ruthless... focus on what is going to stimulate business.

[bertles86]

Hi schoolboy, thanks for the reply. I take your point, but in our case we are trying in the long run to effectively integrate Facebook with the website for both marketing and actual live sales. So yes excessive widgetry et al will slow down site performance however this one is deemed necessary (for us).

In the meantime, I've taken your excellent advice and shrunk the main image resolution and brought the right column in properly, however the FB sidebox content now sits outside the sidebox border! Any tips? I followed this great tutorial here. Functionality is spot on, just need to tidy up that border. Oh and any ideas or tips on how to show only 1 or 2 products in the New Products sidebox?

Thanks again.

[bertles86]

Whoot found the amount of products in the sidebox here Configuration>Maximum Values>Random New Products for Sidebox

[bertles86]

Okay well I seem to be working in the right direction with this, but would still greatly appreciate any nudges!

I have shrunk the resolution of the main image, and that has brought the right column in, however there is still an uneven amount of white space between the centre column and right column that I'd love to minimise. You can see what I mean here:




And I've tried to centre align the content of the two sideboxes in the right column by adding a class to stylesheet.css:

 .centeredImage
    {
    text-align:center;
    margin-top:0px;
    margin-bottom:0px;
    padding:0px;
    }

Then calling it in each definition of the sideboxes:

define('TEXT_FANBOX_SIDEBOX', '<p class="centeredImage"><fb:like-box profile_id="116954695015876" width="140" connections="4" stream="false"></fb:like-box></p>');

define('TEXT_BLANK_SIDEBOX', '<p class="centeredImage"><img src="/includes/templates/pure_red_free/images/payments.gif" alt="Payment Options"/></p>');

But I still have excessive whitespace above/below the content in each sidebox.

Any help at all would be amazing!