Specials Layout on main page

[IAINMCG]

Hi Guys,

Looking for some advice again. I am currently changing my homepage and i've decided i'll show my monthly specials on the main page. I haev enabled this. Is there a way for me to put some customization around the specials products to make them look nicer such as a border round the specials, coloured lines between them etc.

You can see my page here: www.thepetpad.co.uk

As you can see the specials don't look very nice the now.

Thanks

Iain

[schoolboy]

You could add a background colour to the DIV...

Try adding this to your stylesheet.css

#specialsDefault {background-color:#E8FFDD;}

The DIV is described by #specialsDefault so you can do pretty much anything with it in the stylesheet - add backgound images, etc...


BTW: your site is taking AGES to load. I made TWO cups of tea while I waited for your obscenely-large sliders to load. Don't use PNG. Yours are each 200kb, and you're trying to push out EIGHT on the home page. That's 1.6 megabytes - just for the sliders.

You have HUGE banners... but microscopic product images... The juxtaposition is visually uncomfortable,

Scott Wilson (one of zencart's long-standing gurus) recently alerted us all to THIS ARTICLE.

Perhaps you should take a look at it too.

[IAINMCG]

I'll have a look at that, thanks.

as for the load times, i have been trying to change the images, what format is best for a quick load?

Thanks

iain

[schoolboy]

Compressed jpg is best. You have to experiment with the compression a bit to see how far you can take it, but remember jpg is a "lossy" file format... it suffers "loss" with each "edit" or re-format.

I generally create images of the following dimensions, and keep ALL images on a site to the same aspect and aspect ratio.

Portrait:
600 X 800 - 120ppi (compress to within 100kb or better...)

Landscape:
800 X 600 - 120ppi (compress to within 100kb or better...)

Square:
750 X 750 - 120ppi (compress to within 100kb or better...)

Photoshop is best, but GIMP (freeware) can do the job just as well.

ALL images named in just alpha-numeric a-z,0-9 with lowercase letters, no spaces between words, and file extension always lowercase .jpg