OH someone help me! Newbie here!!

[raw-bee]

I swear, I'm not a techno idiot but I'm so confused. I currently run a successful commercial website through bizhosting.com and though it's very search engine friendly, I'm frustrated with the look of their templates and I'm having some serious service issues.

So, I am now looking in to developing my own site using zen cart. First, I don't know if it's a solution for me because in order to keep my search engine rankings, which are excellent, I need my product and category pages to be named exactly the same as they are now. My pages are all .html and include a descriptive page name that helps me rank well. If I convert to zen cart will I lose this? If so, my site will virtually disappear to the search engines which would kill my business!! So far the only zen cart shops I've seen are all .php pages with jumbled names that have no relevance to the product.

Here's an example from my site:

http://ododboutique.com/embellished_overalls.html

See how icky the template is? But it's search engine friendly and my site is mainly search engine driven. (We rank on the 1st page in google for embellished overalls, for example, because of this page title).

If I do switch, I want to purchase a zen template, but it's editable in frontpage or dreamweaver, so how does it integrate in to the cart? You have no idea how confused I am! Just to try zen cart out, I set up a category and a product and there is a link that says 'to view more about this product, go to the product page' and it wants me to link to another page!!! I've not seen that with other zen cart websites... I'm so confused!

Robbie

[patski]

The link to another page is because you have Show product url switched on in Catalog / Product Types / Edit Layout.

Re commercially available templates then beware of purchased templates claiming to be for Zen Cart - there are dozens which claim to be but aren't. There are many free ones in the downloads section on this site which may suit your purposes with modifications which you can make in Dreamweaver or equivalent.

Re the page titles then you can control these. Easiest is to have keyword rich category and product names but you can add metatags and so on to add further ones.

It would be wrong to say that a switch won't have some impact on your ranking - the site will need to be indexed again - but your content will be broadly the same - there may be some others who have made a similar switch that can better advise on ways to minimise any impact - as I've only been involved with brand new stores.

Good luck!