Have i Made a large Blunder?

[Rugbythug]

I have a Website I am happy with

www.universalfabricator.com while it looks less polished than other web-sites this type of design has made $. I hoped to add Zen as a Back end Shopping Cart. In a different thread I was told Instead I should make my shopping cart to look like my other HTML page. A quick look around makes it seem like this is not qoing to be real feasable. I have only a few products that you can get only from our company. I need a lot of Type and video, large pictures to get my message to the consumer. Do I need to look elsewhere for my shopping cart needs?

[Kim]

Do I need to look elsewhere for my shopping cart needs?

No, Everything I saw on your site can be adapted to use Zen Cart's Template override structure and once it is in place using the shopping cart features and Admin will make your life easier.

[Henrietta]

while it looks less polished than other web-sites

Looks pretty shiny to me

I don't see why you can't customize your zen cart to be similar to your landing page, color, header everything. Your cart would be a second page accessible by a button or link, you don't want to duplicate the landing page do you? You would place your merchandise in your cart and you have places to put all the fine print, shipping, returns, privacy policy etc.

That is what I did.

[kiddo]

Zen Cart doesn't need to be your entire site. If the layout like you have it is making money for you, add Zen Cart as a back end processor. The ZC pages can be made to look quite like your main html pages.

An example of such a hybrid html/Zen Cart site is here:

http://www.imyb.com

Most of this site is plain html but it jumps to ZC when a customer buys something.

[kobra]

I don't see why you can't customize your zen cart to be similar to your landing page, color, header everything. Your cart would be a second page accessible by a button or link,

Zen Cart doesn't need to be your entire site. If the layout like you have it is making money for you, add Zen Cart as a back end processor.

I will xhime in here and add that the sooner that you get away from &a&oo and there fees the happier you will be.

I see almost no major elements in your current site that can not be brought into Zen Cart. As Kim stated and I will elaborate upon: You should be able to get 9?% of the good parts of your current site, polish up the overall presentation, and reap major benefits in the backend and management facilities.

So I depart abit from other posters in that I see your site being replaced in entirety with Zen Cart.

If you created the current site you will be mildly disapointed that Dream Weaver and the WYSIWYG development platform that it provides will not be as seamless for this php application. This is due to the fact that you are not creating page after page as actual pages do not exist in the accepted sense and therefore can not be edited with DW.

Your investment in porting this over to Zen Cart will pay you in benefits for some time to come.

[Henrietta]

Zen Cart doesn't need to be your entire site. If the layout like you have it is making money for you, add Zen Cart as a back end processor. The ZC pages can be made to look quite like your main html pages.

An example of such a hybrid html/Zen Cart site is here:

http://www.imyb.com

Most of this site is plain html but it jumps to ZC when a customer buys something.

Your site completely froze my browser, twice. I use Firefox.

[stevesh]

Your site completely froze my browser, twice. I use Firefox.

I wish it had frozen mine - whatever that awful noise is that plays when the home page loads has to go.

[Rugbythug]

thanks all for the Replies. I will keep plugging away then. I need that book to get here so i can learn to read Zen.

[Henrietta]

I wish it had frozen mine - whatever that awful noise is that plays when the home page loads has to go.

LOL

I keep my speakers muted when cruising unknown sites.

The book is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't answer all the questions. While you are waiting for it to arrive hang out and read in the forum, you will learn so much from others questions.