Can I make an entire website with zen cart?

[loughnet]

I'm just wondering. I'm (utterly) new to zen cart and I've recently been approached by someone to design a website for their shop. They also want to be able to use the website to sell their items online.

I have a design in mind for the shop website and was all ready to go when I came across zen cart. See, I'd much rather the site look more like a website, with an about us, links, contact, etc, your standard website, with lots of news and features and a custom menu to go with it. I mean I could make the pages separate then link to the zen cart part but that would look cumbersome.
I'd much rather it's all as coherent and uniform as possible.

In other words, I want it to look more like a full website rather than a standard online shop. So basically I'm wondering is it possible to:

1. Edit the templates to look like the pages I have in mind.

2. Create extra pages with these templates for contact, about, links, location, plus a profile on the shop (i.e the actual building)

3. Have all of these pages come up as standard links (i.e. /about, /location, rather than long URLs of script gibberish)

Any advice or examples you got for me I'd really, really appreciate it.

[afo]

The things you can do with Zen Cart are pretty much limited only by your imagination. The template defines the look and feel of the site, not what pages are on the site.

Take a look at the Fan Odyssey site in my sig. I recently converted the site to a Zen Cart store because the site itself had run its course. Using EZ-Pages, I retained some of the information from the site in the Past Events box.

HTH!

[schoolboy]

Zencart is a sophisticated "content driven" website system, designed to render content according to the now widely-accepted protocol of database-driven page rendering. Fundamentally, you can achieve what you're after with zencart - ie: a "standard" site that has numerous bespoke (customised) features, that ALSO doubles as an e-commerce website - but to achieve this you need to understand how PHP-driven page composition interacts with:-

1. The database
2. Underlying stylesheets
3. Customising components (such as the ez-pages feature)
4. The "template" system.

If you are unfamiliar with database-driven content (where pages are "cobbled together" on the fly) overlaid on a template and over-rides system, then the first thing you are going to need to learn is how a coding language like PHP interfaces with the 4 points highlighted above.

So, the short answer to your question is "yes - you CAN use zencart to design and render a website that meets your requirements".

This will only be achieved however, when you have a high degree of knowledge of how to create templates, work with CSS, and configure all the settings within zencart that enable/disable its many hundreds of features.

(It's taken me 2 years to appreciate the flexibility of zencart, but wow! It does what I want it to!).

For the novice, zencart is without question the easiest way to build an online shop that is advanced in its functionality, yet relatively easy to manage. The zencart community is close-knit, supportive and extremely helpful - so if you lose your way at any point, someone is usually available to assist.

[afo]

The beauty of Zen Cart is that you can start out simple and let it grow from there. Most of us make tje mistake of trying to run before we can walk when we're first starting out with Zen Cart because we can see where we want to go so clearly. Take it one step at a time and you'll get the site you (and your client) want.