newbie here building a site...

hello, i am building a custom css site for my client that is 99% content... and only one page will have 5 products... can i make zen cart look like my site or do i have to do the whole site within a zen cart template to keep every page consistent?

thank you so much:smile:

Things will be much easier if you do everything within Zen Cart.

There are free Zen Cart templates available. Perhaps one of them will work as a starting point for the design you want to create. You can see them in action at http://(sorry, site offline)/

ahhh i was afraid of this.... ok, so does the index page have to be part of the template? i want to do a 'enter site' page

thank you for your help :)

I'd step back and think out this some more. If you're selling products you will have a lot more than a single listing page to think about. You'll probably have a descriptive page for each product, the shopping cart page, the checkout page (or pages), a login page, an account area where order status can be tracked, and probably informational pages about shipping and refund policies too.

This may change the balance of your site. You can style Zen Cart to look however you want. So it is possible to use it only for the cart-related pages and style it to look like the rest of the site.

However, I've generally found it easier to bring the static content inside the Zen Cart and only worry about creating and maintaining one set of styling information.

You can have an "enter" page, but if the user switches back and forth between Zen Cart and the "enter" page, sessions and shopping carts can be lost. I believe you just need to name the "enter" page index.html to get it to load first. Zen Cart creates index.php.

I'll second what Kuroi said as well.

oh this is all good stuff!... i have alot of work ahead of me, lol:ohmy:

so if i build the whole site within the zencart template, can there not be evidence that it is a ecommerce site except for the pages that are about the products? might be a silly question..sorry :)

cos im thinking about buying this template http://www.zenflavor.com/demo2/

I guess I'm confused. You can style Zencart such that it doesn't 'look like an ecommerce site', but that template you referenced screams ecommerce.

Maybe if you gave us an idea of what these 5 products are, how you're building the rest of the site, and how important the ecommerce part is to the overall project, we might have some better ideas for you.

stevesh,
you are prob. confused because I am confused, lol....
since i have been told that the whole site needs to be built within the template, i chose a template that has a similar color scheme and header size to the site i WAS building.
i want the product page to look like the rest of the site....

we are selling t-shirts, sweatshirts and caps with my clients logo on it.
the rest of the site will be talking about my clients books, featuring him on youtube vids, ect. (he is a motivational speaker)
and the product page is very important.. my client def. wants it.

i hope this helps you help me and thank you again for any time and consideration you give me.:D

Lee Ann