Cart Only For Christian T-Shirt Website

Hi all,
I have a website that sells christian t-shirts at http://www.mychristianthreads.com. I am currently using Paypal as my payment method, but would like to use an inline cart instead. I hired someone to do this for me, and it didn't work like I wanted. The Zen Cart is located at http://www.mychristianthreads.com/Cart (if you visit this, sometimes it takes almost 30 seconds to load.) I had it hosted with Godaddy and people told me to move it. I transferred it to another domain on a different hosting, and the speed was still way too slow.

My question is: does Zen Cart allow the functionality to ONLY use the add to cart the put cart inline with my current site? I built the site myself, and am happy with the way it loads and looks. I don't want to purchase one shopping cart or a yahoo shopping cart, but for me to integrate it with the site I have already, this is looking more like what has to happen. Any help or suggestions greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Hi Zcole
I am not sure what you are asking
Do you want your cart to take creditcard or direct debit etc as well as Paypal
If so you just need to install additional payment modules to your zencart

YOWSER!!!! Part of the problem is your page size! Your total page is over 400k!! http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://www.mychristianthreads.com/Cart/

It looks like most of the work of converting your store to ZC is done. There are a few more items that could easily be included like your row of promo links below the flash, and a few stock ZC items like the Welcome Guest that could easily be eliminated.
Some of the converter's design choices were questionable - the details of your original header are better except for the ragged right edge - but that again is easily fixable. The breadcrumbs could be moved to the header and tweaked to work the same as your current ones. The featured products centerbox could be replaced with the new products box and styled to exactly match your New Designs graphic.

If you really want the big page with the letter and policy info at the bottom of every page, you can have it. Likewise with the satisfied customers and shirt definitions boxes in the sidebar.

As for speed, a comparison of your original site's report and your ZC site's report shows that both are major dogs, with the original being 816k and the ZC being 506k. Some serious optimization is in order no matter what. Just the cool flash header takes 332k, or ten times the suggested total page size.

One big problem with the ZC is that the small/medium/large image capability was ignored and you have dozens of 30-90k thumbnails on a page, compared to your original site's 7k thumbs. That's just sloppy work, not ZC's fault.

So more work is needed, but you are close to having a good Zen Cart with infinite future capacity for e-commerce.
To answer your original question, Zen Cart is not designed to work as buttons inserted in an HTML page.

P.S your T-Shirts ROCK!:smile:

Wow... thanks for all the input!

gh42, you addressed some of my concerns with the Zen Cart... and the picture/thumbnail issue is one thing that I worked out with the non ZC design.

Do you think I should wipe out the flash and just put an image on the front? Is the multimedia too much?

You can tell that I am green to a lot of this, but does the # of "objects" mean the number of outgoing links from the page? I thought you were supposed to have a lot of them for SEO, so should I try to limit the number of outgoing links?

To answer another one of the questions, I would very much like to be able to take credit card and debit card. That functionality is built in, but the shipping & handling became a nightmare.

I'm not sure that I know enough to complete the Zen Cart so if anyone is interested in helping out I'd be interested to hear about your services!

Thanks again for all the help!

Someone correct me if I am wrong but....
Replacing your flash object with a graphic would speed things up.

The modules for the payments are pretty simple.
If you download the modules, all the files are placed in the appropriate places so you just have to place them in your site and install them in your admin via a simple install button.
I assume you already have your shipping set up with your paypal module anyway
The extra modules just give extra payment options.

I would have a go before paying anyone:smile:

P.S
I noticed that your text links go to white when you place your mouse over it.
You may want to change this to a colour in your css so the ones with the blue t-shirt graphics above them dont disappear when you do this

Re thumbnails - Zen Cart has built-in support for using small, medium or large image files in the appropriate places. You just need to create the files, name them correctly, and upload them to the correct folders.

Hi guys!

Yeah, I need to work on my stylesheet a little bit to correct that navigation turning to white. It gets so confusing after a while b/c I have three separate div tags for placement and all three of them have their own a:hover, etc.

I'm going to try and that thing up and running... eventually!

thanks for all of the help!

Zac

zcole:

Hi all,
I have a website that sells christian t-shirts at http://www.mychristianthreads.com. .
Thanks!
I don't want to HiJack your thread, but WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR category sidebox?

I love it, the menu headings, and sub-categories is EXACTLY what I have been trying to find for my sites and a new one I am workin gon now.

Could you turn me on to the programmer that made them for you?

THANKS
JOhn ><>

No problem John! I'm not sure which one you are referring to... but the Christian T-Shirt navigation on the root site was written by myself. I tried dupicating the effect in Zen Cart (in the /Cart directory) but was unable to get the bg to span the entire length of the table with a CSS rollover. When I added the needed attribute, it must have conflicted with other portions of the existing ZC style sheet (and since they are so extensive) it was kind of a pain to sift through them all. I'd be happy to help you out if you let me know what your color scheme is, or point me to a site that you're using now.

If you are talking about the display: block; that is needed to make the cat name styling full width, there is a <br /> in the code (necessary for reliable layout without block) in tpl_categories.php, which causes an extra space if using display: block;.

This is all addressed in one part of the Categories Dressing code, if you want an example.

I was wondering if you knew how to add flash to the header of Zen Cart. What I mean is I can add the flash to the header of zen cart however I can't seem to add a preloader that can load in the flash content.

if you want to see what I mean you can check out the site

www.stoppoints.com

you can see the flash has a preloader when it loads on the index page but when you click on buy and zen cart is loaded I can not make the flash preloader work so I had to just load in the flash by itself thus there is a black space until the flash is loaded any help would be great

thank you very much for taking the time to read this message:smile: any help would be great