osCommerce Tabbed Navigation

Posted on June 8, 2007
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

Sliding Doors of CSS using Tabs for Navigation

After getting a little third party help recently on some PHP code to make the tabs a bit more dynamic for for osCommerce I’m pretty happy with the results the contribution. This contribution essentially takes the sliding doors all css tabs example from AListApart and gives the user a way to control the active tag in a dynamic environment.

The only hangup at this time is that you have to do a redirect to get the yourdomain.com/ to appear as yourdomain.com/index.php in order for the solution to work. I’ll be working on fixing it so that is not required.

Read more on the tabs effect from here http://alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors/

CRELoaded – osCommerce – WordPress Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

Integrated design and templates – WordPress eCommerce

Its interesting! In the past 4 months after people reading my posts around the web about making osCommerce and WordPress sing together how persistent the questions keep on rolling in.

I put together a little tutorial over on www.livedemosite.com in the articles section of Joomla which I’ll make live and it covers some of the key steps you need to consider and keep in mind in order to pull it off.

I’m 95% designer and 5% everything else (sort of) so much of what I’ve done has everything to do with the look and feel of the integration. This poses problems for those that want custom coding because up until this point almost no one ever asks for it when it comes to sharing the user database and such. Well that is about to change.

I hired a programmer to complete a bridge so I can bring together WordPress and either osCommerce, osCMax, or CRELoaded users together. It will basically be a simple login replacement form for either of the loaded variants of osCommerce replacing the existing one. The logic is simple and I’ll disclose more on that later.

I’ll keep you posted in more detailed rant later.

Joomla Real Estate Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

Use with OpenRealty or HotProperty

Just tested three new real estate template designs for the ole inventory and the moment I hear back on my post in Joomla in reference to the status of version 1.5 I’ll post them for download.

The idea behind these designs was to put in some features that would be key to marketing real estate sites and services such as MLS search, FSBO and or rental listings type sites. These sites are EXTREMELY difficult to market and profit from and of all the clients I’ve seen succeed at this, they ALL have a common characteristic.

Long ago when I regularly built FSBO and Rental Listings sites the market was fresh and open. Not so many fly-by-night make me rich please type ventures, now that the popularity of these have seriously plummeted I’ve been moving people to WordPress as individual apartment and rental property owners discover its a better tool.

So these designs were largely prompted as a result of this noticeably cookie cutter designs that plague the internet. Granted there are still plenty of uses for FSBO type sites but the cash register days are long since over for the turn key quick buck artists.

Professional Service Sites: Yes and In order to get these service sites profitable as many of my clients have done a key component is a site with unique portal features and some I’m not going to elaborate on yet. I will say however that some things I notice after 3+ years of designing FSBO type sites that the only ones that stay successful are those that follow a different set of rules than say for instance the dating site business. Treating an FSBO or rental listing site as a dating site simply wont work. Its a common mistake and although many do get loaded up with a few hundred listings the key players that go beyond that (non national) do so in part for those reasons mentioned above and a good site concept.

When the templates are released you can read more blog posts on the subject of getting your site launched successfully if you are in the service industry.

CRELoaded Content Director

Posted on June 2, 2007
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

Custom Content Pages in CRELoaded

CRE Content Director introduces a whole new paradigm that seamlessly combines the advanced page management features of a content management system with CRE Loaded’s comprehensive shopping cart application. Leverage your ecommerce data to make compelling content faster and drive more revenue in your store with revolutionary features like these:

  • Pages and Sub-Categories sort interchangeably
  • Separate meta-tag values for Pages and Page Categories to maximize SEO
  • Links from the menu and item listings to any page on Internet
  • Display a completely different template for each Category in your store
  • Embed advanced HTML and even php MySql code into your pages for dynamic content with endless possibilities!
  • Display BUY links for products right on your pages!

Enhancing your chances with WordPress

After looking over the product demo for the CRELoaded Content Director I figured I’d poke around a little in WordPress and see If I couldn’t just get the product categories and or lists to display in a blog and I’m able to convincingly merge the two applications design, navigation and inventory pretty well.

I believe that if a person really wants to market their online store for selling products or downloadables using CRELoaded that WordPress should certainly be part of the mix. Template design for CRELoaded can be ported or modified to work with WordPress in such a way that visitors to your store would find little inconsistency in layout and structure which is a major benefit to maintaining your unique consistent look and brand.

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