http://www.sconcelighting.com

Well, after doing the switch from fastTemplate to Smarty, I must say I am extremely pleased. Smarty is not only 10 times easier to use but the features are nothing short of amazing.

This site is also my first shopping cart built from scratch. It has some unique features such as showing number of items and subtotal in cart on everypage.

Features:(I list them since they may not be obvious)
Dynamic alt tags on everything in the catalog.
Dynamic title tags
Dynamic alt tags on cart buttons.
Mod Rewrite on all catalog pages -- very nice IMHO.
Real time Ups shipping quotes

The graphics are soon to be changed. The customer did not like my southwestern colors. But this will be a breeze thanks to smarty.

Bugs:
Looks funny in Mozilla due to my use of bordercolor tags, will update the css when i do the new graphics.
Also there is still some copy to be done for about half of the products.

Play around and see what you think.
Is this order process easy enough?

Note: the payment gateway is live so if you actually do want to order go ahead.

I am glad this project is coming to a close because this alot of work for one person. Enough rambling, check it out.
http://www.sconcelighting.com

Feed back appreciated.

On a side note, thanks to devshed and people like SepodatiCreations, Rycamor, M.Hirsch, FreeBsd, AlCapone and many others who have helped me.

btw - forgot to use the url as the title and i can't switch with edit post, my apologies to the mods

heh, I would have to say that this is one of those cases when you have both not enough and too much information

It is not very easy to understand how to navigate the site, but the middle section has too much text for EUU.

Also, in opera the image buttons (check out and view) cart don't work.

I think the product images are too large on the category pages.
http://www.sconcelighting.com/category/western.html

I'd rather be able to see 5 or 10 products in one window, rather than one and a half. Save the larger images for the product information pages.
http://www.sconcelighting.com/item/Horse_and_Rider.html

The shopping cart vignette's text is way too large. 12pt is fine for most users. The ominous '0' on the side looks like a design mistake.

Why even have a 'view cart' and 'check out' button if I haven't added anything to my cart?

When I click on your company logo, it doesn't take me to the home page. Regardless of the 'home' link directly beneath that, clicking on the logo should always take me home.

It would be nice to have some information about who you are, how I can contact you, what your return policies are, what shipping options are available... all I see is a cart, w/o much support information to back it up.

AlCapone--
1. your probably right
2. that's a problem, since the main I reason I made a custom shopping system was for ease of use, I will look into that.
3. the buttons only work if there is something in the cart which at first seemed like a cool idea, but now I guess it can be more confusing than anything else.

drgroove--
1. I agree 100%. Unfortunately the customer doesn't. I tried to explain this to them and guess who won? hint: not me.
2. see number 1
3. I agree-at least now I do. I wanted the cart to always show the number of items and subTotal. After I did that I thought it was such a cool feature that I over-emphasized it. Will change with the new templates and graphics.
4. I think I will change that too.
5. Good advice too-I always hate when the logo doesn't take you home.
6. That stuff is being added as we speak. I spent so long on the cart system and backend design, I still have to finish the 'normal' stuff. I usually work backwards doing the things that seem like a challenge first.

Thanks guys -- I believe this input will push this site further in the right direction.

caguru,

Its a great site - not sure if I mentioned that or not in my first post. I think it'll be truly excellent once you have it finished. Thanks again for sharing your hard working with our niggling eyes.

- drgroove

I think it looks good, but I might change the "collections" menu to be a little more "separated." I really didn't know what I was clicking on when I clicked on it. What I mean by separated, is maybe a devider between each one so that it doesn't look like a sentance... just my 2 cents. Great site.

Just another suggestion. A "remove from cart" button on the view cart page would be useful. Also a way of changing the quantity of orders.

[EDIT]
Also just noticed one major problem. Clicking checkout forwards me to HTTPS but shows "0 item(s) subtotal $0.00". Going back to HTTP shows the right total again.
[/EDIT]

Those ideas sound good too.

kolatracks--good eye.
I was doing some maintenance on the server and i made a little boo-boo. Turns out if you are running more than one apache daemon they must be run as the same user to share session info. I am sitting here trying to improve performance on the non-ssl sites and causing problems at the same time.

Tis working now. Thanks

I see now after looking into your work that you are an newbee an I apologize for the critisism. It is apparent you are not a proffessional and I wish you the best of luck!

Please pm me any time you want some advice!

excuse me? i left the company i did this for a long time ago. the site was re-installed on a new server after their old ones were confiscated by the colo. I have no control on what happens to the sites after that. I even wrote a manual on how to reinstall this site. This site is only missing one 2 things. Clear the smarty cache and the mod-rewrite rules and it would work. btw, this is one of the sites I never was paid for.

As for your personal attack continuing from other threads, I will PM with my response. We can continue the flame there.

No one else wants to read this nonsense.