Setting up an ecommerce website

ryanbph

ryanbph

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I am making a website for my families business. I am currently using a little bit of HTML, and a little bit of adobe go live to put this together. We are a manufacturing company and the site is to sell to our wholesale customers, as well as to solicit retail customers. I have no experience in creating a website, but I have taken some free online courses on HTML and adobe go live. I currently have a couple questions, but I am sure I will have more as the site progresses.

First off, what should the width of the site be. The rule of thumb that I heard in the free class was 800 pixels. Granted I am using a 21" wide mac monitor, but to me that looks really small. Taking the code from cheapass and putting it into go live, it looks like the dimensions on cag were about 1000 pixels wide. Does anyone have any recommendations on the size it should be?
 
I think the safest best would be to design for 800px first, if you have no prior knowledge on how your future visitors use the web (do they have their browser maximized?) or what their machines are capable of (EEE with a low resolution vs. iMac with a high resolution).

If you're worried that the narrow width would look small on bigger displays, you could try playing around with the background imagery so that the page appears to fill the entire browser, but is actually no more than 760 pixels in width (ie: this and that).

Good luck.
 
I would imagine that most of our wholesale customers have little/no knowledge of anything with a computer. We sell to gift shops across the country, and most small gift shops are typically owned by people over the age of 45.

As for potential retail customers, I guess that would vary.
 
also mrelusive, do you know what you have to type for code to get the zoom picture pop out like was shown on one of those sites?
 
briefly looking over that site, you just chose a version, and then add the script of the version to each page on the website. Have a image, and a thumbnail version of the image, and add the script into a css style on the page?

I personally liked the suckerfish hoverlightbox version. I would only use the lightbox on our products page.
 
Yup, though you don't add a script to your CSS. You just link to their JavaScript and CSS files in the of your document (you could combine them with any current JavaScript or CSS files you are already using, if you want to consolidate them).

But yeah, once you got that done they just pop open an image when you click on the thumbnail version (dependin on the script, you might have edit the tags a bit).

Keep in mind that that list is 2 years old (I didn't check to see if those updates he did upped the post date), so there's probably better builds out there.
 
I know it has been awhile, but I haven't been working much the past year due to an accident. I have a question about shopping carts. Does anyone know of one that has a referral of other items on the page. For instance, if you are looking at a 360 game on amazon.com, they will have other suggest items.
 
So far as the size goes, make sure the page is dynamic in that it re-sizes when the window is re-sized. You've probably noticed how some sites stay the same when you re-size a window, versus the way that some automatically change when the window is re-sized. This works best because the site will change to fit any size display.
 
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