Understanding the connection between store and website

[Guest kaskudoo]

Hi Folks,

I am getting ready to implement CubeCart on my site and I have a question. I saw it before, that I went to a page and then clicked on 'Store" and the design was broken and I was in some kinda store of that site. I will try to avoid this effect by getting as close to the original design as can be. Is that a possibility at all or will I have to get my whole site into the store layout?

My main concern is not the appearance (I can work that out), but would I limit functionality somehow in having the store only avlable when clicked on the button 'webstore'? And what happens, if the user surfs to another webpage in between, that is not incorporated in the store and then returns o it? Will data be saved -- or is it better alltogether to have the store present at all times?

I illustrated this real quick:

First of all, this is my page now: homepage

This would be the page with the webstore implemented: webstore

I had the idea of having the buttons for the categories only appear, when prior clicking on 'webstore' .... if you would navigate away from the store (by clicking on any of the other navigational links), the categories would disappear - but maybe the shopping cart would stay (where right now the 'dummy text' is? Or will that break the system somehow? Or shall I just incorporate all pages in the shopping cart?

It would be great, if someone could tell me the better business practice for this. I am still getting used to the layout of the html in cubecart, but i think i can handle it - too bad golive doesn't wanna open TPL files (mac os x), but thats alright ....

Thanks for reading :w00t:

[roban]

I think you'd be fine having Cube Cart behind your html site. Since it's database driven your customer's information would remain no matter where 'they wandered off to'. You problem will be having Cube Cart echo the look of your main site but if you're good with html you should be able to pull it off.

[Guest kaskudoo]

thanks for your reply.

i might just put the whole site into cubecart. i will change the look completely and try not to break any functions

how does this technique (tpl files and such) affect SEO? i don't think it will interefre that much (since webspiders see what humans see [and more]) but i thought i might ask that, since SEO is fairly important to me.

one question again regarding the first post of mine. will a customer be recognized (same session) when he wonders off to 'about us' and then back to the webstore - will the items put in the cart before still be there?

i don't think i will have my site separate from the cart, because me (as a customer) i will always want to see my shopping cart ... and if i make the other stuff on the website separate, then i am not able to see that anymore .... i could imagine that people wouldn't like that.

i am in the process of making the layout of the shop with CSS and i try not to use any tables whatsoever, but when i cannot transform the products page for example easily enough, i might as well go with a table or two.

thanks again for the feedback :D

[Guest chantesse]

I also would like the cc shop to be my website homepage, but the only SEO Mod around has some complicated prerequisites re the hosting that I don't quite understand - I'm a bit worried that if I make cc the Homepage minus any SEO my Google ranking will drop.

So was thinking the exact same idea - for the time being put links direct to the categories from the site home page. Watch out - if you rename or re-label a category, have to update the homepage links. I am assuming that once a Prospect is 'captured' into the cc shop, s/he won't leave!

[Guest kaskudoo]

I also would like the cc shop to be my website homepage, but the only SEO Mod around has some complicated prerequisites re the hosting that I don't quite understand - I'm a bit worried that if I make cc the Homepage minus any SEO my Google ranking will drop.

So was thinking the exact same idea - for the time being put links direct to the categories from the site home page. Watch out - if you rename or re-label a category, have to update the homepage links. I am assuming that once a Prospect is 'captured' into the cc shop, s/he won't leave!

well,

i used a tool from SEOchat.com on the demo page with CC3. It simulates a webspider crawling the site .... here is the result:

Click

as you can see, all the words are pikked up and the spider continues on to 17 other internal pages. so far so good it seems. would you mind telling me more about the SEO mod that you were talking about?

[Guest chantesse]

Thx for the SEO link - useful tools in there so I bookmarked it. Anyway, abt the SEO Mod:

In cubecart.org there is an SEO mod that once installed, changes all your internal cc store page links to plain English file names. Thus the likes of a Google Spider will supposedly index your products & categories in a highly relevant way that will bring you more traffic (especially useful if you have specialist items).

BUT, having read up on the prerequisites, was put off as I was not sure if I can meet them (I do not control my server) or if the mod would cause issues with my cc store.

Instead I generated a sitemap from a site similar to the one you recommended & submitted that to Google Sitemaps then crossed my fingers. Actually, used on a real store like ours, the tool I used a while ago in free mode maxed out at 500 pages but also generated quite a few nonsense links among the good ones. (PS - now tried SEO Tools - it maxed out at 33 links - far fewer than I obtained via http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

What I would ideally like is a rock solid SEO mod for cc 3.x !