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Here's one of mine


jerseyjoe

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a restaurant wanted to attract more catering and takeout (some parts of the world call it take-away).

http://itsgreektomejerseycity.com/

I waiting for about 1/2 dozen product photos and more verbose product description, but this site's pretty much done.

It appears to not be a registered CC site but it is. I'm just waiting for the key.

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Guest eric47905

Nice, Simple and effective....Making me hungry for greek food but delivery to St Paul would be a little out of range I think.

Does the order then get emailed to them at the restaraunt, out of curiosity?

The only thing I dont like are the subcategory folder pics, I think it would be much better to sub those out for icons of a plate from that category, or even anything else, I personally just cant stand those subfolder pics. They bring down the finished look for me.

Other than that it looks nice

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Nice, Simple and effective....Making me hungry for greek food but delivery to St Paul would be a little out of range I think.

Does the order then get emailed to them at the restaraunt, out of curiosity?

The only thing I dont like are the subcategory folder pics, I think it would be much better to sub those out for icons of a plate from that category, or even anything else, I personally just cant stand those subfolder pics. They bring down the finished look for me.

Other than that it looks nice

At the moment, the only gateway configured is the "Print Order" that I modified for sending by fax.

Two issues are delaying configuring a PayPal gateway.

1) I haven't solved the problem described in a thread over in the PP Gateway forum that produces an error at checkout.

2) After I do, the owner will place a laptop at the cashier station. Orders will come in by email that is pinged frequently. Then the cashier will punch them into the POS touchscreen monitor just as she does now with phone in orders. Those orders are then billed to the customer credit card and a copy is printed on the kitchen printer, telling them to prepare the order.

The POS manufacturer is unhappy that the restaurant has rejected a $12,000 proposal (plus outrageous hosting and maintainance fees) for an integrated store that would take the order in through their proprietary shopping cart. That would avoid the manual order entry step.

But the owner is willing to live with the manual system and there is hope for an alternative. Sources I have consulted assure me that once I solve the PayPal issue, they can integrate the CC order directly into the kitchen printer too. That remains to be seen. I intend to ask Brooky if Develion might want to quote a price for that custom work - and there are other folks here too, who might be able to write that code.

There is incentive. At the moment there are 10 franchised restaurants in the system. The franchisors and I are working closely. If this is a success, it will be applied to all stores. The 10 are all here in NJ, but they have solid plans to go regional and then national. St. Paul cant be that long off - and it's worth the wait. The food is superb. All freshly prepared. The in-store decor recalls a Greek fishing village. See the Interior Views in the site docs under "Information."

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Nice design Joe and definitely hungry for Greek!

One thing I noticed - some of your images are longer than the text box. Happening on http://itsgreektomejerseycity.com/index.ph...mp;productId=28 for one. Seems to be in IE7 and Netscape.

You are right, but the issue is less a matter of a short image than a short product description. If the item had more verbose text, then the area would extend below the image. I expect that the client will provide more words for items like this and that should resolve the issue.

Thanks for your comments. Greatly appreciated.

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Nice simple design ;)

I would personally remove the contentBG image as having it there shows the white background of the boxTitles at the bottom which makes it look a little messy IMO. I agree with the Eric about the subcat pictures, perhaps create a blank white image with the Greek border around them? You could also format your design link but other than that well done :)

Those are good ideas about the subcats.

I did some exploration in Google images to see what small gifs other restaurants might use but soon realized that there is another issue. The way CC's subcat images are applied, the same graphic must be used for both the Catering menu and the Takeout/Delivery menu Category.

So, absent a mod that would be make one graphic specific to one cat and another graphic specific to another, whatever I do must be as generic as the bland file folders.

Your idea about using the Greek "key" like the one used below boxTitle (as those designs are called) would work but only if I make the graphic large enough to enclose some white space. The key is 32pix high. Any smaller and it starts to lose identity as a key. The means a graphic that would have to be 32 for the top line, 32 for the white space and 32 for the bottom; total, 96pix.

There are rows of icons. Allowing for the required space between the rows, that area would have to be at least 320 px high, pushing the product list off the bottom of many displays.

I'm thinking that I may be better off to create a 1 pix high graphic in the identical color as the bg those icons now sit on. That would make the icon invisible - no loss since it is merely decorative - and not very - while bringing the product list up higher. Only the text label would show.

Hmm - later today, when I have time, I'll play with that. I'll post back here again after I do.

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BTW - regarding the food, it is EXCELLENT.

There are, you may have noted, a few hundred photos that have had to be Photoshopped for uniform appearance and size and installation and association with a specific product. Many hours. Many, many hours. (seriously . . . lots of hours).

The restaurant is only a short distance from me. I have made it a practice, while working on this site, to bring my wireless laptop there and work through lunch and/or dinner time.

The owner is a great host and always insists on my accepting yet another free meal.

Ahhh, the rigors we web developers suffer and the sacrifices we make for our craft.

(pass me that plate of baklava, huh?)

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Guest lovvus

Joe, how did you get the Search and login box to be transparent so that your header could be viewd through it? also what is the setting to get the header to go completely accross the page? is it width in pixels or what? love the look of your site.

thanks

lovvus

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Joe, how did you get the Search and login box to be transparent so that your header could be viewd through it? also what is the setting to get the header to go completely accross the page? is it width in pixels or what? love the look of your site.
The search and login are simply the default for the Legend skin.

The only thing I did was move those elements up on the page because the banner (file: topHeader.jpg) I installed is is only 90pixels high, instead of the 116px high banner of the original skin. I truly begrudge giving over those 26 pixels. The original banner simply waste space that is better used for product and for selling. I've even done sites where the topHeader is only 60px high and it looks fine.

As for the width (756px), another reason I like Legend in general is that it is a fixed width that displays well at all screen resolutions. If you hand around here long enough, I usually post an average of one lunatic rant about the the ignorance and arrogance of designing for higher resolutions, thus alienating and rejecting the huge numbers of people who have their displays st for 800 by 600.

Not that anyone, to my knowledge, has ever taken my advice on that point . . .

PS: thanks for the compliment. All I did was create a new banner using the graduated color blending tool in Photoshop, add the Greek-ish font that someone in this forum was kind enough to find for me, replace the boxTitle.gif above each box with a "Greek key" border copied from a 2,500 year old temple and convert the default 3-column layout to 2-columns so the product photos could be large yet leave room to display the product description text next to (instead of below) the product image.

I posted a similarly modified free theme over in www.cubecartforums.org under the name "midtown"

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Guest fullt

Looks good Joe - loaded fast on dialup and I like the way you incorporated the greek design in the side boxes.

Did you find the thread that Ansuk posted for installing Paypal? I followed the instructions exactly and it seems to work just fine although I've only done a few test purchases so far. The real test will be when I actually go live. Congratulations on another job well done. (I have to go now - looking at the site has made me very hungry! :errm: )

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Looks good Joe - loaded fast on dialup and I like the way you incorporated the greek design in the side boxes.

Did you find the thread that Ansuk posted for installing Paypal? I followed the instructions exactly and it seems to work just fine although I've only done a few test purchases so far. The real test will be when I actually go live. Congratulations on another job well done. (I have to go now - looking at the site has made me very hungry! :errm: )

Hmmm - do you have the link to that Ansuk item? If it works, I'll get you a free Gyros Souvlaki with Greek (not French) Fries - but you'll have to come to Jersey City to pickup.
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Guest fullt

This is for Paypal IPN - dunno if that's what you're after and dunno if it works with Paypal Pro, but it worked for me.

Thanks for the free souvlaki offer, but I stay as far away from the city as possible. NYC is an ok place to visit every decade or so, but I'm happy living my boring existence here in the boondocks of NY! :)

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There are, you may have noted, a few hundred photos that have had to be Photoshopped for uniform appearance and size and installation and association with a specific product. Many hours. Many, many hours. (seriously . . . lots of hours).

It may help. I had to change the size of a lot of my photos. In Photoshop the macro function is worth learning. You can change sizes and resave photos with just one click. Not much help if you also have to crop and otherwise tidy-up but it helped me.

Also a free program "easy thumbnails" it can re-size an entire folder of pictures in one hit. As well as reducing quality and changing brightness contrast.

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Guest eric47905

There are, you may have noted, a few hundred photos that have had to be Photoshopped for uniform appearance and size and installation and association with a specific product. Many hours. Many, many hours. (seriously . . . lots of hours).

It may help. I had to change the size of a lot of my photos. In Photoshop the macro function is worth learning. You can change sizes and resave photos with just one click. Not much help if you also have to crop and otherwise tidy-up but it helped me.

Also a free program "easy thumbnails" it can re-size an entire folder of pictures in one hit. As well as reducing quality and changing brightness contrast.

Or if you are using a pc and have microsoft office installed, it comes with microsoft office picture manager under office tools. It is really dulled down from photoshop, its not a program to work on photos, but rather edit them for the web, it does batches and you can resize and change contrast and crop with only a click or two on hundreds of photos at once!

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