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Hello everyone. After trying every free storefront package I could find, it appears CubeCart is going to be the winner. It's just easy to use and I never really felt "lost" when trying to configure and design it.

Anyway, I'm starting this storefront for my Mother who has had a B&M shop for over 10 years. It's an infant and children's clothing store (she also sells toys, keepsakes, etc.) and while she doesn't expect to become the Amazon.com of children's clothing, she wants to extend outside her town as much as possible.

The only website building experience I have is what was required for me to take at uni and some intermediate HTML scripting nearly 10 years ago...so, pretty much none. CSS and PHP are completely new to me, but I have been in the IT field for 15 years, so it's not alien to me.

What I have here is a v3 install with the ArwenBlue theme that I modified to suit my color needs. The colors chosen are what my Mother considers her store's "theme", so I tried to implement them the best I could. I'll probably end up purchasing the v4 for her after I get a good feel for things. It has a few extra options that v3 does not have that I would like to implement.

Have a look and let me know what your impressions are.

www.ladnlassieshop.com.

Be gentle (but if you can tell me how I could improve, I'm definitely all ears)! Thanks!

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Guest Brivtech

Well, it's clean, but not seeing the products you're selling, I can't comment if the skin you bought is suitable or not.

Your logo looks slightly out of place - I think the background should be white, but it's a few shades into grey/blue, so it stands out against the while of the header. Either pad the logo out so that this shading is uniform around the image (if it is intentional), or colour it white to blend in better. Perhaps on your monitor you can't see the difference; on my laptop, it is very obvious.

Finally, I'd suggest you reduce the spacing of the blue right at the top of the web page. This spacing is a little too generous, and reduces the availability of page content lower down - Something that may be important to someone looking at your web page the first time, and deciding whether to click to another site or not. (I would also consider reducing the height of the white header a little as well for this reason). You'll see that as you add content, this will start to make a difference.

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Thanks for the feedback. I've reduced the space at the top and I think I fixed the blue/grey tint you were talking about, but I'm not sure. I still need to work on it a little, but I had not noticed those things until you mentioned them.

I installed Google Chrome and I don't know what to do about that. It's a total mess. Unfortunately for me, I have no idea to fix for compatibility issues...I don't know if I can even call myself a novice I know so little. I may just have to cut my losses with Chrome users or hope that there's better compatibility with the v4 skin for this. Maybe I'll figure it out as I go. Thanks for pointing it out though!

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It's a nice graphic and you have chosen a clean CubeCart skin. By coincidence I have just recently completed a CC3 store with a product line of items for similar products.

http://babiesnewpinkandblue.com

The only thing I might change, other than the previously mentioned suggestions, is to choose a skin that displays well at any screen resolution, starting with 800 pixels wide, such as the one I just linked to. There are still people with that setting on their monitor who must scroll left / right to see yours, and they don't like that.

You have made the right choice in selecting CubeCart. You will discover an important and valuable reason is the excellent support you will find here in these forums and in the alternative forums at http://cubecartforums.corg

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Joe, there was a trend recently to start making skins of about 1000px wide, because the general user-base was starting to use wider / more modern monitors. Were the narrower skins were flush-left instead of centered/scaled, this was very noticable.

Designing skins for this width (and taking into account the fact that there are still a handfull of users with low res screens (Probably running IE5), the right-hand column should be used for less-important items.

This design trend is well under-way, but is flawed. With the surge of mobile devices now being used for web browsing as well as micro laptops (Screen size up to 8 inches), the industry needs to wake up and consider a new design process: Full size (1000 px) web pages, and aternative slim pages aimed at other users. Switching depending on the user's settings can easily be achieved automatically, but involves more work for the designers as they need to create 2 versions of a skin. There's also accessibility issues that are largely being neglected by designers/developers alike which the CC community has yet to grasp.

Oh, and I would suggest changing the deep blue border on the side boxes to the pastel blue you are using in the box headers.

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I agree completely re the new design considerations. My response was narrow to his specific situation. Frankly, I don't know what to do about adapting to the mobile screens. Surely it will become a significant consideration.

I have seen almost no discussion of how to design for the mobile screen, and I don't know if the parameters are sufficiently defined to be useful. There are as many screen UIs as there are phones. And even when the size is the same, you have such factors as the difference between how iPhone handles screen clicks compared with Blackberry Storm, different aspect ratios and so on.

I guess we need to start "back to school." And just when I thought that turning 76 years old next monTh would exempt me from having learn anything new!!! WHEN, OH WHEN, WILL THAT STOP??

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And just when I thought that turning 76 years old next monTh would exempt me from having learn anything new!!! WHEN, OH WHEN, WILL THAT STOP??

That's must be an old photo then Joe.

Yeah, the Internet is an ever-changing animal, always new things to learn. I love it.

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And just when I thought that turning 76 years old next monTh would exempt me from having learn anything new!!! WHEN, OH WHEN, WILL THAT STOP??

That's must be an old photo then Joe.

Yeah, the Internet is an ever-changing animal, always new things to learn. I love it.

It's about 5 years old taken at the cast party of a Broadway show. The photo over at "the other" forum, in my favorite red shirt, is 2 years old, taken at a sidewalk cafe, facing the beach at Manly, AU (one of the best beaches ever.)

See http://www.cubecartforums.org/index.php?showuser=411

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