Getting Started with OsCommerce Designs

It is a known factor that most online users are more comfortable browsing at professional looking website compared to a basic copy and paste html designed site. Appearance matters, as it always has, especially when it comes to web marketing. If you have an existing online shop and is currently using OsCommerce as your platform, you can actually download various OsCommerce designs, templates and theme modules at the contributions section of the software’s official website, OsCommerce.com At this section, you can download ready-to-use buttons, arrow images and a number of design templates that you can add up to your site.

Buttons are the most common elements of an online store. There are a number of downloadable buttons that can jazz up your site. You can choose from gradient, xp-interface, and even animated buttons.

If you want a certain look for your site, you can also browse downloadable templates that can add more personality to your site. Remember that branding is an important factor in establishing website recall. You can make your website quite unforgettable to your online visitors by choosing the right OsCommerce designs that fits your company name and the products you sell or the services you offer. You also had the option to choose a specific color theme for your online store. You can also download some CSS skins to add more spice to your storefront.

If you have some amount of creativity up your sleeves and want to create your OsCommerce designs, you can always do so.  If you want to design your own online store yourself, you need basic html or php knowledge because you need to edit some files. The basic files that you need to modify include the filenames includes/header.php, includes/footer.php, includes/left_column.php, includes/right_column.php, and stylesheet.css.

The first thing that you need to do is to change the default banner of OsCommerce that appears on your website header. You can log in to the admin section of your store and click on configuration, my store, and change show category count to “false”. Jump to tools and go to banner manager. Delete the existing OsCommerce banner and upload your own logo to the image folder on your website server and overwrite the image file oscommerce.gif.

You also need to change the name of OsCommerce and change it to the name of your online store. You open the file header.php and look for this string (DIR_WS_IMAGES . ‘oscommerce.gif’, ‘osCommerce’) change ‘osCommerce’ to the name of your website.

After changing these basic files, you can continue to modify the stylesheet.css file according to your preference. You can now download OsCommerce design plugins to add button images or to change the color scheme of your site.

Another option for you to make your online store more presentable is to hire a web programmer and/ or designer to modify the look of your online store. Make sure that you convey to the designer what you exactly wanted to your site. It might help that you show him a website that you might want to model your site from.

Without enough time, creativity, and effort, you will soon have a professional looking website that would not only impress your visitors but can also relatively mean a higher ROI for you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under All about OsCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.