Design advice.

[Tricky Richy]

Hi all

Newbie here.

I bought into V9 and pleased I did so it’s a great product.

I’m looking for opinions and help on design layout, I have three main product groups and products within them, now I started by creating three brochure pages and added the product fragments to those pages, I assume that’s pretty standard but that gives me the problem of naming the buttons on the left hand bar to reflect those product groups one such product group will be Waterless Car Cleaners as an example clearly a very large amount of text on a button LOL.

Any advice or example sites are most gratefully received.

Richy

[leehack]

Richard do you have a URL for your site yet? Your post makes no sense as products added to brochure pages is not the way things are usually done. Did you manage to take a look at the example store when you loaded actinic? You have brochure pages for information and product pages (sections) for products. If you want to have 3 main sections, then add 3 what we call top level sections and have the products sitting within these 3 sections.

It sounds like you have jumped in head first and missed the basics, have a look at the inbuilt help, the starter guide and most importantly the example store. I'm intrigued as to how you have done things, some screenshots would be helpful.

[Tricky Richy]

Hi Lee

Thanks for the reply I've now uploaded to the domain www.thedrywashshop.com
I may make a little more sense to you if you take a look.

But as you say I've probably jumped in a little to deep without
looking at the basic stuff.

Maybe got a little exited

Rich

[I-CC]

Basics are you will need to create your own navigation images for the ones called brochure on your site. You could try to clone and match the existing ones, or use the flat image which Actinic then creates its own images from (which is a colour pallete), but is complicated, which is why many use text navigation menu's as opposed to image based ones, as a lot easier to maintain, but that is what is needed, creation of your own specific navigation images, sorry.

[jont]

As Lee says keep the brochure pages for products specs, history and general bumph... add the products to sections and name the sections correctly.

As an aside I would have just the product in the photo and not all the background stuff as it looks like this is part of the deal. Either have the product on its own own blue the background out slightly (use a smaller aperture when taking the pic or apply a blur in PhotoShop)

[Tricky Richy]

Hi Folks

Thanks for the come backs all criticisms and advice welcome, now I've got past the initial over enthusiasm and got down to doing a bit of reading and created something resembling an online shop (the pictures are only temporary while I work on new ones) I have two further question one loosely related to a question from praven. The theme and colour scheme I’ve chosen
I’m happy with but some text in particular the text under the checkout and view cart are so light as to be unreadable I can see the colour is controlled by pallet colour 1, changing this obviously changes other parts of the theme, increasing the size of the text would make it easier to read, can this be done?
The other question is can I prevent wrap around text on images such as happened on the accessories page.

Gradually getting my head round it all.

www.thedrywashshop.com

[jont]

The wrap on the text is due to the product image being applied the following style in the actinic.css

.image_product {
margin: 0px 18px 10px 0px;
text-align: center;
float: left;
}

... the float left does as it says... floats it to the left of everything... longer text will then wrap beneath. You can stop this by using several methods including adding additional margin to the image or probably preferable is to wrap everything but the image in the product layout between a <div> and set a margin-left to clear the image.

[jont]

I can see the colour is controlled by pallet colour 1, changing this obviously changes other parts of the theme, increasing the size of the text would make it easier to read, can this be done?

Yes. You will need to create your own style in the actinic.css .... click on the code you need to change and replace the class=".." with one of your own. If there is no specific class in there (ie the style is being inherited from say the <a> tag) than add in a class of your own and style accordingly. This will then only apply to that instance of the class and the rest of the site will remain unchanged.

[Tricky Richy]

Top Man Jont I'll have a play with that stuff, I can do a bit of HTML but with a new piece of software I'm still a bit shy of mucking about with things.

Rich

[leehack]

Snapshot before you start playing with anything and you have no need for concern at all as you will always have a return path at your mercy.

[Duncan Rounding]

Looks like a creche here with the baby photos and lego. LOL

[jont]

It's the new retro look