AlteredWood@Night

I spent the last week or so working on adapting a shopping cart to AlteredWood. It’s the one I asked about on one of the WebProWorld forums. I couldn’t find anything else that I thought might work. It’s from ShoppingCart.org.

It seems pretty complicated to me. Someone put a lot of time into developing it. I put a lot (for me) of time into trying to figure it out. I’m pretty much at a loss when it comes to programing languages. This is written in Perl and I don’t know what all the symbols mean, but I got enough of an idea of how it works to use it.

I have the cart looking like one of my pages so the customers feel at home when they get to that page. I’m happy about that. And it works! The first jewelry box that I sold using it was subtracted from the inventory. Hooray. That was one of the uses that I got it for. The other was discount coupons, and that worked also. 20% off from now until the 22nd.

Just one thing left to do, or at least one major thing. When you click on an item that is out of stock, it takes you to a page with only a header and the rest is blank. If I click on an item that is not listed, it takes me to a page that says the cart is empty. That’s what I want to happen when the item is out of stock. I have to work on that. It might take me a while to figure out how to do that. More to come.

Man, there are a bunch of shopping carts out there. Hundreds, I think. Most, if not all of them, have storefronts with them. That’s not what I’m looking for. I don’t want to change my website any more than I need to.

I have been using PayPal, and it’s working well. But someone asked me the other night if I would give a group a discount. I can’t do that with the PayPal shopping cart. Also, I’ve been worrying that I would sell one of my jewelry boxes twice. That wouldn’t be very good. I try to get every sold jewelry box or other item marked as sold as soon as I can, but one of these days someone is going to add an item that has already been sold. So, I could use some software that would stop that.

I think I might have found what I need. I have asked on WebProWorld if any one has any feedback about paypalshoppingcart.org. With it I can just use my own buttons and PayPal and it will let me do much more. I’m hoping that it gets good marks from the forum. 

Thanks to the kind folks over on WebProWorld, I’ve learned more about blogging. Now I know what a Permalink is and how to change its format. And I didn’t even think about keywords. Duh, they are one of the most important things to remember as far as SEO goes. So much to learn and so little time. I guess if I can stay a couple of steps behind, I’m doing OK. Kind of like playing bogey golf.

This blogs design is almost finished. I’m happy with it. It almost matches the AlteredWood.com website.

I had a lot of trouble with the header. I was trying to match the one on AlteredWood. While trying to make it work in more browsers than just IE, I changed the header image to include the pages background image. What a difference that made. After getting all of the navigation from the original site up there, matching and working in all my browsers, I took it down. I thought it should have a simpler look.  Now I just have a simple link to AlteredWood. And it’s not even in the header. It’s just in the sidebar listed under, you guessed it, links.

Anyway, the trouble I had was that I was trying to use the background image on the page and space down the header photo and the navigation from the top. It would look good in IE, but not in any other browser. I think I tried everything, but couldn’t figure it out. I finally Photoshoped the background image and the header photo together and am using that as the header image. Since it’s only one object, it’s a lot easier to align. That’s probably something that everyone knows or there’s a better way that I could use, but it makes me happy to come up with a solution.

I’ve been playing around with AlteredWood.com for a couple of years. I’ve made major changes to it 5-6 times and minor changes dozens of times.

I’ve learned a lot about web site design, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to keep up with the latest. I seem to be one step behind all the time.

Even though the web site is based on a template, as is this blog, I’ve learned what most all of it means. And I changed quite a bit on AlteredWood. Here, on the blog, I’ve just added the header picture.

A year ago I didn’t know what CSS meant, and now I figure there isn’t another way to do a web site. That and a little PHP and the site is so much easier to change or maintain.

What’s it all about? I think I’ve done a pretty good job of search engine optimization as far as AlteredWood goes. If being behind the time by a couple of years is good. I’ve learned a lot, but there is always more to learn and everything keeps changing.

I guess blogging is part of it now. I think it’s a way to get linked to more sites and that means more search engine friendly. But what do I do? I don’t have a clue. I think having this blog and doing some posting is good, but I’m sure there is a lot more to it. I don’t know anything about feeds and ping-backs and slugs and such. I’m hoping to get it figured out, but by then the rules will have changed.