New Web Site Design

LocaLiceR wrote:SEF URLs are rather for the users, IMO. You surely noticed, that Firefox 3, Google Chrome and IE8 support the search for the strings typed in the address bar. For me, for instance, it's much more easier to find a bookmarked site or a recently visited site, even when I remember only a keyword.

+1

how about we just set the keyword to automaticly give search results

There is no need for special keywords, if the (sub)category names and product names are included in the URL, e.g.
When you type in 'vaio' in the address bar of your browser, all of the URLs matching the 'vaio' string will be displayed, so you can select easily the product.

In Safari 3 I was finding lots of overlap between icons and text.
I just went to the site to take a screen capture but it all looks different from when I first posted!

Perhaps I was looking at an intermediate version or something?
Anyway this new one is a lot better - well done!

Regards
Mark

re SEO URLs - what LocaLiceR said!

There is no need for special keywords, if the (sub)category names and product names are included in the URL, e.g.

CODE: SELECT ALL
http://www.yourstore.com/computers/lapt ... -vaio.html


When you type in 'vaio' in the address bar of your browser, all of the URLs matching the 'vaio' string will be displayed, so you can select easily the product.

Regards
Mark

I have an idea how to make it work better then the older version. I was thinking of using pre actions in the front cotnroller to change the page that is being loaded.

molumen wrote:Great, a lot better and clearer than the previous one. Now opencart.com needs a new logo (I can make one if needed, I'm a graphic designer).

Not new, but better:



Works with any-color background. Current one was made for black background.

Good...I agree...
but why not create new cms for website?

What's wrong whit the CMS?
I find it easy to use, the only problem I had was installing a other languages. Maybe need to make clear you still need to fill in some translations to make it work.

I've decided the new design was not good enough so i sent the weekend working with a graphics designer to come up with a new design.

The new design is really good. Its just beeing treaked and should be out next week. We are also doing a forum template to match the frontend.

Ok it seems like people are going a little off topic here. The topic at hand was "New Web Site Design". Primarily this topic should be discussed in a manner where people say they either like it or not. What features they think are good and which ones are not. Are things presented in the correct fashion on the website. Is anything mis-informing. What do you like about the website. Stuff such as this are the things that relate to this topic.

Discussing things such as SEF Urls and such are off topic. These are thigns that should be discussed under "New feature requests" or something equivilant. I mean you wouldn't go to a parent / teacher conference and talk about alcohol addiction would you? LOL

I think that the new website is better. Alot cleaner and great use of usability vs accesssability. I think some things could be changed though. This comment has to do partly with the website and partly with the software. It says on the website that there are 20+ Gateways. Misinforming people is just simply bad ethics. Not something that any website owner should do. The features listed should always be the features that are already implemented into the software. I have commented on this before in another area of this forum, but I thought it was worth mentioning both for the software and for the "website".

If certain payment gateways are still under development, all but 6 of them, then essentially 14+ of them still remain at a "non-ready" status, which means that the software does not have 20+ Payment Gateways, it has 6. Please for the sake of the website give more correct and accurate information.

As long as I am here and people are discussing things off-topic and since the topic seems to have evolved from "new website design" to "sef urls" I guess I could go ahead and give my two cents... Search Engine Friendly URLs have been deemed useful and are becoming a requirement for the new Web 3.0 standard that are being set by the W3C and other website design/ development organizations. There are alot of well known names in the industry that promote sef urls and for very good reason.

When you have urls such as; "http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?page=whatever" search engine crawlers index the content of pages with hardly any effort, but the links themselves do have issues as far as being indexed. Search Engine Indexing Algorythms do infact account for link structure. The arguement is that having a link such as the above mentioned versus something more like: "http://www.yourdomain.com/page/whatever" has no real weight, because the search engine can still follow the links and index the pages, has no real significance. This is just simply not true. I know quite a bit about "Online Marketing" and the fact does remain that link structure does help quite a bit. First of all, so many companies would not be implementing it if it did nothing for page ranking and seo optimization. I have built quite a few websites and re-designed websites wih hardly any changes except for sef url structure and the ranking and indexing turned out to be much better. You just simply have to be smart about how you carry out your mod rewrites.

You are right, Magento uses a sef structure where you have a link such as this: "http://www.yourstore.com/category1/prod ... tname.html", this is incorrect use of sef rewrites, because mostly the depth of directory and more importantly insugnificant data. category and product have nothing to do with the actual displayed content on your pages. In this case only the productname.html is consistant with the content of the page. Search Engines want to see things in links that are consistant with the data being displayed. For instance you wouldnt have a page talking about "toy trucks" and name the link cantsanddogs.html. That is just a huge waiste of a good link structure, but the same goes for using a link such as "index.php?page_id=14" when the page displays "toy trucks" as well. It's the same logic. SEO Logic says that the page title, page description, page keywords, the link to the page, and the content on the page (headings, paragraphs, etc) should all have one bases subject matter, so in the event you had a page with "toy trucks" you would use those words in the link, the title, description, keywords, and as much as you possibly can within the headings and paragraphs on the page without overdoing it.

Magento's use of /category1/product1/, this is something that also ruins the entire purpose, because neither directory name has anything to do with the content on your site. The optimal url structure would be something like; "http://www.yourstore.com/toys/toytrucks" and having a suffix at the end such as; .php, .html, .aspx are not neccesary. They can be stripped away in the mod_rewrite. You don't just rewrite for one structure though. Let's say your site sells the following: toys, electronics, and furniture. The following url structure would be considered when implementing the mod_rewrite:

Toys - "http://www.yourstore.com/toys/productname"
Electronics - "http://www.yourstore.com/electronics/productname"
Furniture - "http://www.yourstore.com/furniture/productname"

This structure can be done in the backend of Magento, it can be customized as it can be customized in Wordpress, Drupal, etc.... All you have to do is change the name of your categories and change the mod_rewrite accordingly. Anyone who argues that SEF Urls are not beinificial, may have spent the last 12 years developing, but they don't know jack about modern web design/ development.

Hi,
Daniel, what files I have to modify to insert new buttons and replace the main red bar ? I would love to put in my own buttons to match my site design.

Thanks

Daniel wrote:Ok since everyone keeps wanting the SEO URL's I'm putting them back. But one question what pages do we want to be SEO? I think just the categories and produtcs should be fine.

How about permitting those who want to use SEO's to enable it on their own rather than implement it across the board? Say, an option in admin "SEO's: Enable/Disable."

Yeah there is no reason to implement it yourself. Just make a small program module that can be controlled through the backend as "Starchy" was saying, that can carry out writing functions to the .htaccess file, etc. Refer to wordpresses backend module shown below:



Something like this would be prefered by users. It makes it much easier.

I didn't know you could get php to edit the .htacess file.

does anyone know any problems doing this?

I wrote some script to edit the .htaccess files for a members system etc... in fact I think they still use it.

Just treat them as simple text files.

Note: Some hosting providers turn off access to system vars like PHP_AUTH_USER occasionally so don't use it for login stuff but apart from that no problems.

Phil.

Yes you can use PHP to write changes to an .htaccess file. I am not personally sure how it is done exactly, but I know that Wordpress has done this successfully as well as some people in the Drupal Community have created modules that can carry out these functions. I used to know someone who knew alot about doing stuff like this, but I haven't heard from him in a long time. I am tried to find something myself on how to do this with PHP and the most I can come up with are forum threads on Wordpress and Drupal specific scripts. I know that alot of the modules used in both CMS/ Blogging Systems have some very unique code, so I don't know if their code would be a good example to start with, but then again it may be a good start, I am not sure. I haven't really done anything with Wordpress or Drupal other than design themes.

With that said it may be benificial to just ask around and see if anyone knows how it could be implimented into OpenCart. I will ask some Katz I know and see what I am come up with as well.

I know that to be able to carry out this function the .htaccess file has to be made read/writable chmod 777, obviously, but the something with the PHP script also has to be able to write to that file type. I think it's like the previous guy was saying it just writes it as the .htaccess file is a text file.

hi all,

i am new here...

i need to know if i have an old open cart and now i want to upgrade my shop with your new upgrades... so what files from new upgrade opencart folder i need to upload.

please remember i do not want to lost my data ??

Thanks

rpotterjr wrote:First of all, so many companies would not be implementing it if it did nothing for page ranking and seo optimization.

So why do so many companies still pay to have their domain name submitted to google and '2000 other search engines' on a monthly basis! Just because they all do it, does not mean it is right.

rpotterjr wrote:I have built quite a few websites and re-designed websites wih hardly any changes except for sef url structure and the ranking and indexing turned out to be much better.

The structure of the design is very important in my opinion for SEO. Your designs may naturally lend themselves to it. However, my own experiences of seo urls is not the same as yours, resulting in no improvement in listings or traffic. I think subjective experiences here could differ considerably.

rpotterjr wrote:You just simply have to be smart about how you carry out your mod rewrites.

Yes, I love mod rewrites but not for seo. I just love they way they hark back to simpler days, when pages were hardcoded and could follow such structures. My vote goes for the simplest possible solution, www.yourshop.co.uk/productname.html. (Perhaps a new error of 'product name already exists' and forcing unique values only in the d/b would solve the minor issue of same prod names.)

I never saw the old site design. I think this one is great! Very clean, very nice. I like it. I think the clouds should move like http://fx.inetcat.com/.

Paul.

Usually the .htaccess file should only be written to when INSTALLING a script and that is how other software programs set up the url rewritting code within the .htaccess file.

ALot of hosting providers do not like to allow CMOD settings of 777 anymore only 755 so not sure if that would be a problem, except usually you can modify the setting at installation then switch it back for security reasons.

DRUPAL is one that does it at installation I believe