Myfirst Open Cart shop.

Hi, I am a newbie to OC and I am loving it

Just put this canvas print sales site together yesterday. I will be tweaking it over the next few days. I have removed all of the content out of the footer for now, while I fill out all of the content for those pages and will put them back in later.

I found using OC really easy and informative, until now I had used ZenCart and Wordpress and a bunch of plugins to build my retail sites.

I also used an extension by Michael.liang for import/export and this was brilliant! In the past when ever I had tried using excel files to populate stores there were always problems, this worked like a dream and allowed me to populate the store quickly without any problems.

I think I am going to enjoy using OC from now on.

http://www.alanchunphotography.co.uk/fineart

You'll have to take this as it comes, from someone who actually has had photographic and several kinds of hand rendered artwork hung in museums, displayed commercially, and lithographed in combined sizes and resolutions that are technically difficult and rare to achieve.

The esthetic talent and implementation evident in at least some the work did not make it into the cart. The first esthetic editor whom you must satisfy is yourself, and you need to become a better esthetic editor than you are. The background is hopeless for the purpose. The thumbnails as well as the blowups are far too small for the purpose. Why am I even looking at twenty acres of surround for so few and so tiny images relegated to a small swath down the center? Look carefully at Architecture 1 and 2, and at several among your night shots. Why do they appear better than the cart, six ways from Sunday? For architectural shooting, unless you actually want the even extreme vertical convergence seen in the Medieval vintage structures, shoot dead level and crop the expected expanses of unwanted foreground. Our brains offset parallax; cameras record it, and when it's too tiny our brains do not correct it but dislike it. Take a deep breath and crop: squirrels and insects, for example, among many others. Take a deep breath and weed out the lesser among effective duplicates, as well as all that were not quite shot. Look at the grasshoppers; BE the editor who is hard to please. Be particularly cold-blooded about your focus, depths of field, and technical graphical aspects, 24"x30" is not all that easy to print competently even with the best experience, equipment, and bankroll. You have not been in a gallery or yet suffered enough post-vacation, chicken-potluck slide shows. You must fully prepare the work in order to showcase it (wander into some galleries for kicks, look at quite a few on-line photographic galleries for kicks), and then you must showcase it where the work attracts attention and the setting does not distract from it. The work should be selective, from among your best. The cart is the setting. Get the fine into the art by weeding out what isn't fine, and into the cart by simplicity.

As for the extensions (if they're still there), never mind.

Thanks for that Bute, although I thought this was about Open Cart and not about my photography?!?

I respect your comments and appreciate your input, as you seem so helpful it would be nice if you could compile a list of the images and their pros and cons for me to go through, that way I can become a keener editor for the future.

Esthetic or Aesthetic
a theory or idea of what is aesthetically valid.

Had the images been on the same plane as the cart I would not even have responded, let alone to the whole deal as a package. I'll look at it from time to time. You have the initial examples I noted. When you look at the images, one by one, recall what was the magic moment, when you fired the shutter, that is somewhere in the image. Crop to that, it will include the "whole picture" inside the image. You'll see that when you enlarge thumbnails. You're well on your way, just be selective and keep aware of what competitors have been up to, you'll learn quite a bit from the better ones. As for cart, the idea is NOT to copy others' galleries, but to differentiate yours in HOW you subdue its distractions from your work. (Yeah, esthetics and validity aren't science, and science meant philosophy before coming into its own heyday, but to some extent they're both unsettled and available in granite.)

Depending upon your platform (win, apple, linux) and what you already have in programs, you may want to take a look at freeware paintdotnet and the freeware version of photofiltre.

Duly noted and thank you.

I haven't even started to customise the cart really, just a few tweaks here and there for certain annoying things and getting the legals put in place.

I don't like how the bog standard cart looks or feels and will attempt to make it look more like a photo site than a shop as soon as I can.

As for editing software, I have Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3 & 4 so I am okay on that front.

To be honest I grabbed some images from my archives that looked nice to populate the store and I guess it shows as I should really have paid a lot more attention to my product instead of the vehicle, that will be put right soon enough.

Alan

Since you're set on software and have ample archives, the products will go smoothly. I don't happen to care for several of the default appearances, either, and aversion to stark white overdone is part of that, but you're underway with a different approach and to a large extent you can easily enough keep sequential backups so you don't drive yourself batty before substituting alternative images with the same background name(s). Example: charcoal grey or even photographic greycard grey for the canvas, just to play with it as each thought enters your mind and you have time and inclination to tinker with it. You'll probably find that neutrals work best, without the extremes of cold through warm, white or black. You'll undoubtedly notice snippets of magic neutral textures in your own work.

"Take your time but be quick about it," only because once you launch, the engines will begin circling to feed, and within a couple of weeks to a month after that people other than trusted friends will begin seeing it, and customer awareness time will have begun. Engines will take even 90 days to finish confirming, revisiting, and cataloging.

Hi there,

I have just tried to view your website and it says that its down for maintenance. Please let me know when its back online and I will give you my honest review.

Kind Regards,
Doug

boreddoug wrote:Hi there,

I have just tried to view your website and it says that its down for maintenance. Please let me know when its back online and I will give you my honest review.

Kind Regards,
Doug

Hi Doug,

I am in the throws of customising the theme at the moment. As soon as I have it sorted (just got one problem with image holders to sort) I will put it back live and let you know.

Cheers
Alan

Hi Doug,

I am in the throws of customising the theme at the moment. As soon as I have it sorted (just got one problem with image holders to sort) I will put it back live and let you know.

Cheers
Alan

If you could that would be great thank you.

There seems to be some problem with the "fineart" page. I am getting a 404 not found.