mccormicky – Page 8

Internet Explorer and Z-Index and me

I’m sure you’re already aware of this but IE is a pain in the butt. I just spent more time than I like to admit trying to figure out why my dropdown menu would not stay open (on mouse hover) over my stupid slideshow. At first I thought it was because my stupid slideshow had a z-index value that was too high. So I spent time messing that up. But then I noticed a very curious thing: when I added a background color to the ul, the menu stayed open over the slideshow.

Hmmm.

I had added a background color to the ul but I’d used rgba for a transparent-ish background.Lower versions of IE(less than IE9) ignore rgba and I knew this. What I didn’t know, shockingly enough was that lower versions of IE will create a bug when they have an element with z-index and no background color. So if you want your drop down menus to stay open on hover over another element (no matter if it has z-index or not) you better add a background image or a color or both.

IE is so EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Installing LightSpeed Web Store for the 1st time

If you just bought your license and now have to figure out how to connect with the web store database the first thing you’re asked to do is to create a database using your hosting plan cpanel – oh you didn’t know that your LightSpeed connected with a database? And you don’t know what a database is or for that matter what a cpanel is?

OK, hold up. I’m not about to go into all the technical details here. Chances are if you’ve purchased a license for the LightSpeed eCommerce Connector (connects and uploads your product inventory to an online store powered by LightSpeed’s native app: web store or to Magento) you’ve hired a designer/developer to customize the online shop. And chances are also that this designer/developer knows how to install either one.

So you usually won’t have to know what a database is or even have to ever create one, even though it is a snap to do through any modern version of a control panel (cpanel for short). Your designer/developer will probably upload the web store files for you and can even install the web store for you,too.

But someone on your end is going to have to input 2 very important bits of information in LightSpeed following this path: LightSpeed > Tools > eCommerce > Set Up (in older versions of LightSpeed the connector can only connect to Web Store so the path is Tools > Web Store > Set Up). In Set Up you see 2 text boxes: Web Host and Password.

In the Web Host text box input the URL/address of your web site: http://www.mydomain.com Plus the name of the sub-directory where Web Store files are located. So if you or someone else uploaded the Web Store files to a folder called shop you’d also put that in the Web Host text box: http://www.mydomain.com/shop. If the web store is in the main directory of your site (in technical terms the server root) you’d just put in http://www.mydomain.com. That takes care of Web Host.

The Password is the password you chose when you or your designer/developer installed the Web Store. Many of my clients do not install Web store themselves so I end up getting on the phone with someone and walking them through it.The Password is not the FTP/cpanel/database password. The Password is never used by anything else besides the LightSpeed eCommerce Connector. Once the Connector is connected to the server and therefore the database, you may change the Password in the Set Up panel whenever you want. But because the only thing that uses this password is the LightSpeed Connector, this is usually not something you need to do,ever.

Oh, I almost forgot! Make sure to click the Save button!

If everything is correct you should be able to access the Admin Panel by clicking the Admin Panel button.The Admin Panel is where you go about setting up things like your Store Name, your Store Phone what size you want your product images to be and whether or not people can checkout as guests, if they can use the Gift Registry and if you want to show your families ( brands) in the Web Store menu and lots, lots more.

So there you go. Those are the 2 things you need to do to get LightSpeed connected to your web site. There’s a lot more you’re going to have to do and there is a great amount of information about all of that here.

Here’s a funny story

A while ago I was hired to do an eCommerce site for the owner of a stationary shop in Carrol Gardens,Brooklyn. We met up, she showed me some mockups she gotten from some design students at FIT and then I went to work. Unfortunately, at the exact same time we began the online shop project the owner was also opening the brick & mortar and it was also right before the holiday shopping season and, oh well she didn’t have any time at all to give me input or feedback on they way my design was shaping up. So I ended up working entirely on my own. And also (this is a big one) she never sent me any photos or gave me any page content.
Yeah, that happened.

Anyway she did not like the site I showed her (too boxy she said) oh, well it was based on the boxy mockup, after all. I whipped up another template design out of the goodness of my dumb heart. Yeah, I care if they like my work. She didn’t like it. I ended up selling that template design for $750.00, thank you very much.

I went on working, making 4 more differently designed templates and (in the end the client received at least 7 unique design deliveries) she didn’t like any of them. Later I was told that industry standard is to deliver 2 designs, tops. Well!

Eventually my other projects with people who were actually invested,motivated and serious took precedence over this project which had devolved to the point where I practically begged her to hire this other design company and let me off the hook. She said nope, she’d paid me and I was indentured to her for life ( just kidding). Quite a lot of time went by – communication came to a standstill. She had a baby. That should tell you just how long this thing was taking!

At the beginning of the next year I wrote to her and asked her to either let me go or approve one last final design. This time she sent me links to other sites she liked (all very boxy) and I delivered using those sites as inspiration. We always had that sticking point though of her not giving me any professionally shot photos to use on the home page. What is up with people who won’t pay for a professional photographer??? The ones I got were grainy, blurry,totally low res.I didn’t want to use them. I know the quality of the photos can make or break a site.No matter how great the design is the site is going to look awful if these horrible photos are front and center. So, everything was done just the home page needed some serious photos.

More communication standstill. Finally she wrote me to tell me she was going with some other folks. I let out a whoop – I was free!

I recently went to take a peek at what these geniuses, these paragons of web design had come up with and lets just say I was not impressed. They’d actually used that woodgrain background image tile that everyone was using in 200 9 – a big design trend back then. But now it looks dated. Plus what does a stationary shop have to do with woodgrain? Because there are wood floors in the brick & mortar? Do me a favor!

So here’s the funny bit. About a week ago, my awesome colleague and often my project manager called me to let me know that the owner of this site had contacted the owner of another site I’d built and wanted to know who their designer was! We had a good chuckle over that.

My new design for an online store especially for music downloads (with sample audio!)

Musicians of all types, from Indi-Rockers to Death Metal monsters and even Classic Rock tribute bands need to be able to sell their music online. There are lots of sites they can join that will do it for them like e-music and cdbaby and they make it real easy… But the bands aren’t selling on their own terms, on their own web site, with their band logo and all of that extra nice nice-ness.

So when I was asked by ON to develop an online store for them of course I grabbed a fresh copy of WordPress + wp-e-commerce and got to it.

My 1st challenge was finding an audio player that was customizable with CSS (not Flash!) I was so happy to find this plugin Haiku minimalist audio player. This plugin let me paste a shortcode into the product editor so that before customers are ready to buy they can hear a sample of the song. Customers can add multiple tracks to the cart and they can also choose a format, wav or mp3. ON also wanted to be able to offer the option to download the entire album (in both formats) and/or the option to buy the physical cd.

So on one side of the product page there’s the artist name & photo (the cd cover art as a featured image) and under it there is a list of 3 products: Buy CD, Download Album (MP3) and Download Album (WAV).

The new version of wp-e-commerce makes it easier than ever to mold your product pages any way you need. I really love how much easier it is to handle Variations now. So well done! The best decision GetShopped made was to go with the way WordPress works now – quite a bold thing to do because it required a complete revamp of their plugin. So I have much respect for them. Talk about wanting to be Future Proof. I love that.

Why Beta? Because I used the Product Page template.I should have used the Category Page template. I haven’t yet handled Single Product Pages,either. But its a good start!