Sunday, November 21, 2010

Zen Cart and Ecommerce Web-sites

Zen Cart is a free of charge and open source shopping cart software. Zen Cart's source code can be freely modified and even redistributed by users. The code for Zen Cart is a fork of some other shopping cart plug-in called osCommerce, and is meant to be easier to use and configure by those not so technically inclined. Zen Cart is maintained by a small, but focused community who are making steady improvements to the software.

Please don't be bother with the installation process - if you have ever installed WordPress successfully this should be a cake walk.

Zen Cart is built to make it effortless to set up product listings, pricing and payment options and also act as a content management system (CMS) for all other aspects of your e-commerce web page. This will definitely help to maintain a website and make it much more intuitive and easier to understand for many who are not necessarily web designers or programmers. In case you run in to difficulties or require a fast solution to a problem, there is a very active help community forum to get you sorted.

Today all users can customize their site with a help of many Zen Cart templates available from various sites on the net. Use of Zen Cart templates will let the site owner quickly modify the design of their web site to better suit their individual needs. One of the advantage of Zen Cart Themes is that site owners can eliminate the need to hire a web designer to tweak the basic layout to suit the particular type of product presentation. Other benefit is that Zen Cart themes are easy to install.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Zen Cart Customization

There are many places on the web where a site owner can find Zen Cart templates that use their specific company color scheme and branding. With a help of Zen Cart themes the internet site can include the colors and branding associated with a certain brand or maybe an established brick and mortar retailer. It is very important to have a standard branding and color scheme shared by all facets of a business.

A web site owner may opt to go and hire a web designer to give his store a highly customized look, this has some disadvantages however. The very fist point - it's the time needed to find the right designer with the needed skill set. Designing for Zen Cart is rather different from designing web-sites using the more widespread HTML and CSS languages.

Another aspect to consider is the time it takes to meet with the designer, have them produce a design mock up or two, and then make revisions before final design approval. If time is of the essence then using a pre-configured quality Zen Cart templates is definitely the route to take.

The upside to employing a designer to give your website a custom look is that you will have an original design which enables your website and business be prominent among the others. Your internet site is usually the first opinion a customer has of your business, and there's no other opportunity to make a first impression.

A professionally designed web site that is pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate instills confidence in your products and helps keep customers on your web page, increasing the odds of them making a purchase.