Howdy,

I recently purchased Shopping Cart Designer Pro and Shopping Cart Creator Pro with the hope of getting away from the mind numbing complexity of setting up and styling a simple store with Zen Cart. Zen Cart is very powerful, but it is also very complex and tedious to work with. I'm looking for a better way to get a store up and running.

I fired up Designer Pro, selected a template, opened the Help PDF and dived in. In short order I was able to add a custom gradient background and a company logo. I am still playing with the Navigation menu and trying to figure out how it works.

What I would like to do is to move the Shopping Cart Summary to the top-right area of the header as we did in this Zen Cart website. http://www.athiero.com
Is this something that needs to be done in Creator?

Is there a document or page on the CoffeCup website that explains the relationship between the Shopping Cart Designer and the Shopping Cart Creator? Do I create the main design with Designer and then create the actual website files with Creator? I could do this with WordPress and Cart66 or WOO Commerce. I just don't want to deal with the performance and potential security issues involved with setting up a store in WP.

Hiya Mike,

Basically the Designer does all things to do with the "looks" of the shop. This is any images at all that are static (meaning that are part of the theme itself), any placing or spacing of any elements such as how far apart you want your products to be, how big, how small, any theme elements such as background, logo, etc etc. this is all done in the Designer programs.

The Creator program does only product stuff. This means, images of your products, pricing, shipping etc. It does not do anything at all to do with the theme and placement of elements on the shop other than the products and any code you enter into the pages themselves (which is basically content).

For the most part, Designer makes it pretty, Creator makes it work

P.S. Any product type images, titles of categories and such that you see in the Designer program are only placeholders for you to design how you want them to look. The actual titles and product images will show up correctly once you add actual categories and titles etc. to your shop in the Creator. The placeholders in the Designer are there so you can tell it what font and color your text should be, what size your product images should be, and things like that. The real text and images for the products are setup in the Creator.

Hope that all makes sense and helps

Thanks Jo Ann!

If I understand it correctly, Designer is used to set up a framework, or layout, for the store but the Creator sets up the actual store.

Suppose I want to add a slideshow in the banner area. Would this be done in Creator?

Thanks again,
Mike

Anything you do to Logos (banners) to change anything that will stay the same theme wise on every page, that you aren't adding into the content area of the pages themselves (some people use images and content on every product or page so that doesn't count here) is done in the Designer so yes.

How you would do a slideshow in the logo area I have no idea lol, not sure it can be done, but if it can I'm sure someone will come let us know