hi all,

ive just purchased shopping cart creator pro and shopping cart designer pro, is it just me with limited experience with coffeecup software or is that not actually that much custom work you can do to the themes?!

i was hoping to be able to take the theme 'i do' and add boxes with images in which would also link to other pages, add those pop-up boxes to my product description pages, add new pages which also had the big image like the homepage of 'i do' and really just play around with the design but it seems quite limited with what you can do! basically i wanted it to look something like http://www.quiksilver.co.uk/ in respect of the picture and boxes etc.

if this makes sence to you please can you help?

Thanks!

Hi Sally...
Well I am happy about how I have been able to customize my own shop. Certainly I cannot guarantee that you will come up with something quite like the store you mention, but providing you are capable with graphics, you can certainly come up with something very zazzy of your own. My advice would be to mess around a bit more and maybe look at some of the stores that other members have already produced. Don't forget that a lot of the people in here know very little about web design, but nonetheless, have come up with some pretty neat ideas. Also remember that you can still keep the home page or index page "outside" the store pages, and so can go to town on fancy content in there which you can use as a basic theme for the shop pages. I have found that changing the sizes of the thumbnails in the categories has given my store a slightly different feel... then shifting things around with the padding and margins makes a difference too. If you are really ok with coding, you can go into the files and make changes which are not actually possible in the Designer interface - just remember that there is no team support for that though.

Thanks for the help how do I get into the files and change the coding?

Design a shop, save the files and remember where you put them. Open the files and tweak. A word of warning - you must remember that every update on your shop could well overwrite your tweaked files, so save them somewhere separate to upload to your server each time.

Let me mention this though. I have been able to completely redesign a template using only the features given in designer pro to match an existing template from another website. So, it should give you enough flexibility to do what you need.

Yep and there's lots of apps out there that give you scripts you can use on your pages just like any HTML pages you would create. Might get a bit tricky figuring out how to get the links to the .css files in there, but adding javascript things like Visual Light Box http://visuallightbox.com shouldn't be too difficult to create those boxes that zoom like in our product details pages Lots you can do if you put your mind to it.

And as the Philosopher mentioned, many of us have matched shop and external html pages ( I did mine opposite of what he did, I created my shop theme and then created external pages to match on mine), but much is doable with a bit of imagination and all the help that comes from these forums, which I can tell you I used greatly when I was trying to create my HTML theme to match hehe.

Not sure if the popup boxes you are looking for are like the ones on the product pages Sally, but I just came across this thread that might give you info on how to do that for other pages:

http://www.coffeecup.com/forums/shoppin … post140515

This post above is directly to the one Scott gives on how to do it, but you can scroll up or down to read the rest of the thread Hopefully that helps a little.