After waaaay too many months of design and development, our new site www.mrvector.com is finally live with a fairly heavily customized skin.
To give props where props are deserved, Jason was HUGELY helpful a few months ago with the first round of customizations we did to the cart software and templates.
That was when we knew jack about the cs-cart template system.
After that, we spent a few more months redesigning things some more and learning way more about cs-carts innards than we wanted to in order to get things to the point where they are now.
But we’re pretty happy with the results.
Any feedback/issues/suggestions would be appreciated!
Just fantastic. It’s one of the nicest CS-Cart sites I’ve seen and I have no issues or criticisms at all. Everything looks really professional. Well done.
Nicely done. You’ve managed to develop a truly individual site.
" Your cart is too empty ", love it :). Really nice site, well done.
Yay! Glad to see you finally up and going!
Yes, this was indeed a fun project and I am glad that everything worked out for you on the skin!
Very nice site. But I am just curious why you chose cs-cart for this project. You have less than 20 products and are not using any of cs-carts advanced features.
It appears you are just using cs-cart as a basic shopping cart and its content management system to maintain your other pages. A simpler cart would of been much easier to work with on this project. I am not even sure a database is necessary for this size web site.
Only reason I am asking is for my clients I would not of used cs-cart for this size project. Just curious what drove you to do so. Maybe I am missing something obvious 
Anyway, very nice job.
David
Thanks for all the feedback, guys. After so much work it’s great hearing so much positive stuff.
Jason: No kidding, right? I can’t thank you enough for your initial help with everything. We couldn’t have gotten it so far without you.
David: We actually spent A LOT of time researching and deciding what cart to go with. We looked at all the majors like Magento, joomla, cubcart and even at wordpress plugins (which would have been my preference, since I’m well-versed in WP themage, but most of them had serious bugs), and a gazillion others.
I HATED shopping carts by the time we finally settled on this one.
But ultimately, we went with cs-cart because:
- We wanted something with enough features to allow us to grow. Designing an e-commerce site is a pain in the $)@… I only want to do it once. We have a limited set of products right now, but when we have 100-200, I think cs-cart will still work for us.
- We plan on integrating affiliate features down the road and like the fact that cs-cart has this built in.
- We wanted something that was customizable visually. I have some degree of familiarity with smarty, so that was a plus.
- We wanted strong support for downloadable files since that’s our core business.
- We wanted a backend that was usable, didn’t make you puke looking at it, and had good tracking features for orders and people.
Just curious, what solution would you have looked to?
Liz,
Those are all valid reasons to use cs-cart. For smaller sites, like yours, I like to use a modified version of the Quikstore Shopping Cart system I created. It has all the features you mentioned, but is a lot easier to modify and create templates for. But if you plan on growing, cs-cart has many more features to help you do so. You can never go wrong with cs-cart if you have the time to modify its code and customize a template. If not, a site like yours could easily be created in about a week using a basic shopping cart system.
I was curious, because I generally talk my clients out of using such a powerful cart like cs-cart unless they have hundreds of products and plan on updating them often. I can get them up and going with a lesser solution faster and a lot cheaper.
David
[quote name=‘Liz’]After waaaay too many months of design and development, our new site www.mrvector.com is finally live with a fairly heavily customized skin.
To give props where props are deserved, Jason was HUGELY helpful a few months ago with the first round of customizations we did to the cart software and templates.
That was when we knew jack about the cs-cart template system.
After that, we spent a few more months redesigning things some more and learning way more about cs-carts innards than we wanted to in order to get things to the point where they are now.
But we’re pretty happy with the results.
Any feedback/issues/suggestions would be appreciated![/QUOTE]
looks fantastic… did you keep all product info content in cs-cart pages and just keep blog posts in the blog system? what are you using for blog software?
bschiett: thanks!
Yes, we did keep all the cart stuff in the cart (as well as the contact us/faq/about us pages). The blog is separate and is running off the very capable Wordpress
We did cheat and create a .tpl for the home page that just puts static HTML, and plugged in an rss reader to pull the latest blog entry from the blog’s rss feed.
[quote name=‘Liz’]bschiett: thanks!
Yes, we did keep all the cart stuff in the cart (as well as the contact us/faq/about us pages). The blog is separate and is running off the very capable Wordpress
We did cheat and create a .tpl for the home page that just puts static HTML, and plugged in an rss reader to pull the latest blog entry from the blog’s rss feed.[/QUOTE]
cool!
so all product info is in cs-cart? you just post news to the blog and that’s all you use the blog for?
Yep, that’s how we set it up!
[quote name=‘Liz’]Yep, that’s how we set it up![/QUOTE]
thanks, i actually sent you an email earlier today through your website
I love your site! I It can easily qualify for one of the featured ecommerce sites in smashingmagazine for the design.
I notice your meta author still list cs-cart.com.
Maybe you wish to change it to mrvector.com
May I know how long you spent customising the template of your site?
Thanks nodame! Glad you like… and I really appreciate the suggestion about the meta author data.
I’m on it!
I’m not sure how accurate our timeframe was for development. This is the first time I’ve worked with cs-cart, and while I did have some previous experience with Smarty, it definitely was a learning process.
Between having someone do the first version, redesigning, and then implementing the template changes again ourselves, it took a few months (working mostly weekends).
If I was going to do it all again, it would probably take much less time. Maybe a week or so.