Tips for Creating an Online Store

Posts Tagged ‘design’

CSS Tips: Bigger Thumbnails

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Flying Cart comes with some pretty great built-in themes and gives you the ability to customize your store even further with custom CSS. If you’ve never worked with HTML or CSS making changes may seem daunting at first. But if you take things one step at a time and save your progress you can learn how to make a lot of changes yourself.

To get started, here’s a tip on changing the appearance of your featured products.

original-thumbnails

Starting with the Tuxedo theme you’ll notice that all of your product thumbnails are in a white box with white space around your thumbnails.

updated-thumbnails

But what if you wanted to remove the box and make your thumbnails larger? It’s a simple CSS fix.

Read more after the jump for details on how to change your thumbnails. Read more…
(more…)

Category: Help & Support
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Zack White Art and Design

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Image of Cassie

Cleveland Stencil Artist – Zach White Art and Design

Category: Featured Stores
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Amzed Designs

Friday, September 25th, 2009

amzed-hussain

We just added Amzed Designs to our list of talented designers you can hire to design your store.  Check out our full list here.

Category: News
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Add custom content to your department pages

Monday, June 29th, 2009

You can now add custom content to the top of your department pages.  Add an image or write some descriptive text to give your pages some personality.

Here’s an example using Hana Bay Coffee (hanabaycoffee.flyingcart.com). I added an image to illustrate the “Hawaii” concept on this page and I wrote a few sentences about the Hawaiian beans.

dept_description

Here’s how to do it:

1. Log in to your heaquarters and go to the Products > Departments page.

2. Click on the word “Description” next to the department name and an HTML editor will appear.

3. Enter your content into the editor. If you want to insert an image, you can use one of the images you uploaded on your custom CSS page or you can link to an image that you have hosted elsewhere (try <a href=”http://www.flickr.com” target=”new”>Flickr</a>).

4. When you are done, click the blue disk icon next to the department to save your changes.

5. Go to your store and check out the department page. How does it look?

dept_description2

Category: Flying Cart Features, Store Design
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Store uses own website to sell products from Flying Cart account

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Robeco Clarete of Pinoy Culture (www.pinoyculture.ca) came up with a way to use his own website to sell the products from his Flying Cart store.  That’s right – his own site hosted on his own server! He gets the flexibility of using his own site design, but also has all the benefits of using Flying Cart to manage his sales and market his products.

pinoy culture store screenshot

PinoyCulture.ca PreSchool department

pinoy culture screenshot

PinoyCulture.ca Shopping Cart

Really?

The design at the top and the sidebar are Robert’s own. The middle section of the screen contains the content of his Flying Cart store.

How does this work?

Robert’s solution is very clever and requires some technical knowledge to implement.  In a nutshell, he used the Flying Cart custom CSS feature to hide all the page elements other than the products. Then, he made a department navigation menu on his own site and linked to each department page in his Flying Cart store using the javascript “loadintoiFrame()” command. These links are targeted into an iframe in the center section of his site. This creates a seamless interface and most customers won’t have a clue that the ecommerce comes from a hosted solution.

The Flying Cart team is entirely impressed with this creative way to use the software.

Category: Store Design
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calling all designers

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

We love designers. Designers make us look better.  They make things look beautiful.

We are looking to feature designers right off our homepage.  This is a great place for our new customers to learn about your design services.

If you are a designer and want to be featured please send us an email.

Category: News
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How to Add a Widget

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Kristen Cast of Organic Faith Photography asked me how she can add an animoto widget to her homepage.  I get this question a lot so I though it was time to do a blog post.

You can use this guide to add a widget from slide, animoto, photobucket, myspace, etc.

1. Copy the embed code from the site with widget (it will look like a bunch of code)

2. Login to the Flying Cart headquarters navigate to Store -> Homepage

3. Scroll down the click on the HTML button in the “Welcome Text” section (The HTML button is located in all sections where you can add text, not just the Welcome Text section… so feel free to embed widgets on your about us page as well)

1-html-button

4. Paste the embed code you copied in step #1 and click on the “update”

html-source-editor

5. Click the “Update Homepage” button on the Flying Cart Homepage Setting.

6. Enjoy the widget on your site

Follow these detailed instructions for embeding a YouTube Video.

Category: Help & Support
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Need better packaging ideas?

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

The DieLine Logo

Check out The Dieline for great ideas on how to package your product.  They show off some of the best packaging designs I have ever seen!

Strawberry Organic Juice Awesome Packaging

Cleavage Cupcakes

Furoshiki

My favorite part of the blog is the before and after section where they show you ways companies have improved their package design.  It really makes you think of ways to improve your design.

Bounce Packaging

If you have new innovative packaging.  Show your stuff off by submitting it to them.

Category: Fun Stuff, Marketing Tips
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