Site check please [Archive] - Actinic Community

Marci

10-Nov-2003, 02:12 PM

Have just redesigned our online store after complaints from some 56k users...

Can someone take a peek n' give me a rough idea of load times etc etc, and any advice to improve it...

http://store.over-clock.com

jmedinger

10-Nov-2003, 07:18 PM

Marci

A couple of comments...

1) I would try and keep the section images on the acatalog page all the same size otherwise it pushes the layout out of sync a bit. I'd also put a <br> in before the text starts for the Section description OR at least vertically align the corresponding image to the top of the cell it occupies

2) Missing an image on http://store.over-clock.com/Other_Cases.html (btw I've got the silver one - it's a beast!)

3) In general the graphics sizes are fine... 5K ish for the section images and 10 - 15K ish for the main product images

4) The pages do load quickly on ISDN - can't speak for 56K tho!

5) It might be nice to see a user submission form on the contact page...

6) Overall the site is good looking and easy to get around - well done!

Jos

JMK2

11-Nov-2003, 01:57 AM

When I clicked on 'buy', instead of forwarding me onto the next page, it took me back again to the products page.

The paypal banner link was broken.

What a comprehensive site. Even animated gif's. How many hours did all that take you?

Can you tell me how you placed your header in there? Was it by using an include file?

The site is certainly a credit to you.

garyhay

11-Nov-2003, 07:28 AM

When I clicked on 'buy', instead of forwarding me onto the next page, it took me back again to the products page.

Interested in this one as a recent upgrade to 6.1.3. had this happen on a couple of our clients sites

JMK2

11-Nov-2003, 07:36 AM

Let me know if you want it checked again, perhaps there is something with my browser version or settings that prompted it.

pinbrook

11-Nov-2003, 07:44 AM

I went to manufacturer info on one of the products, closed the window and popped out of the site.
you need a target =blank statement to stop losing customers

neat design though

Marci

11-Nov-2003, 10:32 AM

closed the window and popped out of the site.
you need a target =blank statement to stop losing customers

Now that IMO is something that needs integrating into Actinic a bit more... Information Link.... could do with the ability to give it a target rather than it always being self... especially if linking off-site, in which case you can't use extended info popups either as they don't give the option to load an off-site URL...

When I clicked on 'buy', instead of forwarding me onto the next page, it took me back again to the products page

Just checked every product and they all work fine for me... odd... I'll look into it... same goes for PayPal banner - link appears to work fine.... could be a browser version prob... Appears to work perfect under IE-6.0.2800.1106.xpsp1.020828-1920...

Can you tell me how you placed your header in there? Was it by using an include file?

Made a new page based on our standard template, with a big empty cell below the header for catalog content, then just dropped in NETQUOTEVAR:BULK into the template... you can see in the pic below... just designed a brand new HTML page... opened up the original actinic theme and copied and pasted required info from the <head> sections, then drop in the 3 main NETQUOTEVARs...

http://www.over-clock.com/marci/actsnapshot2.jpg

It might be nice to see a user submission form on the contact page...

Most customers tend to head straight for the forums or IRC room and grab us realtime... we get very little communications by e-mail or by form etc, as they all prefer talking to us live as it were.

Plus I can't work out how to get Form contents to mail over in a legible fashion.... ;)

Missing an image on http://store.over-clock.com/Other_Cases.html (btw I've got the silver one - it's a beast!)
Fixed... ta! Now... the file was there for that one, but it's name involved an invalid character that worked fine in Act5 but has suddenly gone screwy under Act6... remove the % from the filename and works fine..

How many hours did all that take you?
3 years and counting so far - tis continuously under redevelopment... I must've redesigned the site every 6 months or so since we started it trying to find the perfect design / layout...

Still can't get the cart contents cookie trick to work tho... at top of page under navigation links was where I had it.... worked fine on checkout (www.over-clock.com/cgi-bin) but not on catalog pages (store.over-clock.com) so followed instructions in Knowledgebase for the Demon-CGI problem and still doesn't work... in fact, once I did that it stopped working from either link. Should the domain be preceeded by "http://" in the ACTINIC.pm file?

chrisbrown

11-Nov-2003, 12:08 PM

Should the domain be preceeded by "http://" in the ACTINIC.pm file? In our case (which is not Demon) there is no "http://" or even "www.". See below:

print "Set-Cookie: " . $sCartCookie . # set the cookie
"; EXPIRES=" . $sCartExpiry .
"; PATH=/; domain=morestage.com; \r\n";

Marci

11-Nov-2003, 12:35 PM

Making the cookie valid for the entire domain including subdomains logically... now why on earth didn't I think of that?!

Will give it a try n' let ya know!

JMK2

11-Nov-2003, 05:02 PM

Thanks Marci,

I just checked again (Win2K machine). I went to the P4_DDR boards and tried to buy the Asus P4V800-E Deluxe. I took me back to http://store.over-clock.com/P4_DDR_Boards.html after a few seconds. I changed Qty to 2 , same thing. I then tried it in Netscape, and got the same behaviour. I moved to another machine running Win3K and got the same behaviour.

The Paypal link is there, it's just the banner does not show (http://images.paypal.com/images/paypal_mrb_banner.gif).

I'll try that trick with the templates. Our main template page is made using CF Includes so I'll have to redo it all so it will work in html I guess. Thanks for that.

rmladden

11-Nov-2003, 05:18 PM

I does that for me to. It think it is because the quantity is on the product page and so there is no confirmation page.

Marci

11-Nov-2003, 06:04 PM

Ah right, now if you'd have said that there was no confirmation page then yes, it's meant to be like that... s'just the way Act6 works AFAIK that if u put quantity on the product page then bye bye confirmation.... u get a look at your cart before it forwards you back to where you were so you can continue shopping. Then use the View Cart and Checkout buttons up top...

The cookie domain thang worked a treat but Telewest bombed out on me today mid upload and has been off since until now, so at the mo the store is midway between 2 states....

You can see the Cart Total working on this page tho... http://store.over-clock.com/Case_Fans.html

Banner still shows up perfectly every time for me... so not sure... it's linked directly off paypal, not hosted by us...

JMK2

11-Nov-2003, 06:23 PM

Maybe that's why the site seems to load slow today.

If I take the path to that missing banner (http://images.paypal.com/images/paypal_mrb_banner.gif) and place it directly into my browser, I get a page cannot be found error. Could it be your machine has it cached locally and that's why you see it?

I need to ask your help on that template you created. The page you based it on, do you start with Act_Primary.html? Then you take the <head> section and drop it ito your new page? I'm struggling a bit to figure out what the three main NETQUOTEVARs actually are, is it 'Bulk', everything in the <HEAD> (less the link to the actinic stylesheet), and something else?

Thanks Marci.

Marci

11-Nov-2003, 07:58 PM

Now if I take the link and paste into the browser on both my home machines and any of the shop machines it loads fine, and I've emptied cache etc on em all to check...

Will grab the code for me templates tomorrow when i get to work for ya...

Maybe that's why the site seems to load slow today.

Nope, that was just a router problem that's been giving me grief ALL day...

JMK2

11-Nov-2003, 10:47 PM

Thanks Marci, I've almost got it, I'm just getting an error about the 'src=" tag,and my menus are not preloading so I'm getting a script 'object not found error' in IE. I think the src error may be due to something one of the other templates is trying to load, such as Act_CartButtonImage.

On that broken link, it must have something to do with my DNS settings. Come to think of it, I use the 'hosts' file trick to redirect known blacklisted sites to my local server, perhaps that file has blacklisted that PayPal IP for some reason

Marci

12-Nov-2003, 12:20 AM

U get used to the SRC error... I have it on every upload... it's just the price you pay doing it this way unless you put EVERY image file etc involved in the acatalog directory so that in the HTML template all src references point straight to the file itselt with no proceeding directory changes or domain changes etc....

(eg: so every src reference is as follows)
<img src="bgrnd.jpg">

rather than

<img src="/media/allpages/bgrnd.jpg">

I tend to just put up with the warning message on every upload. Can't be arsed duplicating images all over the place and consuming further bandwidth when users will already have the majority of them cached from the site's front page.

my menus are not preloading so I'm getting a script 'object not found error'

I don't use em so not sure... will have a look from work tomorrow at the templates and see what I can find out... possibly you're missing:

<script language="JavaScript" src="actinicextras.js" type="text/javascript"></script> from your <head> section...

JMK2

12-Nov-2003, 12:26 AM

Thanks Marci,

I thought maybe that src thing was causing the object not found but somehow I've managed to get rid of it anyway.

I'll also just ignore that error then, good to know it is not a fatal problem at least.

Now I'm down to the last problem of getting my own stylesheets to work but otherwise I seem to be mostly there now.

JMK2

13-Nov-2003, 05:43 AM

I just realized that you can in fact still buy something even though I was bounced back to the original page. I did not realize that the item had been added to my cart and that I needed to click the checkout nav link to complete the transaction. It finally came to me when Jacy asked me to check something on his site and it did the same thing, then he explained it was supposed to.

Had it bounced me back to the index page I probably would have figured it out. So it turns out to be my fault I did not understand how it works, but I truly did get the impression that I was not able to get something into the cart. So it would stand to reason that others may also get that impression and exit the whole site and abandon their order. I think the best thing would be to have an intermediate bounce page that says something like, "thanks, items have been placed in your cart, returning you to the index page now, please wait...".

Marci

13-Nov-2003, 10:44 AM

Or have a look top right on the catalog pages of our site now, where it will show that totals and values have been added to the cart!