Basic startup questions

[Paula]

I'm brand new to this, so please bear with my basic questions.

1. I completed the wizard, entered a few products and created a few category pages on my own (yay!). What I would like for set up, is when a potential buyer clicks on a side category link, that the product show up WITHOUT all the written descriptions; I just want the image, name of product and price, like you see on many other stores. And when they click on the image, etc, it should bring them to an individual item page with description, additional images, price, buy now button, etc.

The way it's set up now, which I don't want, is that when a buyer clicks on a side category link, all the images show up with the descriptions. And clicking the image doesn't take you to the individual page. I do have More Info checked under Product Details and published but no luck.

2. How do I get my side product category to appear on ALL pages; currently it only shows up on my home page?


3. Right now the title of my store does not take me to my home page (not clickable/linkable). I do plan on replacing with a logo. Can I get this to link to my home page?

Thanks.

[Jim]

1. Which theme did you choose for your store? The various themes have different ways of displaying products on the page. So you might want to go to Preferences > Themes and click on the various themes and see how the products are laid out on the page.

2 It is easiest to assign products to pages when the Page and Product screens in the back office are in the Advanced editing mode. So click on the Pages icon (left most image) in the navbar at the top of the screen. If at the bottom of the screen you see a button Advance Editing click it. If you have one that says Basic Editing your are already in advanced editing mode.
One in advanced editing, from the list of pages click on the name of the page you want to put the links to your other pages on. Then click the Assign Items button and choose the Pages option. That will display 2 boxes the top one has the pages that are already assigned to the page and the bottom one has the rest of the pages. Select those in the bottom box that you want to have links to on the page and click the Add button, then save changes. Repeat that process for other pages. You will see the Publish tab appear on the right of the navbar so after you have assigned all the page links click on the Publish button and the store will be republished and you can then view your pages with the links you just added.

3. I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Is this a name that you assigned to the home page? Is your home page named index.html? If you click on the My Store button near the right side of the navbar do you go to your home page?

[Paula]

Thanks for the reply, but I think I may have sounded confusing. Let me ask a different way.

1. I figured this one out. : )

2. Just to be clear, I'm referring to the far left side navigation column on the store page, which lists all the categories/pages in my store. I would think this would already be placed on all pages.

3. What I'm asking is...when I click on the title of my store on the actual website, it does not go directly to my home page. For instance, when I click on the ShopSite logo on your website, it takes me to your home page. How do I accomplish this?

Thanks,

I think this will be an awesome cart...once I figure everything out. : )

[Jim]

2. There are two ways that the navigation can be accomplished, depending on which version of ShopSite and which product level you have. The way I described in the earlier post creates links to what ever pages you want to have on a page and is available in all versions and product levels of ShopSite. It needs to be done on each page where you want links to other pages to appear. The second method is the Global Navigation, where you create a set of links that will be displayed on all pages. This is done under Preferences > Navigation.

3. Creating a link from text that goes to a certain page is done using the html anchor tag, <a href="url to page"> text or image </a> ShopSite will normally create links to the home page and other pages which are in the navigation section of the page. If you want to add additional links you can create them in any text field in the backoffice of the store such as the Page Text 1, Text2, Product description, global Header and Footer etc. If you have the Pro or Manager level of ShopSite there is a built in html editor that your can use to help you create the links. So a simple link to a store page would be something like this.

Code: Select all

<a href="http://My.domain.com/index.html">Home Page</a> 

Or if you want an image to be the link to the home page you would have

Code: Select all

<a href="http://My.domain.com/index.html"><img src="http://My.domain.com/media/mystorelogo.gif"</a> 

Is that the information that you need? Again, the ShopSite templates are generally coded to create a link to the home page somewhere in the header or navigation, but you may want to create another one somewhere else on the page.

[Paula]

Jim,

I have the Pro version.

What I don't quite understand is this: The category links were automatically made when I created Pages, and they do appear on the Home Page. If I create new links to category pages, won't this double the category links?

Also, the More Info tab appears on all pages, so why wouldn't the Category Pages also appear on every page?

[Paula]

Also, is it possible to reset the wizard so I can start from the beginning?

[Jim]

There is no way to reset everything to the default state automatically without wiping out the store and reinstalling it.
You can however, delete all the pages and products by going to Utilities > Database and then click the Empty button and then select Products and click Empty. Then select the Pages option and click Empty.

The above will only remove pages and products from the database, it won't reset shipping methods, tax, payment methods that were configured while going through the wizard.

Once you have completed the wizard you generally don't need to go back through it but if you want to you can get to it again by going to Utilities > Wizard

[Paula]

Thanks, but I think I screwed things up so don't mind redoing everything. Can someone take a look at this for me? I understand there may be an additional charge,.

The actual tab with "Categories" is now missing. and under "More Info tab" is a link to "Shopping cart. "I've been through navigation but can't fix.

[Paula]

I got it working again. Thanks!

[Paula]

So if want to create Info pages, about us, etc. how would I get this placed under the "More Info" tab?

[Jim]

It depends on what template you are using where things are placed. Which template are you using? Can you post a link to the page so we can see it?

[Paula]

It depends on what template you are using where things are placed. Which template are you using? Can you post a link to the page so we can see it?

[Paula]

Although I may very well end up changing templates...

[Paula]

So the questions are:

1. How do I add links/pages under the MORE INFO tb?

2. How do I add more tabs, similar to that of MORE INFO and categories?

3. How do I change the names of the tabs?

[Jim]

The 3 column template uses the section that is titled "More Info" on your page to contain such things as the Registration, Gift Certificate link, Wish list , Payment logos, A store image, the Share link code etc. The only fields that the merchant can use to modify this area are the backoffice settings that turn on those features.

If you want to add additional information to this section you would need to modify the template include file 3Column-LeftBar.sst and add template tags or hard code text to the file.

The text for "Categories" is hard coded in the page template file 3Column.sst .
The text such as the More Info is being drawn from the Preferences > Store Text > Store Pages > More Info text value.

(please either use the forum or the email method for asking questions. There isn't an need in doing both.)