Just Zen it and Skin it
ZenCart is a turn key open source shopping cart - a better coded and regularly released descendant of OS Commerce. Among other things it featuring a powerful template system, strong customization potential, a large developer base, and controlling founders - this means out of box it is good but lacks a degree of refinement. Here are seven mods and tweaks we at cleir use to turn a paltry default installation into a traffic generating and visitor ready site (just add water...and a template...and products). Whats lacking? SEO niceties, page load time optimizations, analytics, and marketing tools. We address these after the jump.
Make It Talk
While the usefulness of SEO URLs - web page addresses that are easy to read - is debatable, their use for end users in terms of readability is a given. I tend to side with Brett of Webmaster World who first suggested in 2002 that the value of brandable URLs far outweighs that of domain-with-many-keywords.com urls. That said much of Bretts underlying philosophy is to consider visitors first and search engines second. I prefer to show my visitor something useful as opposed to pId=,cPath=,main_page= and associated jibberish. Ultimate SEO URLs turns default zen urls into wonderful compositions of product and category names. A word to the wise - for those unfamilar with this mod install it AFTER most development is done, it makes future debugging slightly more painful for the uninitiated. Additionally using this mod with multi-lingal sites can be painful.
Requirements:
- Apache with mod_rewrite
Installation:
- Difficulty: 6 - requires modification of zen source files and apache configuration...some modifications are done outside of your store.
Alternatives:
- Magic SEO URLs - [we have not used these because they are] extremely overpriced and generate large htaccess file. Consider using if you want an easier install or want to support multiple languages and are willing to sell your soul.
Make It Sing
Lets face it - google is the end all be all of search. Many years ago there were a number of competing shopping / price comparison destinations such as yahoo, mysimon, pricegrabber, shopping.com, etc. Today there is google base (froogle rebranded), and the smouldering ruins of the aforementioned. So for an ecommerce site - a google base feeder zencart mod is an important source of traffic. Similarly supporting google checkout will give you a slight edge in google base rankings and a nice badge if you use analytics. Yep that was a twofer.
Requirements:
- Google Account
Installation:
- Difficulty: 6 - Installation on google base feeder is easy but a degree of customization to the source packages is recommended or required. If you want to skip the 150 page thread over at the zencart forums cleir can help sort out your feed.
Alternatives:
- I wish. Others I have used for base feeding are more subpar.
Make It Dance
One of the less than ideal features of an out of box zen is the use of full size images. By default zen uses several image sizes - for instance a product will have a thumbnail which is shown inside a category page, a small image on a product details page, and a full size image which is shown when the product is selected. Unfortunately these 3 different sizes are all presented to the users browser as the full size image which is then scaled client side. The result for a default home page - chalk full of these oversize monsters - is wasted bandwidth and a slow loading page. Enter the subtly named Break my Zencart and one of their mods - Image Handler 2. Image handler serves to cache and resize images server side eliminating this issue. It also supports watermarking, and javascript zoom effects.
Requirements:
- ImageMagick or PHP with GD libraries.
- Abilty to update server directory permissions (for caching).
Installation:
- Difficulty: 5 - requires modification of zen source files.
Alternatives:
- None required - this mod rocks
Make It Tell You Dirty Little Secrets About Past Lovers
Google analytics is your best freind when trying to intuit why your site has not received an order in almost a day. Though installation could be as simple as adding some code to your footer - the analytics mod tracks purchases and has a few other nifty nice to haves.
Requirements:
- Analytics Account
Installation:
- Difficulty: 1 - pretty much as easy as it gets.
Alternatives:
- None required.
