Grateful Heart Creations

[guyjam]

Hi there,

I've been putting this together for my wife over the past couple of weeks.

www.gratefulheartcreations.com.au

I've been using Dynamik for 2 weeks now. Well I've now been doing CSS for 2 weeks now... I knew a bit of html from doing some sites about 8 years ago, but never had any success with CSS before. So to get this site up and running in a couple of weeks felt pretty amazing.
There were definitely a few good hair-pulling-out moments, and I'm sure there'll be a few more. So far(except for some font colour probs) I've managed to push past all my problems.
I am the type of guy that if something isn't working, I try it differently until it works. So I can have no logic behind why I did something, except for "It worked that way".

Anyway, I'm going to blab on for a bit here. Sorry if I bore..

The biggest issues I've been having have been with trying to figure out what custom CSS to use to change various elements. Removing lines, changing font colours etc. I'm still struggling with it. Firebug has been helping, but there's still a few issues i can't figure out.
I never really got custom widgets working for me either. I actually ended up using purely EZ widgets for all my layout needs, then shifting them around with margins until they sat where I wanted them.
Custom Layouts are awesome. So is the EZ stuff.

I've used Cart66 for the cart side of things. Found it OK to work with. Haven't really discovered all the features yet, but it's serving it's purpose at the moment.. This is the first cart I've set up before. I paid for SSL, but i don't think I need it if I'm only going to be using PayPal. It's all very confusing for someone like me who doesn't know what they are doing I didn't find much support for "idiots who knew nothing" at the Cart66 site. So I spent some time trying to figure out what questions to search on the forum, and then sheepishly asking stupid questions. Even in a faceless community I'm afraid to seem stupid. argh.

The gallery with the small thumbnails is created with Photospace plugin. Works nice,
looks weird in Safari though.

The code in the Product page is as ugly as hell. My wife will have trouble updating that page with new products herself. I'll have to clean it up somehow..
Same with the Featured Items widget on the home page. Ugly code. All my fault. I used the Catalyst PHP widget here, as i couldn't get the layout working with a text widget.

The Blog and News pages content are actually custom Layout and widget areas(I got some working). I used the Catalyst Excerpt widget to control which Post Category to show. Because each product in the shop is a post too, I couldn't just have a blog page with all my posts. I had to keep everything organised in there with Categories. So the Excerpt Widget seemed perfect for this.

Still got some SEO stuff to take care of. Want to put in some text on the front page. From a marketing point of view, we want visitors to feel like they want to be a part of the clothing theory that my wife is creating. Organic, locally made, comfortable etc. So we'll be attempting to keep the site quite personal, with Jen talking about her experiences in the blog. Want to try and move away from the idea that this is a faceless company and the clothes are made by machines.

I've got another site i put together last week too, my company site, but i'll make a separate post for that.

Thanks for the help anyone has offered me. I'm sure I'll still be asking more questions in the future.

Cheers

Guy
www.buzzgraphics.com.au

[deepsouth]

Very delicate & minimal feel which I rather like. I agree with putting some text on the homepage to tell people what it's about.

As a customer I'd also expect to be able to see bigger pics of the products.

[guyjam]

The larger images is a good idea. I'll see if I can make a larger version pop up in Photospace.

There seems to be quite a few Australians here...

[ben_pyman]

I love the look of your site Guy. Really nice minimal and classy design. Great job for your first Catalyst site!

I was going to ask you how you found the Cart66 support, but you've kind of covered it.

Looking forward to seeing some more of your work!

[haydnwynn]

Nice site. I wish you and your wife all the luck in your new adventure.

You should probably lose the admin login link though.

This is the Internet. You need to be careful.