Create a Smooth Shopping Experience With Custom Styled Checkout Pages

Posted by Joris on February 18, 2011 at 3:40 pm No Comments

A shop sells best when the complete store has a consistent look and feel, that includes the checkout process your users go through when completing an order.

We’ve listened to our users and have implemented customization of the checkout process through nothing more than simple CSS.

We’ve kept things simple and efficient by using a file called checkout.css. Just add a checkout.css file to your theme and we’ll automatically detect that file and plug it into your checkout pages.

Here’s a comparison between the default checkout style on the left and a slightly customized version for one of the shops running on the SolidShops platform. The checkout.css file used to create a the right version contained only a handful of CSS rules.

It’s completely up to you how you want to customize the checkout page. In the example above, they only thing that was changed is the background image and a custom logo to create a consistent shopping experience. If you want to take it a step further and customize all elements on the checkout pages, go nuts.

Check out the documentation for exact instructions if you need them and let us know if you have done something creative with your checkout page!

Thanks again everyone for the valuable feedback you’ve given us. Thanks to you we are able to continuously improve SolidShops. Enjoy the update!

New features for web designers

Posted by Joris on July 2, 2010 at 8:34 am 2 Comments

Since the beginning we’ve been focused on making SolidShops.com as easy as possible, while maintaining flexibility, especially when it comes to building templates for your stores. Being a web designer myself I had a fairly good idea of what we needed to build to make our application easy and fun to use for web designers.

I also talked to a lot of colleagues in the sector, to friends, to people at conferences such as the amazing Future Of Web Apps and to shop owners and asked them what their design requirements are when building an online web shop.

Almost all web designers, including me, thought of the following

• a flexible – but easy to use – template language
• the possibility to manage assets, files, images
• selection of a default theme, to get started quickly if necessary
• the use of partials/includes in templates for recurring bits such as footers and navigation.

A few months later we have implemented all of these core features into the application. To give you a sneak preview before we launch in beta, here are some screenshots that give you an idea of how you’ll be able to build your own templates with our own solid templating language.

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