Lesson 13. CS-Cart Design — Overview

Design might be the most powerful side of CS-Cart ecommerce website design software. It brings an endless number of possibilities along with opportunities to sell goods. Anything can be tweaked, changed, or modified. Begin with the default one and finish with outstanding design selling products on its own. This is what design in CS-Cart does.

All design features in CS-Cart ecommerce web program are found under the Design title of the Admin panel. Themes, Layouts, Templates, Email templates, Documents, Menus, Product tabs.

In the Themes section you can choose, install, upload, delete, and customize themes and styles for your store. The page is divided into three parts: Current Theme at the top, Installed and available themes below, and general information to the right.

In the Current theme part styles for the current theme of the shopping cart internet software are manipulated, use the Theme editor to customize a storefront in real time, and edit content on-site. The theme editor allows owner to create his or her own unique style for a storefront with just a few clicks, and content editing is used to change the names of interface elements, products, and pages on the go.

The tabs below are used to switch among themes and styles. Each theme can have several styles. Styles drastically change the look of a storefront with just one click. After that it is still possible to proceed with your own customization. In the Browse all available themes tab, there is a list of themes available for the installation.

To the right of the page the general information about the current theme. There is the theme name, directory, where the theme is placed, the number of layouts and styles and the current theme developer.

Layouts determine the structure of a storefront. A layout consists of layout pages, which represent various page types of a storefront. Layout pages consist of blocks nested inside containers. Changes made on a layout page affect the page on a storefront of the shopping cart software package. A block contains a certain piece of information like a logo, product details, breadcrumbs, etc. You can add, edit, remove, or simply move blocks to change the structure of the page.

The next important thing in the Design section is templates. With templates it is possible to edit the source code of the theme directly from the admin panel. We do not recommend to change anything here if you don’t have any experience in design or development. But experienced developers can make an eye candy using this tool.

Menus help to organize different types of content displayed on pages into short consistent lists. The good example here is the Quick links menu. A list of useful links gathered at one place. After creating a menu just place it into a block to make it viable.

The Product tabs section is the last one here. Product tabs organize the information about a product on a product detailed page. Use them to split product’s descriptions, features, reviews, etc. into separated groups. This way products’ pages will look much more clean and decent. That was a quick look into CS-Cart e shopping cart design features.