I think you answered your own question right there .

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You really need to fix your "thumbnails"

Irish Mobile- mobile phones Ireland - each one of the images is massive and you're only using html to "resize" them ie. change the display attributes as opposed to the actual file size

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Nice clean design,

As that's a zen cart shopping cart you've got plenty of options with the layout of your products I'd put 3 images across and two rows and then next box have new/featured products.(On my screen there's 2 products across and only 2 down on one side)

Here's a link to the image handler, its easy to install (make sure you back up before) it will improve the performance of your website speed look(no stair-effects, smooth edges) etc, Image Handler 2 for v1.2.7, Zen Cart | free shopping cart software I've tried downloading that website on dial up and it took nearly 10 minutes and you can tell the images are squashed. But the image handler will automatically resize your pictures.

Well spotted....the latest version seems a lot cleaner...I'm not sure about the Imgae handler i'm using Zen 1.3.8 I can't find an updated version........

Here's one serious bug I stumbled across in Zen the other night....I nearly cried...If your using Zen anywhere it's definatley worth the mod http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?p=553018 luckily my host picked up the phone at midnight and helped me rewind the mistake......

thanks for the tips.....

If you don't want to use the image handler there's another way optimise you images, similar to having extra images per product.

Zen's auto scaling can result in images with less than optimum files sizes and thus consume bandwidth.

If you want to show your images with the relevant images sizes you need to provide additional information to Zen Cart, and it will recognise the images by there suffixes of "_LRG" or "_MED" respectively(large and medium)

If you go to yourwebsite.com/images you'll see the directory’s called large and medium will be there.

If you create your images like below and ftp the medium images to medium folder and same with large

so you should have
mobile.jpg (small image"base image")
mobile_MED.jpg
Mobile_LRG.jpg

You can configure the size of your medium images and large images in

Configuration-> Images
Product info - Image Medium suffix
Product info - Image Large suffix

If you have photoshop it would be able to do very quickly with actions

Hope that helps, I did a Zen Cart store 2 years and am giving it a complete overhaul at the moment that's why its fresh in my mind

- Site looks ok and functional

- Logo is a bit icky imo, might put some users off - it doesn't feel fresh, clean (but the rest of the homepage does) and looks a bit noobish - might cost you some trust points with potential customers imo.

-from a SEO standpoint, the site is terrible, but I guess SEO can be retrofitted or neglected for now since it's early days.

looks like it could be a cool site tho, I don't mean to sound negative!

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HI,

Just a couple of things on the site.

You have a link picture of a house beside the home links this looks well, why not use icons for all the links going across for New Products, Featured Products, Shopping Cart and Contact Us.

The back end section looks well, for example New Products Sections or Featured Products Section. This is professional looking. This style should be adopted for the whole site including the main page.

The one primary factor which is bring down the site is the frontpage.. Your front page should have a similar but adopted layout to your New Products or Featured Products Page.. Small images look well compared to big ones.

The front page just looks like ur trying to use the space up with the big pictures because you dont have the content to fill it where this is not the case as you have a lot of products to offer in the other sections.

Try some product specific promotions on the front page! For example offer a Nokia Phone or Sony Phone. People like to see prices! If they see a competitive price they will click further.

Oh yes and previously mentined by other your logo. You might not have time to get someon else in to do it but in the mean time you can make Irish Mobile Smaller and condense it to the top left and have some writing under it.. Maybe a pic of a mobile in the logo.

I hope this info is of some use to u! My fingers are sore now!

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I'm just after upgrading a website shopping cart from 1.7 to 1.8a and the image hanndeler works fine, should really help the load times and appearence of your site

thanks Lottoplus i'm going to try this, i'll do a quick pick in your honour..

thanks
GB

How's this Gav....does it get the seal of approval?

Attached Images

Irishmobile.jpg (266.0 KB, 7 views)