My Digital Home

[laurie_lewis]

Well, I have pushed to go button on my first attempt and would love some feedback.

http://mydigitalhome.com.au

[pommy_davo]

I like it, nice simple design and it's easy to find your products. Speaking as someone who has just taken the plunge into VirtueMart it is the sort of site I would love to start off with. How long did it take you to put together?

[laurie_lewis]

I initially spent a LOT of time trying to design my own template (as a noob this wasted a lot of time).  In the end I purchased a template from JoomlaShack for $50 AU (best investment I made) and then went throught the modification phase.  I found with a good support forum that it was easy to change things around and I got ideas as I looked at other peoples problems/sites.  It is actually quite easy to make a template look quite different from other peoples who have also purchased the same template.  I am not trying to advertise here just my experience as a noob with web design.

After buying the template it only took about two weeks of playing around to get it to this stage.  A lot of that time was finding appropriate graphics, putting products in etc.  A lot of the issues with virutemart I came across were dealt with here in the forums.

I was familiar with Joomla so that made it a bit easier.  I do have the family tree on another website based on Joomla allready (http://thelewisfamily.id.au).

What I have found is that you are continually trying to improve it and "value add" to the site.  I now have to try and figure out how to have products that my distributors will not allow me to advertise the price of, along side products I can.  In the end I bit the bullet and said I am basically happy with the design lets get it out there and fine tune the rest of the things as we go.

Thanks for the positive comments.

Laurie

[pommy_davo]

So it was just an off the shelf template then?
How much html knowledge do you have?

[laurie_lewis]

Enough to so that I could edit the CSS files to get the colours/fonts I wanted and to fix up some VM modules so that they fitted within the template.  It has still taken some fiddling with the template and with VM templates to get the look I was after.  I have also added extra module positions that I have not used yet to add extra flexibility.

I suppose this was made a little bit easier through my other site which has a template that I did from scratch - but based on another one I saw (http://thelewisfamily.id.au).  I don't think you will find a off the shelf template that you will not have to modify in some way to get an individual look. 

I can find my way around with tutorials but I am not a html/css wiz by any means.

Does buying a base template make it a cop out

Laurie

[pommy_davo]

I'll ask you that question after you've made your first million!

I don't think it is a cop out at all - I spent weeks worrying about having to learn CSS, html, PHP, MySQL and half a dozen other technologies before I realised I hadn't actually done anything at all. It's impossible to learn everything and if you did, you wouldn't have time to sell anything. So get together a solution that suits you and concentrate on getting your business going, that's my view.

I'm still going to try to learn some MySQL though, I find that kind of fun!

[laurie_lewis]

It is all fun but I think your statement about getting something OUT THERE is the key.  I have found that php/css/html is something I have had to learn far more that mysql.

Laurie

[pommy_davo]

Well I wouldn't mind knowing a bit of php/CSS/html as well! MySQL will probably be more important for me, i'm selling comics on my site and I have thousands so tracking them all will be more of an issue for me.
Good luck with the site anyway, I'll be putting it in my favourites and I'll keep on eye out on what you're selling, I live in Melbourne myself so if you do mail order I might just test those VirtueMart scripts of yours!

[awlfm]

The design is simple and nice. i like it.
I like the small button that provide feature to fix the witdh. it is very useful
how u do it ?

[laurie_lewis]

The width controls are part of this template but if you search the forum at Joomla I can remember seeing the ode there on how to do it.

Thanks for the feedback

Laurie