With Niora’s “OSC to CSS” contribution and osCommerce’s 2.3.1 upgrade, one may wonder at the need for another “tableless” rewrite of osCommerce. Frankly, we were overjoyed at the prospect of finally being able to retire “CSS osCommerce,” but, here we are again with Version 3.0.0.

Why is CSS osCommerce different than the other solutions?

Different objectives. While osCommerce has always been concerned with appealing to a common denominator of users and Niora’s “OSC to CSS” has been about making osC tableless, Rasa Design Studio has concentrated on an osCommerce that helped with established marketing techniques and strategies.

Our original launch of CSS osCommerce, therefore, had less to do with making the application tableless and more to do with an overall strategy of marketing and conversion. Our later versions added features that either streamlined owner operations, made the application easier for non-programming designers and consolidated code that was hopelessly redundent. Tableless design, then, was only one part of a significant series of core code changes and CSS osCommerce version 3.0 is our best rewrite, ever… and is based on osCommerce’s best rewrite.

Is CSS osCommerce the best version of osC for your development team?

OsCommerce does it’s best to be “all things to all people” and its adoption of a (mostly) tableless structure helps. Rasa Design Studio’s CSS osCommerce, however, was developed with marketing-driven projects in mind. We believed that design and marketing ideas should drive programing instead of programing constraints limiting design and marketing objectives. That said, we don’t mind if our marketing bias shows.

The best answer to the question is that low-budget shops that don’t stray far from existing contributions and design templates will find it cost- and time-effective to stay with osCommerce Classic. Projects that demand complicated new functionality may find CSS osCommerce to be more flexible and the coding structure more intuitive.

What is the cost?

Rasa Design Studio is releasing CSS osCommerce 3.0 for a flat $30 price and opening up support on our site with a new forum. Custom modifications will be billed at competitive flat rates.

In general, Seven Stone eCommerce is an answer to clunky “shopping cart” applications that emerged before the needs of shop owners was fully understood. While current applications have grown in power and sophistication over the past several years, they are often Frankenstein monsters built on a core architecture that predate Ajax popularity and sometimes, as in the case of osCommerce, even predate the power of Google.

Seven stone, then, was conceived, not merely as a shopping cart eCommerce application, but as a ‘business’ application with the ’shopping cart’ as only one key component of a larger, online business. Storefront design, marketing, operations, sales, customer relations management, Human Resource, shipping and receiving and other ‘divisions’ of a modern, growing business should be contained under one roof with all elements able to talk and interact with all of the other elements.

Whether a business starts out as a single owner-operator business, or a financed company with hundreds of employees, the framework for running all online business should be contained within a single framework and should be flexible and modular enough to grow with the business.

The idea has been there ever since my work integrating osCommerce with OrderMotion. A proposal written for Atria to study BlueNile.com’s usability and the rise of Ajax solutions has made Seven Stone eCommerce much more of a possibility. With frameworks such as Cake and Symfony, the actual building of Seven Stone has become the new priority of Rasa Design Studio.

Tableless Structure in design is better for marketing, SEO, file size and styling. It’s cheaper to maintain by designers that got past their first HTML tutorial before hiring themselves out and sites designed tableless have a much faster turn-around time.

The performance of our Tableless XHTML/CSS osCommerce demo store shows the power of this type of web site as it relates to Google and this is the number one reason why the tableless mark-up was considered the main component of our rewrite of that application.

Some designers (the ones least comfortable with CSS) will claim that nested DIV tags aren’t a real improvement to nested Tables and will point to sites such as CSS Zen Garden as a prime example of nested DIV’s. The argument is that the amount of code is often similar when DIV tags are endlessly nested. This misses the point of CSS Zen Garden, which was using that particular mark-up to be more flexible to ALL designers and not reduce file sizes or redundant coding… a point it makes clearly on the site. Further, the designers don’t suggest how they would be able to achieve such a vast array of designs from a single chunk of XHTML using only tables.

Where all else is the same and the number of incoming links are the same, tableless sites consistently out-perform tabled sites in everything from seo, w3 specs, load times, search engine rankings and file sizes.

The cost and time to make a design change with a single CSS file is reduced sharply compared to changes in tables across every document of a site. I’m able to produce a CSS osCommerce site in 7 – 10 days as compared to the 21 – 42 days for an osCommerce classic site. At $30 per hour, that translates into a huge savings.

Server performance is another issue with, for exmple, osCommerce MS2. Most osCommerce designers use a template system to design their osCommerce site and this increases the load on the server significantly, slowing the site down during peak hours for visitors. The alternative is STS or some other template is to code the PHP directly and that involves wading through thousands of lines of code across hundreds of documents. Tableless CSS osCommerce has the structure grouped together on a few pages and the design — using CSS — is located on ONE page.

No templates needed. Server gets to breathe a sigh of relief.

The newest applications and blog software use tableless mark-up for one real reason: It’s better.

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Right. That’s not how it works.

By itself, a site that’s optimized for search engines does absolutely nothing to actually promote a site let alone convert visitors that actually visit. That said, a web site that isn’t optimized for search engines will definitely get in the way of search engines that are trying to index the site.

While SEO is a necessary part of the entire marketing effort, it is yet only a very small part. Since most of our clients seem to segue into marketing with “SEO,” let’s talk about what it is and what it is not; what is expected and what the intended result should be. From there, I’ll write other articles on how to leverage an SEO site for full marketing potential.

What Google would like to see

Google represents anywhere from 65% – 90% of all non-advertised visitors to a site depending on the industry and business of the web site in question. This means that Google is the 900 pound gorilla that every eCommerce and eBusiness site needs to cater to. Given that, it behooves site owners and site developers to concentrate on Google’s needs in order to achieve the maximum number of qualified search result visitors to a site… from there, a site can concentrate on actually ‘converting’ those visitors into paying customers.

Google is in the business of returning qualified search results to its own visitors based on ‘keyword strings’ (phrases of 1 or more keywords) that visitors type into its search form. Google indexes as many web site pages as possible by sending ‘robots’ out onto the web to read individual web pages, catalog and rate keyword usage on each page and measure the number of incoming links to each page in relation to the keywords it finds.

The exact scoring mechanism that Google uses is a closely guarded secret that has spawned an entire industry devoted to nothing other than finding out what, exactly, Google likes and doesn’t like. In short, though, it can be said that a web page that scores high in the use of certain keywords shows up near the top of a search result page and attracts a lot more visitors than a site that doesn’t score highly.

Sites that try to ‘fool’ Google into thinking that their web page is about a certain keyword when, in fact, it’s really not… well, they get penalized or even banned from Google.

Remember that Google indexes web PAGES and not web SITES.

Let me say that, again: Google indexes individual PAGES on YOUR SITE and does NOT rank your site as a whole.

That means that every page on a web site needs to be optimized for one and only one keyword string. Links coming to a site with a reference to those keywords need to lead to the interior PAGE and not to the home page of the SITE. As an example of how this looks, consider searching for a book title and see what page on Amazon.com the search results lead to: Not Amazon’s Home page, but rather to the interior page most closely related to the keyword you searched for.

Characteristics of an SEO site

If you look at a typical newspaper, you’ll see that there’s a lot of text with different size and boldness on the page. A lead article may have the name of the newspaper (e.g. The New York Times) in the boldest and largest text, lead stories with large, bold text; titles with lesser sized bold sub-titles underneath. Some articles may even have a third line of bolded text before the paragraph text of the actual article begins.

HTML and XHTML marks up it’s text copy in the same way with ‘tags.’

Title Tag: The ‘name of the newspaper page which shows up on the top of a browser window. In windows, it’s the blue part of the window and the text there tells Google the very first things about what it should expect to see on the rest of the page.

h1, h2, h3, etc header tags: These are equivalent to newspaper article headlines with h1 being the most important, largest and boldest text on a page and subsequent headers being the sub-headers of a page. Keywords found in the h1 – h7 header tags tell Google that at least PART of the paragraph text that follows will be about that header.

p: Paragraph Text. Keyword strings should be scattered throughout to support the h1-h7 and title tags.

Bold (b or ’strong’ tags): Bolded text is considered more important than regular text.

a: Anchor tags are the URL links that you see on a page. Two things about this: linked text with a URL that includes a keyword phrase that ALSO SHOWS UP on the linked page is counted in two ways by Google: (1) The incoming link to the next page is counted, (2) The keyword phrase is counted.

Other elements

A word on “tables.”

Tables have long been used as a layout device for designers since the old days when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were having it out. Designs that use tables have an inherent disadvantage to designs that make use of “tableless” designs: Information in a tableless design is more likely to be presented to Google in a contextually relevant way. There are other advantages to tableless designs, but the SEO factor is the most important.

Ordered and Unordered Lists (UL, OL and LI tags): A list of items is, by nature of being part of the list, contextually related to all of the other elements on a the same list. Navigation menus that make use of vertical or horizontal list ‘buttons’ not only use less code than table systems, but also are read in a contextual way.

Design Graphics can be added as part of the HTML (sometimes messy) or as a ‘background image’ delivered by the CSS stylesheet. Rasa Design Studio makes use of background images to deliver the logo graphic and provide actual h1, h2, p keywords that can be seen by Google and not by the user. The techniques are NOT ‘black hat’ and add immeasurably to a page ranking.

With most of our design elements delivered by CSS, the actual HTML or XHTML code ends up being very light and nearly 1/3 the file size of tabled designs.

Google doesn’t really read meta tags, but other search engines do: We take the meta keyword and description tag content and mirror them in the H1 and H2 content of the page. In CSS, the H1 and H2 tags are set with display:none; and the background graphic is the logo. Visitors see a logo and Google sees text relevant to the rest of the page. Warning: If the H1 and H2 are NOT relevant to the rest of the page, Google might see the page as an attempt to ’spam’ keywords and will penalize the page and the site.

That’s only a taste of the SEO site elements. Now that you have an SEO site, what do you do with it to actually MARKET and PROMOTE the site?

SEO is passive. You’re not actually ‘doing’ anything for your site, but rather just getting out of the way of Google so that it can do it’s job. Marketing and Promotion are actions. Remember that Google counts the number of incoming links to your site so one promotion effort is to make sure that there are links leading to interior pages of your site from other, relevant, high-ranking sites. If the link contains keywords that are also found on your landing page, the link is worth more. Thus, CSS osCommerce leading to a page about CSS osCommerce is going to be worth more than click here if the page the link leads to actually talks about CSS osCommerce.

Internal links with keywords don’t count as highly as external links, but they still count. Therefore, interlinking strategies on your own site is important.

The ‘Value Proposition’ and other elements of each page will be left for another article (and once written will be interlinked from this page) but is also important for design considerations for the user experience. These elements actually lead to conversion and are as important as attracting visitors to a page.

I hope this article helps to clear up misunderstandings on the role and value of SEO. If you need your site redesigned for SEO and marketing, please feel free to contact us at any time.

– Sean Rice