osCommerce, CRELoaded, osCMax and CSS osCommerce projects

Sometimes, Rasa Design Studio is hired to fully design and program for osCommerce projects and sometimes we work on only the parts of the projects that other designers have trouble with. 

The following is an abbreviated list of osCommerce projects that Rasa Design Studio designed, programmed, or worked on in some way. The sites were done using either the Rasa Design Studio Tableless CSS osCommerce, osCommerce Classic, CRELoaded, osCMax or has gone so far away from any of them that we can barely find the code left to credit osCommerce.

Form-Stil Company (Client: Firma-Seliger.de): Immediately out of the gate, we discovered an oversight to our "Tableless osCommerce" that was fixed with this project: "What if the client wanted tableless structure, but still wanted to use tables?" In order to stay in line with the design at derdiedas24.com, Firma-Seliger needed the subcategory and product listing pages to use a nested table system... at least for now.

Rasa Design Studio decided to make the entire set of listing pages and modules a more flexible system. Three choices are set in the configure.php file: Tableless listing, Tabled Listing, Use outside file template. We rebuilt CSS osCommerce with this new feature incorporated into the default system.  Still Search Engine Optimized, the nested tables do increase the file sizes, but content is still at the top of the source code and in an hierarchical order with the rest of the page.

MishkaNYC.com designed by Greg Passuntino. Rasa Design Studio was hired to merge PayPal Express, PayPal Direct, Authorize.Net Consolidated (we had 1.7b, which was removed by osCommerce.com) and programming fixes related to options / attributes prices... all of which went after the same resources and had to be passed using cURL.

Using the default osCommerce Classic, MishkaNYC represents one of the difficulties that osCommerce developers face: Contributions (Mods / Hacks) that conflict with each other or go after the same resources.

One of the few sites we agreed to do using Flash with osCommerce (we just couldn't resist when we saw the total design they presented us with) OSPCatalogs.com uses a very heavily customized version of osCommerce Classic and parts of a heavily customized STS_Templates that we found useful. The product fields were changed to provide author, title and other book-types of information. Shipping and other functions were also modified and the entire store part of the site was created to integrate smoothly with the outside part of the site.

We NEVER recommend the use of Flash on the outside parts of the site, or with the front page. In this case, there were major considerations that had to be made about the marketing strategy of the site, since it would, as presented, lose a great deal of its natural marketing edge with the use of Flash. As most marketers know, most search engines cannot read text from Flash... Google can, but only with some success. Therefore, several techniques were employed to pull Google into the interior of the site where the good stuff was: Keyword-rich text.

Even so, it was an active decision by the company to forgo Search Engine Results in favor of a site that matched their alternate marketing channels. Since OSPCatalogs already had success with that part of their total strategy, it did not seem a big loss to them to lose some visitor traffic from search engine results.