Howdy folks! Hope everyone is into the winter holiday season in full swing by now! I finally got around to redesigning my main site (zen cart) and the blog site (wordpress) to make them look a bit more uniform. It was just CSS changes though and some photoshop stuff. I mainly just made the content div tags transparent then added the main background a lightened robot with the magnifying glass. Way easier than I anticipated. And lastly, I added in a cross web app search tool in zen cart to search through the wordpress blog as well. This was pretty easy to set up as well. It is based on http://www.sphider.eu and is really cool. It requires a bit of programming to get it to run perfectly, but after that, it just rocks! I really like it as it takes all of the search results and puts it right into a defined page of zen cart. -Tom

People are always asking me for samples of zen carts for look and feel, so I finally decided to assemble several of our favorites and included a nifty tool called Template Switcher on the left column that allows you to switch the look of the theme of the zen cart right before your eyes.  It is pretty neat. Here is the link: Zen cart Sample Templates If you have any questions, please let us know! -Tom

One of my favorite Zen Cart mods – Google Analytics for Zen Cart is the absolute best solution for tagging all of your pages easily and rapidly. If you have an estore, be sure to go the full route and make sure the success page gets the correct tagging to send back to GA and link in to your ecommerce stats… this is vital folks! This allows you to be able to directly exactly which keywords generate how much MONEY! Once this is known, Zen Cart optimization is a cake walk!

How important is it to you to install Google Analytics into your Zen Cart??? Only the most important thing you could possibly do… Without it, you are completely blind to knowing what to do… what is your top landing page? What is your top exit page? What is your bounce rate? What are the trends for any of these? Which keyword search makes you the most money? These are just a few things… without this knowledge, you are wasting a LOT of time guessing what to do to your site… so many people come to me wanting to change their theme or their look of the current theme… and the first thing I ask is, “What is your bounce rate?” After a beat, and no answer… they realize that they have no idea what I am talking about… I had one client with a bounce rate of 19% who was wanting a website redesign, and I told her flat out NO… not needed, spend your money elsewhere (Folks, a 19% bounce rate is GREAT. This means that slightly less than 1 out of 5 of ALL VISITORS to her site, left immediately! This is great cause the industry average is 30 to 40%!)