As I'm currently out of work again I've got plenty of time on my hands and want to improve my skills with my zen cart and what I can do with it.
I've been loooking at the e-start zen cart book but the reviews seem a bit mixed so I'm a bit confussed!
Anyone here got it or think it's worth a shot?

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www.pupsandpets.co.uk

I dont have it but a friend of mine bought it and he went from novice to very good in no time.

But all the info you need is on the zencart support site.. its just not as organised as the book.

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Solid Wood Furniture, Free UK Shipping www.furnish-your-home.co.uk

I'm probably the best to chime in on this topic because I probably know the least, as in...relatively nothing.

First, I'm not a programmer, and have little to no knowledge of HTML, PHP. I do have some familiarity with programs like Corel Draw, so my thoughts were that a WYSIWYG approach (Dream Weaver) to building a site would be the logical choice.

The problem is, I haven't found a good explanation of the relationships between Zen Cart (proper) and it's customizable template, versus a Zen Cart template that can be purchased, and whether you actually can use Dream Weaver to re-format/customize either of them.

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Business Software | Online Business

Using the template structure to create your own templates I find it to be the best way to customize my sites exactly as I want them.

What I find with buying templates from the likes of template monster is they can lock the source code, so if you want to make any changes to the bought template its nearly impossible (depending on what you want to change). They do other changed to some of the core files in some of their templates too and sometimes the only way to get around it is to go back to them and pay them more for customization or get another website developer to sort it for you.

Learning how to create your own template is not as hard as it seems. A good way to learn is to download a free template from the zen-cart website and look how it is structed, look at how it uses seperate folders (template folders) to house the template. Compare the template files with the ones already preinstalled on zencart (classic template or template_default).

There are tons of free online tutorials to choose from. The a good place to start tho is on the zencart support site. They have a section that explains some of the how-to's in step by step for beginners.

But once you start getting the hang of the template system you will start to create better templates very quickly.

I started off know very little about zen-cart or php, but now I have a ton of templates done, and each better than previous.

The 2 programs I use mainly are Photoshop (for graphics) and Dreamweaver (for the layouts and code)

It's really worth trying to create your own templates because not only are you creating a template on your own, but you will be learning other stuff too like php and html, and maybe even some mysql database stuff.

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Solid Wood Furniture, Free UK Shipping www.furnish-your-home.co.uk