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Hope, Faith and Charity - Custom scenting, lotions, beauty products.

The site I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past month or so is just about finished (only needs a few more tweaks) so I’m going to go ahead and post it here.

Hope, Faith and Charity

The site is all in CSS/HTML, and to my knowledge looks good in all the new browsers. There are a few issues with IE5/5.5 I believe, but I’m willing to live with them as they are just minor cosmetic issues that don’t affect the function of the site.

Back-end

I used the ExpressionEngine for the back-end, which turned out to work extremely well. The pMachine guys have done a fantastic job with this product, and it’s worth every penny of the $200 price tag. It would be overkill for a personal blog site, but if you need a CMS of some kind, it’s fantastic. I haven’t found a better and more flexible system, as far as the template system goes, and ease of customization. The best feature in my opinion is the unlimited custom weblog entry fields, which allow you to set as many fields for an “entry” as you like. For instance on this site I have a price field, title, short description, long description, three different picture fields, a hidden keywords field, and a few others. I can then display these anywhere on the page simply by putting a variable in the template like this: {price}. Then for the Frequently Asked Questions section I have a completely different set of entry fields, post statuses, categories, and templates.

The URLs are search engine friendly, since they don’t have any crazy characters in them like ? or &. Like I said the template system is really great, and you can completely change the way data is displayed just by changing the URL that you link to.

I’ve tried programming similar functions in PHP myself before and I just couldn’t get it. I’m not a programmer, don’t like programming, and don’t want to learn programming. But with EE I can for the most part do anything I like, but without writing any PHP at all. (But if you did want to add PHP, you can add it anywhere in the page, and have it processed before or after the EE codes have been processed) The EE system has some simple “if” logic, which lets you do some things like:

{if title != “hide”}

…show some html…

{/if}

So that if the title of an entry is “hide” then it won’t show up in that entry listing. You couldn’t do advanced logic with the system, but it’s not designed to do that. The logic it does provide though is easy to understand and use, even for someone that doesn’t like programming like me.

EE only recently moved to its 1.0 release, so I found 3 bugs while working on the site. However, after posting them on the pMachine support forum, they were always fixed within 24 hours, and added to the next bug fix release the following day.

Search Engines

The site is already on Yahoo somehow, probably because of a link I posted a couple of weeks ago when I had a question about the site. I was still pretty shocked that it’s already coming up as #14 on the search term “Custom Scenting” on Yahoo, which is the product the client wants to push the most. Coding sites with CSS really does seem to make them extremely indexable, as well as having good titles, which this site has, in my opinion.

Hopefully the friendly google bot will make it’s weekly visit to my site soon and head on over to the Hope, Faith and Charity site as well. ;)

Shopping Cart

The only drawback to using EE for an e-commerce site is that you are limited in the options you have for a shopping cart. Namely, you have to use an external shopping cart like PayPal or 1ShoppingCart, which open in a new window when you add something to the cart. This obviously has some usability issues, but for this particular site and budget, it was the way to go.

I decided to go with PayPal, mainly because it’s free until you sell something, and the shopping cart links are generated using a standard HTML form which makes it easy to pop-in the price and description of items from the EE back-end. With some other services like 1ShoppingCart, you have to first login to their site and create the product, then copy/paste the link into your site. This would have created a much unwanted extra step to adding every product.

However, PayPal definitely has drawbacks as well. Mainly that some people hate PayPal, and also because they don’t offer weight-based shipping. You have to either setup a flat rate for shipping each item, or charge shipping based on a range of prices in the order total. But again, because of the budget of this site, I had to make the call to live with those drawbacks in order to get the site done on budget.

According to pMachine, they will eventually add an e-commerce module to EE that will be available as a separate purchase. If it is anywhere near as well-put together as EE itself is, then it will be the killer shopping cart system in my opinion.

The reason I didn’t go with another shopping cart system like OSCommerce is because every flavor of OSC I‘ve ever tried has been a terrible pain in the butt to customize. You have to sort through pages and pages of PHP code just to change how a little box is drawn. Plus there are layers and layers of nested tables, which would have taken me ages to get rid of. Perhaps the Zen Cart will be a good option in the future, as it has a CSS based layout, but for now it seems to unstable to me, and doesn’t have all of the features and contribution add-ons that other OSC installs have. I figured the CSS layout and search engine friendliness of EE would be more important than having and internal shopping cart. Hopefully I made the right choice. I’ve never seen a OSC site come up on a search engine. I don’t think they get indexed very well at all. And I’d rather have someone find the site and be slightly confused for a second, rather than never find the site at all.

Final Thought

Overall the site was a really fun project. We did all of the photography, so there are some nice big pictures to look at, which will hopefully entice people to buy. I know I’m always reluctant to buy something I see online when the picture is so small I can’t even tell what it is. Hopefully it’ll be successful for the client, and far exceed their expectations. I think it is the best site I’ve done, and I’m pretty proud of it, so I hope they are too.

So if you need any lotions, sugar scrubs, milk baths, salt scrubs, Bella Notte linens, Burt’s Bees products, face masks, hair masks, essential oils, custom scented items, body washes, natural hand-made soaps, BedHead pajamas, etc. for your wife or girlfriend, be sure to checkout Hope, Faith and Charity. :)

yoyoyo…the site looks awesome man!

one crit…lose the default blue links, make ‘em green :-) other than that its nice and clean, good stuff.

I left them blue for usability I guess. The audience for this site is pretty non-technical oriented, and I figure the “Stuff you click on” needs to be as obvious as possible.

Aren’t you nielsen’s little friend? ;)

It looks awesome, derek. If I was a money-spending-bath-stuff-loving woman I would stuff there for sure.

uhmm, buy* stuff there for sure.

Many thanks for the kind words, derek. Oh, and have no fear we are working away on the EE Commerce module every chance we get.