Website design updated

Dated : 12/Sep/2010

Hi I am back with some development upgrade. I have added lots of new features to the website. There is no point in explaining everything but I'll explain few.

Mini Basket
If you go to the website, you can see a mini basket on right side, which moves with the scrolling. you can hide/show basket. Its made with jQuery. Another excellent feature of this basket is if you go to any category or manufacturer page and click add to basket, the item flies to the basket and is added without any postback.

Search enhancement
I was not fully happy with nopcommerce search, so I have built my custom search which uses sharepoint and indexing. All the pages are indexed in a sharepoint server and uses microsoft live search facility to search the website and show results. This means there is no database search and its faster.

Shopping Cart
The main shopping cart was very lengthy and lots of pages so I have changed that to use ajax. Now there are only three/four steps from shopping cart to the payment. This should increase conversion rate hopfully.

Automatic stock update
As I don't stock everything and some of the stock is coming from supplier feeds so I have added automatic stock update in the admin panel. The stock updates automatically every night. For this the website has a task which automatically logs in to the suppliers servers, download csv file and updates the stock associated to the supplier. The price changes are emailed to me so that I can adjust my prices.

I have also reduced Viewstate on most pages and optimised pages for loading speed.

Here is the website address www.just4laptops.co.uk

Please have a look at the website and your positive/negative feedback is welcome. My email is [email protected]

I also do custom design/development and soon be in nopcommerce solution providers so if you need anything doing please let me know.

Regards
Atiq

Finally some fresh design for nopCommerce. Well done!

Hi,

Very impressive - nice that you have gone full screen width also. Looks really good.

Regards,
Andrew

Thanks for both comments. I have changed lot of things though.

hi,

nice site, but you could shrink your ViewState and also use the CombineScripts = "true" and set ScriptMode = "Release" for the ScriptManager.

Thanks jkr

I was thinking that viewstate is quite big but didn't get time to look more into it.

How do I shrink it? Also what would those settings do to script manager? Would I need to do the change on every page for script manager?

hi,

in version 1.30 the scriptManager was removed from the master page (Root.MasterPage) and now resides on pages that need it like products.aspx and account.aspx. so open those pages (they're the most important ones - i really don't care about others) and replace the script manager line(s) with

<ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager runat="Server" EnableScriptGlobalization="true"
        EnableScriptLocalization="true" ID="ScriptManager1" LoadScriptsBeforeUI="false"
        CombineScripts="true" ScriptMode="Release" />

next try adding EnableViewState=""false" to the header, header menu, footer, info block and other controls that don't use postback. some controls don't use postback but in the PageLoad event they have a condition if(!IsPostBack) BindData(); comment the if statement because they won't render on postback if viewstate is off.

regards,
jkr

jkr

Thanks for the code. I haven't used it yet but I have managed to reduce the size of viewstate quite a bit. There is one problem though I was having this problem before even changing the size of viewstate, sometimes I get this invalid viewstate error. I don't think it effects anything on the website but still if I am getting the error there is something wrong. Here is the error please have a look and let me know what's wrong.

Log type:      Unknown
Severity:   11
Message:   Invalid viewstate.
Exception:   System.Web.HttpException: Invalid viewstate. at System.Web.UI.Page.DecryptStringWithIV(String s, IVType ivType) at System.Web.UI.Page.DecryptString(String s) at System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler.DecryptParameter(NameValueCollection queryString) at System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler.ProcessRequestInternal(HttpResponse response, NameValueCollection queryString, VirtualFileReader fileReader) at System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler.System.Web.IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)
Page URL:   http://www.just4laptops.co.uk/ScriptResource.axd?d=fbAo_KAYg5IzPcGh3w9Da80GDGZQ3gV1ZrWXJMr-tzLT1k3R_


Thanks
Atiq

hi,

i get this error too and it seems it's from the google crawler. do an ip lookup.
haven't looked into it yet.

regards,
jkr

Hi,

I was looking How to make full screen design. Can you help me how to do that ??