from the Guru

Corraling those social media icons from Facebook, Google+….

admin — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:23:50 +0000

It’s getting so that the group of social media icons one can have on a website is just a bit unwieldy – having to size them all the same. Getting up the new one to see if it looks okay, etc.

For example, zencartdelia.com

There’s an easier way to do this work that I use on all the websites I work on. Instead of using the separate icon images, I create a background. The one to the left is 20 pixels high and 145 pixels wide.

After adding the Google+ button in, I decided this blog post was necessary because I ran into problems with that icon. Google+ says to use this for the icon:

That rendered the icon the right height but for some unknown reason, the width was the entire width of the division. I don’t have a clue why but the easiest fix was to pull that image source out of the code – and then add the google+ button to the original background graphic. That worked.

One big advantage I’ve found doing this is that I get all my icons in a single file (I use Fireworks for web work so it’s a png file). If I need to alter the color/hues of the icons to make them work better together or with the website theme, then I can manipulate each one while being able to see them all at the same time. Having an image as a background always works well because the page doesn’t wait for it load – it loads behind the code instead.

So Step 1:

Create a background graphic with each icon spaced equidistant apart – 5 pixels works well.

Step 2:

Create a division such as socialMedia to put those icons into. It has to be the same width as the image plus those 5 pixels. In the example on the website, I have that division floated to the right.

#socialMedia { background-image: url(../data/images/socialmedia.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat;width: 150px; float: right; }

Step3:

Also, style the links for that division so that each a link is its own block the same size as each icon and with a margin to the right on each one.

#socialMedia a { display:block; height: 20px; width: 20px; margin-right: 5px; float: left; }

Step4:

The html then is just the division for socialMedia and the links without anything that is visible.

That then reduces the amount of code in the source by using CSS instead of html for the images.

Don’t forget to add in the target=”_blank” as well on these. Any link that goes off your website should open in a new window.

Zen Cart Discount Coupons for free shipping and discount amounts

admin — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:43:59 +0000

I had not had the necessity of digging into discount coupons deeply before last week and got a bit of a shock when my client’s planned coupon turned out to be impossible.

Zen Cart’s discount coupons do have a number of editable parameters and I just hadn’t gotten around to reading the fine print before. You cannot have free shipping on a coupon along with a discount amount! I tried to convince my client that she needed to change her coupon – well, that wasn’t going to happen.

I looked at ThatSofwareGuy’s Big Spender module. But it couldn’t work in this specific situation. It normally would but we did have something out of the ordinary going on.

Then I got mad and started searching the Zen Cart forum for answers. Lo and behold, the solution magically appeared! Here’s the thread. In it ajeh (Linda) posts a link to the altered files.

Here’s hoping the changes are incorporated into the next version (1.5) but at least the fix is available now for 1.3.9h! Download the files here.

Zen Cart Best Practices for SEO and Google Base Feeder

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:18:48 +0000

After working with the Google Base Merchant Feed Mod from Numinix these past couple of months, I realized it was time for some instructions for entering product names and descriptions for Zen Cart.

This is not just for folks who plan to use or are using the Google Base (formerly known as Froogle). These instructions will benefit anyone with an ecommerce site – or even for that matter with any WYSIWYG editor interface. That interface is present in nearly all CMS scripts – makes it easier to add content on your website.

There are limitations to all those editors and that will be part of this conversation.

First, the images.

Naming images properly can be helpful for SEO (search engine optimization) and will prevent possible problems in the future.

Length: duh, there is a length limitation and since no one is going to count the character length of the image name, I’m not even going to mention what it is. Just know that keeping the name to 2, 3, 4 or so words is reasonable.

Spaces: remove all spaces, replacing them with either an underscore or hyphen.

Leave out common words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, and ‘or’ as well as characters such as &, parentheses, slashes, etc. Search engines ignore those common words. Some servers won’t accept the special characters and outputting the images names with ampersands to an xml feed, such as for Google base – Froogle, kills the feed.

Lowercase: some servers are case sensitive and it’s easier to remember image names (and file names) if you stay with one convention. Image.jpg, image.jpg, image.JPG are not the same files.

Some of that carries over to the product names.

If you use an ampersand in your name or description, your pages don’t validate. Not a big issue and since urls frequently have ampersands, links don’t always validate either. I just prefer to see the substitute used: ‘&’ The google feeder mod makes those changes for you in the names and descriptions so won’t break the xml feed.

Don’t use parentheses in your product name. The google feeder does not clean those out but may create havoc in google. It has never occurred to me to use parentheses but some folks do obviously. If you really want the separation from the rest of the name – just use dashes instead but you might also just rethink your naming conventions. There are better ways of naming.

For example, here’s an actual product name: Bronze (Silver Plated) Art Deco Pheasant. He’s trying to differentiate this one from the real bronze products but all he needed to do was use Bronze Silver Plated Art Deco Pheasant instead. Think of work arounds for your parentheses.

The google feeder mod does change the <, >, and curly quotes that may get pasted in from Word which brings up my next point.

Product Descriptions

First, one warning about the google feeder I just ran into. The google feeder mod does not recognize the use the space substitution of ‘ ’. It changes it to unusable and kills your feed. These sometimes get pasted in from html editors without the user realizing it. Then sometimes the user tries to get smart and add in many spaces for formatting. Ixnay, folks!

Zen Cart uses css (stylesheets) formatting for its pages and if you don’t like the way your product descriptions look when you just put text in, the css should be changed.

Many site owners will use that WYSIWYG editor to massively format their products or else format in Word and then paste in the formatting. The main result of these 2 practices is code bloat and sometimes even causes the formatting to fail online. Bear with me a minute here – got to get technical. When you paste in Word text, sometimes the paste includes all sorts of crappy code. It does paste in with extra unnecessary code. The more code on your pages, the harder it is for search engines to find the relevant text.

Also, that extra code sometimes makes it impossible to change that formatting at all, leaving the website owner tearing out hair and moaning, “What in the blue blazing h— did I do wrong?” or cursing computers, technology and Zen Cart. The more you format and play with text in Word, the more likely this is to happen, by the way.

Then if you spend a lot of time formatting in the editor, that also adds in extra unnecessary code.

It’s reasonable to either bold your text and maybe even italicize (not always very readable in a browser). If you want something larger, try changing the paragraph type. (FCKeditor names that dropdown as Format. HTMLarea shows the Header 1 at the top of the dropdown.) The choices are mainly the heading styles.

Heading styles such as H1, H2, H3 are read by search engines as more important parts of your text (so is the bold). Normally each heading is progressively larger the lower the number with H1 being the largest and therefore most important. So if you are needing something larger, I have to assume it’s more important than the rest of the text. It should important enough to have keywords in it to give the search engines something worthwhile to index.

For example:

‘Important Note’ has nothing of importance in it. You may want it to stand out to whoever views the page but making it really big is akin to shouting and is jarring and unattractive.

“Product Specifications’ might warrant an h3 or h4 or bold but that also has no strong importance. ‘Calligraphy Quote Author’ is more specific and carries 2 keywords I want to use on my calligraphy products. That’s worth an H2 or h3. I tend to chose the smaller by the way.

Zen Cart uses H1 and H2 tags but not so many h3 tags. So using H3 or H4 tags is actually more appropriate.

Don’t change the colors. Don’t change the font itself.

You already have enough colors for use on the web site. Don’t add in anymore; it’s confusing and unattractive.

Font changes may well not have the results you want. Fonts can only be viewed on someone else’s computer if they have the specifically named font. Let the CSS stylesheet control that – and don’t change stylesheet to something like Lucida or Comic Sans. Stay with Arial and it’s variations or Times and its variations. Your visitors are more likely to see the same thing you do.

Fix those long descriptions!

If you have a lot of information in your description and that page goes on forever, consider using the Tabbed Products Pro mod. That breaks up the information with tabs instead of all of it on one “page”. That install is not easy and it’s not a easy mod to configure but the results are really nice.

PCI Compliance is driving me crazy!

admin — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:17:16 +0000

Well, not me, really, but the customers who want it. And why wouldn’t they want it? Well….

PCI compliance is a complicated subject that credit card companies are presently using to charge most small online merchants more money.

What is PCI compliance?

Basically, PCI compliance is all about standards of protecting the credit card holder’s information. The major credit card companies created those standards and made them into hurdles. They aren’t simple even though most small businesses only do things in a very simple manner.

For instance, most brick and mortar stores use a credit card machine which handles the transaction and prints a receipt that no longer has the credit card number on it. (finally!). Then the retailer puts that receipt into a folder somewhere and holds onto it as long as they are required to. The day’s batch is processed through that terminal. End of story.

The rules / standards cover all sorts of situations that the small merchant does not encounter or practice. The biggest thing is about keeping the customer’s data somewhere so that it could be used later. That’s the no-no. It’s never a good idea to do that even if your customer insists you keep it for more charges down the line.

If you do keep it, then there are all sorts of rules/ recommendations about how it’s kept. If you’ve ever taken that online test for pci compliance, you’ve weeded your way through that stuff before. Of course, you probably didn’t understand any of it!

They don’t make those tests for small merchants – it’s a generic one test fits all problem. Good grief!

So start the test, answer the questions, fix the ones they don’t like the answers to and then you pass. There’s no checking – it’s the honor system.

So a brick and mortar store can pass that test no matter what their practices are and never pay an extra cent.

How does PCI compliance work for online merchants?

Now if you have an online shop in addition or instead, there is another test you have to pass. Actually, it has nothing to do with you – only with your hosting company and the scripting on your website.

Zen Cart is PCI compliant. If you have it installed with no mods or changes to the code, the scripting will pass. That’s the easy part.

The second part is your hosting company and the server your website resides on. The folks that your credit card company has contracted with does a real time, automated scan of your server. And then you fail.

You read the report and can’t make heads or tails out of it. You ask your web hosting company about it and either they didn’t answer or swore off any responsibility for the problems. You panic.

Stop right there.

If you don’t pass the test, small merchants may pay an extra $20 a month in processing fees. That’s the penalty. Nobody yells at you or threatens your ability to take credit card payments. It costs extra.

That’s no reason to panic. If $20 a month extra in fees is not within your ability to pay, you really don’t have a business.

The Technicalities

The scan looks at your server for what someone has decreed are vulnerabilities. It looks at the versions of the server software. It looks at what ports are open on the server and so on. The results can vary between the scan providers because I assume each create their own code/robots for doing that.

There’s a list of the approved companies on the PCI Standards Council website. But I was’t able to find a definitive list of the requirements to become an approved vendor.

Since I have my own dedicated server, I get to see the scan results from the different companies. I get to see sites that pass and sites that don’t. In the end it has more to do with the vendor doing the scan than it does the server. The company that my credit card processor uses can’t seem to able to scan my server and, therefore, fails. Don’t know why that’s so since other companies can manage it.

My alternative is to pay for a scan from another company. Uh, who? How much? Gosh darn, that’s hard. I started checking and the first company doesn’t post that info. The one that is presently doing my scans is $249 a year. Divide that by 20 = $22.50 a month. Another prices it at $699 a year. Cheaper to go without compliance!

PCI Compliant Webhosts

Okay, now we are talking about something else entirely. There may be PCI compliant servers out there but the hosting companies can’t (or aren’t supposed to) advertise themselves as PCI compliant unless their servers have passed the certification for physical PCI compliance. In other words, if the data center the servers rest in are PCI compliant.

There definitely are some and I have no experience with any of them.

The companies I recommend folks to for Zen Cart hosting that are PCI compliant or help to manage PCI compliancy are Geekhost (certified Zen Cart hosting) and Glowhost who manages my server. Glowhost has a dedicated PCI compliant server program – not shared hosting. Geekhost is a Canadian company with servers “up there” and Glowhost utilizes a datacenter in Atlanta.

The point is though in the end you pay more money for pci compliant servers. Geekhost is a minimum $20 a month for hosting, probably twice as much as shared hosting can be. Their dedicated server rates are better than Glowhost’s though.

Confused? Crazy yet?

Ha, join a very large club.

My recommendation is simple. Don’t worry about it until the credit card companies jack that monthly cost up ridiculously high or threaten to cut you off. Yeah, right, and cut their own throats!

Don’t let PCI compliance drive you crazy!

Does your e-commerce website scream “Trust me!”?

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:42:14 +0000

So what is a trust feature?

Sometime last year I watched a webinar about site security and what to do to have your customers trust you and therefore buy from your site. It was put on, as it turns out, by one of the big names in the industry to sell a specific product. The product will remain unnamed but it is a good product and good idea that is offered by several industry giants.

It’s expensive though for the average small site, so I took all that info they gave me in that webinar and came up with some recommendations that any cart owner can put into play.

Most folks know that having that little padlock down on your bottom browser bar show that it is locked means that the site should be safe to buy from. But that’s awfully subtle for the average visitor and also doesn’t normally show up until they start to check out.

So what do you do to engender trust in your visitors?

The first recommendation is to put images with links on your site that show certain things and to put those images at the very top – in the header.

Though that does put that kind of thing smack in one’s face, it really doesn’t work for most site owners because it can interfere with the site design.

So first, let’s look at what images work best and how they can be incorporated into your design.

The images

There are several possibilities. First, is an image that mentions or stands for your secure certificate. If you pay the big bucks, you can get one that is linked to a page that also verifies the secure certificate. That can be up to 5 times the cost of the basic secure certificate though, so it’s a decision any cart owner has to face. Is it worth it? I don’t claim to know the answer to that but I do feel like that money can be better spent on something else if your funds are tight.

Nearly every secure certificate has some image that you can use. I buy my certificates thru Rapidssl.com which is a Geotrust.com (one of the big boys) division. They supply a little image which has just recently changed:

There’s nothing to link to but it has all the necessary ingredients such as the word secured, the padlock and that really nifty note about the warranty. You could link it to the website but that’s no proof of anything and I think it’s kinda misleading since it doesn’t verify anything.

So when buying your secure certificate, you may need to stop and think about that. Many times your hosting company is selling the certificates. Ask them whose certificates are selling and if there any images that you can use on the website. Ask questions – don’t just take their word for it.

Next up is your payment processor.

Authorize.net has a verifiable seal you can post on the website. Click on it and it will tell you that, yes, they are the payment provider for that website. I really like that because it’s free! LinkPoint/FirstData has only a picture you can use. So again, ask questions of your payment provider. You do need to know who your provider is, obviously; however, many website owners don’t actually understand the distinction between who you signed up with and the actual payment processor.

Payment processors such as Authorize.net and FirstData don’t normally sign up customers directly. They provide the service and then many folks are out there selling those services. I use MerchantWarehouse.com for my own processor and recommend them because their rates are reasonable and they use Authorize.net. Who you sign up with does make a difference in rates by the way.

Then there is the Better Business Seal. They also provide a clickable image for verification. This one can be put in the footer if you feel there’s too much space being utilized by that one.

Last, while you are at it, why don’t you put in the credit cards you accept? Just a small row of them will also let your customer know up front what choices they will have at checkout.

Where do you put those images?

They recommend the header. Ouch. You see how large the images are above. That can really take up some real estate. I prefer to see the phone number and maybe the cart contents in addition to the primary navigation and logo in the header. So I might put the credit cards in the header (not a bad idea) but I never put those “trust features” in the header.

If you have a 2 column cart, a left column and main column, then you can put it on the front page in the content and box it off some way. But the best way is to have it on every page, so I’m setting up sites as 3 column sites most of the time now. Then I use a sidebox entitled Secure Shopping to put those images in. I like having the sidebox header text of secure shopping because that reaffirms again and again the message you are trying to deliver.

But in Zen Cart I can also easily tinker with the CSS to make the entire sidebox disappear – except for the contents. It no longer looks like a Zen Cart sidebox and still fulfills the function.

You can see my sidebox in action on ZenCartDelia.com. Also, I’ve provided a free mod for the Zen Cart sidebox as a reward to you for reading this post!

What’s wrong with the Zen Cart checkout?

admin — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:13:40 +0000

I want to talk seriously about the Zen Cart checkout.

A frequent request I get from my clients is for a one page checkout as if it was the holy grail. Everyone seems to be under the impression that having several steps to the checkout reduces sales.

I want to seriously – and loudly – say NO! There’s very little wrong with the Zen Cart checkout.

First off, if you have customers signing up and not finishing a sale, there is a mod for you to start investigating what your customers see as obstacles to buying form you. It’s called Recover Cart Sales and is located in the contributions section (http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=100)

That mod will allow you to see abandoned carts so you can contact the customer to find out why they quit in the middle of a sale. What you find out may surprise you.

I just recently watched a webinar by James Arrendondo of Exclusive Concepts (exclusiveconcepts.com) about cart abandonment. You can watch it yourself if you want at http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/OnDemandWebinarLimited/ondemandworkshop-video.html.

I had a chance to speak with James after the webinar to find out more about what he does and who his clients are. He only works with the big dogs, folks, sites that amass 50,000 visitors plus per month. So I suspect he knows what he is talking about and guess what? He agrees with what I’ve been saying all along.

Here are the facts from a Forrester Research study:

70% of shoppers have abandoned their carts at least once

57% of shoppers don’t want to pay high shipping costs

48% of shoppers did not realize the full cost of purchase until reaching the cart

41% use the cart for research

15% find the shopping cart process too complicated

The reason why this resonates with me so strongly is the 41% number – using the cart for research. Personally, I do a lot more research than buying online so I knew that there were more like me out there.

So what can you do to improve your Zen Cart performance?

First and foremost is to answer your customers’ questions up front. So continue reading for James’ questions and my Zen Cart and general ecommerce answers…

Open Source – Rebellion or Responsible Development?

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:07:26 +0000

I had a conversation with developer from the Drupal community yesterday that did not center on the technicalities of developing for the open source community but on more global issues and philosophical concerns.

This fellow, Alex, stated that open source was a community made up of rebellious folks – they want it their way and do not follow blindly the code of others. Well, he didn’t say it that way but that’s what I took away from that conversation.

We are talking about tax code compliance specifically.

I set up my clients’ Zen Cart websites for taxes in their home state and don’t worry about what they do with that after the fact. And Alex says that’s the problem. We in the open source community manage to ignore how intricate the tax code can be. Why? Well, because it’s so intricate and changes regularly depending on the governmental entity(ies) whims and laws.

So the solution? Well, it’s definitely not something I’m going to tackle without some real time reaching out to get tax rates, that’s for sure. About 4 years ago I coded changes into a cart on request of a client who said he was required to collect sales tax in all US states. There were some special cases in about 10 states for his type of product. The solution worked fairly well until I started upgrading his sites.

So we started looking at tax specific alternatives.

This customer has been paying 100′s of dollars to integrate with an online program that delivered tax rates by zip code. It does nothing else.

After some research I found AvaTax. This program goes way beyond just supplying tax rates. Go to their site to find out more about it.

But the problem is that there is no mod available yet. Why? Many of the proprietary e-commerce carts have developed their own mods and are profiting off AvaTax. Not so much the Open Source carts. Ew, profit and open source? No, no, we must remain free from such taint!

So here’s the quandry, do we in the open source world stay aloof, above the muck of making money? Or do we abdicate responsibility to our clients, users and developers by avoiding legalities?

Because tax compliance is a reality in most nations. And it is a part of doing business in e-commerce. Here in the US, we are seeing the states start trying to regulate the internet to get the money off those sales. There’s even a push for a federal sales tax in Congress and I’m sure the internet sales will be included in that. Sen Dick Durbin (D) of Illinois has announced his intention to introduce a bill this year for an internet sales tax.

It’s coming – more regulation, more taxes, complicating the tax codes and e-commerce more and more.

So, it looks like I’ll be working on the Ava Tax mod for Zen Cart – without any help from the Zen Cart community. Why? Because I’m not allowed to post for help on this in the forum. I did post and it was removed due to the fact that I’m promoting a commercial product.

AvaTax isn’t paying me to do this. My client is glad to donate some money but there’s no way they will finance this. Once it’s done, I’ll be able to profit on a commission basis most likely. But I know better than to count on that: I’m doing it because it has to be done.

What’s happening at Zen Cart:

Now as much as posting about commercial ventures is forbidden on ZenCart.com, there is a move afoot to create revenue streams for the Zen Cart project. They have a book about Zen Cart that they promote and they now require payments from hosting companies as part of their Zen Cart Certified Hosting.

I had noticed that happening and have been curious but was enlightened this week by someone close to the core team. It’s all about PCI compliance and certifying Zen Cart. Zen Cart is PCI compliant but to get certified as that costs money.

PCI Compliance

Fact of life, making money on the web cannot be done based on totally free software in the future: if you take credit cards, your options for ecommerce carts will decrease as new rules come into play from the credit card companies. Especially if you really make money…

Most of the small carts find themselves paying an extra $10 or $20 a month because of PCI non-compliance. PCI compliance depends more that just your software; it also depends on your server so that is harder to attain.

Carts that make the big bucks pay a much bigger premium for non-compliance – much bigger.

Okay, so tax compliance is mandatory and PCI non-compliance can be costly. Yet Open Source projects either disallow commercial aspects completely or are making money behind the scenes themselves. Kinda schizophrenic actually.

If the Zen Cart core team would allow discussion of commercials addons for taxes, perhaps I could let them know that developing a partnership with Avalara’s AvaTax can be profit making for Zen Cart instead of just me. Well, I’ll send links to this blog post and hope I’m not ignored!

My source from the Zen Cart team predicts that Zen Cart may be the only open source e-commerce project left standing in a few years because of direction they are taking to work towards PCI (PA-DSS) certification.

Okay, then I’ve thrown in my lot with the right folks – not by accident, mind you. I had good reasons for choosing Zen Cart years ago. But there’s more work to be done, more things that need to be openly discussed and more reasons to look toward commercial addons that do what no lone developer or small group can do.

The Streamlined, Efficient Checkout Mod for Zen Cart

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:09:13 +0000

So all of my research and thought have come down to this. I wanted to improve the existing Zen Cart checkout without altering core files. Here are my conclusions that I have incorporated into my newest mod.

First, I took a piece of advice from Fast and Easy Checkout and Numinix.com. He recommends turning off the sideboxes for checkout – getting rid of distractions for the buyer and keeping that buyer on track to finish the process; i.e., completing the purchase.

The Log In Page

I’ve always liked the split login in page (a setting in admin/configuration/layout) but never liked the fact that it added another link into the process of checking out for new customers. So that page is now automatically a split page but with the create account on the left and the login form on the right.

If you have Express PayPal activated for the checkout, the create account box appears below the Paypal Box which has been shortened and made into a Paypal box only. I changed the text for PayPal to emphasize that a PayPal account is not required.

Checkout Shipping

Borrowing from another mod, Checkout Without Account (COWOA), I took the visual cues further. Since COWOA changes core files and does create and keep account information (so you are lying to your customer), I’m not as big a fan of that as I might be. But there’s definitely lessons to be learned from it.

I made changes to that visual header, bringing in more css and getting rid of the png images to make it more cross-browser compliant. I changed the arrows to images that are better visual cues for where you are in the checkout process. I also changed the colors to red for a stronger contrast to catch the eye.

I moved the continue to step test to next to the the continue button for greater clarity. I moved the change address button to underneath the address to get it closer and also removed some instructional text from beside the address. Though it helped to explain things to the customer, I felt it did more harm cluttering up the page. There are plenty of visual clues to the fact that it is the shipping address now.

Checkout Payment

Carrying that on to the payment page, I moved the change address button (It was edit before) to underneath the address and allowed the order total box to flow up to the right hand side to be more easily seen I also changed the text next to the continue button to read continue to review instead of confirm as it also says that on the confirm page. That’s a confusion that needs cleaning up in the default Zen Cart.

Checkout Confirm

You can purchase this mod here: http://www.zencartdelia.com/zen-cart-store/mods/efficient-zen-cart-checkout

Editing the Login – Shopping Cart – Checkout links in Zen Cart

admin — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:41:37 +0000

The default Zen Cart template has some hidden functionality that I like to bring out of the shadows. You know, the two links, Home and Login, right up top in the header?

What you may not realize is that there is also the links for the Shopping Cart, My Account, Checkout and Logoff mixed into that coding. So many folks get rid of that coding when redoing the template and that’s a really bad idea – these are necessary navigation aids to get the buyer through the buying process.

So let’s look at that coding to see what changes will make the hidden links visible.

The code is contained in the templates/your_template/common/tpl_header.php file. (If you don’t have that file or folder in your template, grab it from the default template.) If you don’t have a custom template or are using the classic template, stop right now and go read about template overrides in Zen Cart. When you get your cart set up properly, come back to this article.

My minimal change is to move the shopping cart link.

The lines in tpl_header.php that we are concerned about are 47 – 61 and this is the shopping cart line:

Just move that line up above the previous line :

count_contents() != 0) { ?>

so that the code now looks like this:



count_contents() != 0) { ?>

Your shopping cart link becomes visible and the my account link (CHECKOUT_SHIPPING) is left to become visible once you put something in the cart.

You want the Checkout link visible, too?

Remove the lines of php code. Change this:

count_contents() != 0) { ?>

to this:

To make the My Account link visible move lines 50-51

to after lines 55-56

That will place the My Account link before the shopping cart and checkout links.

No Bra – Get Fired!

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:08:37 +0000

I had the occasion this weekend to tell this tale twice – once to a dear friend 10 years younger and once to my husband of 21 years. It’s part of my history but I realized that it’s a tale needing telling because of the absurdity.

I graduated college at the end of 1972 so we are talking nearly 40 years ago and, of course, it seems like yesterday! It may be ancient history to you young’uns but I am trying to make a point here. I recently heard a couple of young women talking about feminists as if they were left wing radicals. Sorry, that’s not me but I am a feminist and every woman should be one. It’s like racial discrimination – the fight is not won.

My First Job

I was hired as the education reporter the last week in 1972 for a small daily newspaper in Valdosta, Georgia. Fresh out of college with no money, being paid a ridiculously low hourly wage and with a husband still in college, I was also extremely naive and had no clue about what the real world was about.

Within the first 10 days or so, the publisher (newspaper boss to those who don’t know) called me into his office supposedly to discuss the health insurance program. I was a bit mystified because I had already been told about it.

To this day the man probably still doesn’t know what my face looks like because his eyes never rose above my chest level. It was very disconcerting.

You see, I stopped wearing a bra in 1969 when I got married. Being small breasted and afflicted with scoliosis, bras were a torment for me anyway and my husband suggested I quit wearing them.

Sometime after my boss’s “talk”, the religion editor, the only other female reporter, pulled me aside one day.

“You have to start wearing a bra,” she whispered.

“What?” I exclaimed. “Who told you to tell me this? You aren’t my boss!”

“They are worried that you will get raped by the guys back in the printing press room, ” she continued.

Open mouth, stutter, move to restroom, cry for a while.

I had no response to such an absurd statement; I just knew it was ridiculous but had no way rebut it if they believed it to be true.

So I continued on doing my job.

Seven weeks into the job the managing editor called to me and told me to come ride with him.

As we started off towards my house, he said, “You have to start wearing a bra.”

I said, “I don’t even own one.”

“Go buy one,” he said.

“I can’t afford to buy anything on this salary!” I retorted.

“Make your husband buy you one!”

“He’s still in college.”

“Make him quit school.”

“Why, I’ld quit my job before I would do that!”

He stopped the car, reached over me, and opened the car door. He then actually pushed me out of the car and said something that let me know I had just been fired. I don’t even remember his last words. I was 2 blocks away from my house.

Unreal, huh?

Later Years

What’s funny is that once I hit my late 40′s, I realized that those objects of that first firing were not so perky or small anymore and I went and bought some bras. I tried wearing them but they were even more uncomfortable than before. I have, however, been working hard all along at purchasing clothes that tended to mask the fact that I wasn’t wearing a bra.

I would wear a bra when going out where I had to be dressed up for a social occasion or job interview or business meeting.

I bought many bras trying to find a comfortable one.

I gave up.

Turns out I have back damage and disk deterioration that simply makes wearing a bra a painful experience.

The Future?

Women have to take control of fashion. What I’m supposed to wear – what you are supposed to wear – has always and still is dictated by the fashion industry – the still male-controlled and money-hungry fashion industry.

Say no to high heels – they are bad for you.

Say no to ill-fitting shoes no matter how pretty they are. I’ve had 2 operations for that very reason. They didn’t even make shoes for my wide feet for decades – causing a condition called Morton’s Neuroma. Look it up.

Be practical about footwear.

Be practical about your clothes. Discomfort can impact your work performance.

Be confident. Confidence can carry you through and help those around you ignore what you are wearing.

Be aware. No bra? Showing cleavage? You may still attract unwanted attention and it can impact your career. Men are still men and still have trouble ignoring those physical attributes. It’s now politically and legally incorrect to comment on your employees’ clothing choices without a stated clothing policy and 2 lawyers standing by. So you might be making a bad impression without knowing it. Just be aware.

Feminist?

You dang well better be. If you think that’s a dirty word, think again. Be proud of being woman. Understand women’s history in the workplace. Know the fight for women’s rights is not over.

Oh, and try not to get fired. And if you do, learn from it…learn to like who you are.