Dos-and-Donts

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[edit] Do's and Don'ts when using Shopfitter 4

Don'ts

  • Don't start to build your new webshop by editing the demo shop. If you do this then every time you install an update from Shopfitter it will be deleted and over written.
  • Don't use special characters (e.g. : £ & % / ") in category or product names, especially forward slashes (/). They may adversely affect the navigation by altering the server file paths (the links on the site will be wrong) UPDATE ':', '/', '&' can ONLY be used in category names.
  • Don't use the same name for any products or categories. SF4 uses the item name to create the filenames for the web pages so if there are any duplicates the navigation doesn't work correctly.
  • Don't use double quotation marks (or /) in product names, summary descriptions, options or keywords. This will stop the JavaScript shopping cart working correctly. Use two single quotation marks (or -) instead, it looks the same but doesn't affect the JavaScript. We have automated a find and replace to automate this in the publish process, but it's best not use them just in case.
  • Do not delete or use lowercase letters or spaces in a product id, only uppercase and numbers e.g. MASAI003 not masai003(bug found FEB 2009 which can break the shipping).
  • If you do not need the tax rates on the main page please do not delete them, this will stop the cart and search working, Shopfitter needs to have a default tax rate, so please set the default rate to be 0 and then no tax will be added.
  • On the advanced screen please leave the 'display shipping' ticked, if you do not charge for shipping edit the name to be 'Free' and use this. Unfortunately we need to have a shipping setting (we are working on correcting this to allow the total removal of shipping).


Do's

  • Do be patient, it takes months (at least three for a new site) for changes in the search engine indexes to be updated.
  • Add as much descriptive text to each product as you can. This should be original and not copied from another source - Google (et al) knows what's been copied and where from, the original source will be seen as authoritative and so be given a higher ranking. If you've built your site with info. from your suppliers then work through the text and replace it with your own descriptions as soon as you can.
  • Do ensure you add the title and meta data for each category and product. Shopfitter will put default information in these, but adding and refining these will bring better results. Use the search term tools provided by Google and Overture to help you. See Market your site
  • For vista users - please turn off user accounts control (UAC) in the control panel before installing shopfitter.
  • If you want to be able to easily move the site to another pc please add all your new images directly into the dat/images folder and import them from there into shopfitter: C:\Program Files\ShopFitter\Shopfitter 4\shops\SHOP NAME\dat\images


Also see Common Problems

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