www.laurastamm.net I did it pretty much all myself with help found reading this forum and a few emails to some experts in BVCommerce (I didnt bug them to much I hope) as well as Noah, Cliff and Andy. Cliff fixed a bug I found in his free TekGear theme, Andy talked to me about possible ways to get foreign parcel post shipping costs that the US postal service does not provide, and Noah is hosting our site (doing a good job of it too).
I am not a programmer nor a developer and I try not to bug the programmers and developers to much (sorry guys). I know a small amount of html and I use html-kit (free) as my web editing tool (I like the preview function). I tried downloading and using MS visual web developer express edition. It's way to complicated for me. It was taking me way to long to figure out how to use it, so I opted to go back to my html-kit.
I have trouble reading the css. I look for the color, then change it and check the theme to see if I like the way it turned. I pulled the banner image out of TekGear Redux and replaced it with our logo on a blank image the same size. I changed the name of the image to match the one in the theme so I wouldn't screw up the theme. I'm going to have a local artist create a banner or maybe several banners for the top portion of our home page. We may offer our web site in a few different colored themes.
I found 3 bugs in BV5. 2 of them have already been fixed. I suspect my problem with Discounts will be fixed in SP2.
My approach to design and managing our web site has been KISS. If I complicate it to much I will screw it up and have to start over. I also believe if I change to much, service patches, upgrades and what not it could replace some critical files on my site rendering it a pain to get it back where it was before. The less I change, the less I have to remember what I changed.
Basically I have changed my design, content and product displays to work with BV5 and the theme or themes I have chosen. Not the other way around. This is not to say I won't commission someone to write a couple templates or reports for me to tweek the functionality of our web site. I would like to add a couple bells to lessen some of the work I have been doing manually.
But what you see up online right now is our site. I still have to add some pictures to most of our products. As soon as we figure out which ones we want to use and where, I will add them. We also have some pictures and film clips buried in some of our content. You probably have to read the articles to find them. They were placed there not to act as a flashy gimmick or attention getter, but as a reference to support the information conveyed in the article.
What is image swapping?
Bob Noble
Sorry I didn't code our web address as a link. I had a little trouble with the last one I tried in this forum. I must have missed some syntax someplace.