osCommerce out of the box is a pretty ugly package. It looks like something designed back in the late 90's. That's probaby because it was. One of the first things that I like to do with osCommerce is strip all the hard coded HTML and replace it with a style sheet.
Another very important thing to do is to add a thumbnail generator. Out of the box osCommerce downloads full images then scales them with the user's browser. This is wrong on so many levels. Not only does it make the images look bad, it forces the user to download the entire full size image wasting bandwidth and making page load times drastically longer.
Learning to properly crop and save images can make a world of difference for your osCommerce site. There is a fine balance between the image quality and the image size when saving your images for the web. You don't want to save your images with too poor of quality, otherwise they will look cheap. On the other hand, you don't want to save them with too high of quality as the file size will end up being very large and take a long time to download.
It is said that people will only wait 3 seconds for a web page to download. Any longer than that people start leaving. Even though modern bandwidth has increased drastically, you still need to consider all the potiential customers still on dial-up connections.
Another very important thing to do is to add a thumbnail generator. Out of the box osCommerce downloads full images then scales them with the user's browser. This is wrong on so many levels. Not only does it make the images look bad, it forces the user to download the entire full size image wasting bandwidth and making page load times drastically longer.
Learning to properly crop and save images can make a world of difference for your osCommerce site. There is a fine balance between the image quality and the image size when saving your images for the web. You don't want to save your images with too poor of quality, otherwise they will look cheap. On the other hand, you don't want to save them with too high of quality as the file size will end up being very large and take a long time to download.
It is said that people will only wait 3 seconds for a web page to download. Any longer than that people start leaving. Even though modern bandwidth has increased drastically, you still need to consider all the potiential customers still on dial-up connections.