Well, we are about 90% finished with the store.  We have added 5 products.  Actaully, 3 of the products are install services.  I would like to add more products and services shortly.  In the future, it would be cool to offer complete services from SEO to design.  I would invision it being an affordable service for those who are just getting their web businesses started.

I have always liked osCommerce, but since I’ve found the STS contribution, I really like osCommerce.  (By the way, we are offering STS contribution installs.)  During my sabbatical, I played around a little with Zen Cart.  Personally, I think Zen Cart looks super ghetto straight out of the box.  Zen Cart also seems to me to be an osCommerce knock off.  It is very similar to osCommerce in ways.  I would pick osCommerce over Zen Cart any day.

So how do you get rid of those cartoon images in osCommerce?

It’s actually really simple.  Go into your admin section, click on images, then set heading image width to 0, then set heading image height to 1.  That’s it, all done.

If you have installed the STS contribution, you will find that the info boxes leave ugly corner images.  The easiest way to get rid of these corner images is to make them transparent.  I can email the images to you to save time.  Just comment to this thread leaving your email, or just simply send us an email.  I would paste the urls to the images, but you can’t see them so they are kind of hard to right click and save.

There are a few other cartoon images such as the image that appears after you make an account.  You will have to either make these other images transpararent or created your own image to go with the look of your site.  Read more about customizing osCommerce here.

During my sabbatical, I started playing around with osCommerce just for fun. I found a contribution that is awesome. It’s called the Simple Template System or STS for short. You can check out our store to get an idea of what the STS contribution can do. We aren’t 100% done with it yet, but you get the idea. To install the STS contribution it is better to start off with a clean osCommerce install with no other contributions added previously. The STS contribution is super easy to install. I’m not a coder and I had no problems installing it. After installing it, I created a template. I couldn’t get the Word Press theme template to work so I recreated a template of Webpuffs using plain HTML. Making the template is what took me the longest.  You could create your own template like I did, or buy a template.

The next thing you will discover is that the infoboxes leave little pics in the corners and that there are all those ghetto looking cartoon images by the page heading.  On my next post I will talk about how to get rid of the ghetto little cartoon images in oscommerce.  I have to go eat pizza.