We started fidgeting around about having a new template for our shopping sites shortly after Update Jagger, which naturally affected our site as well as many other 'thin affiliate' sites, as termed by Google. The idea was to re-invent ourself for the 2006 season with a clean, lean and a much less distractive interface for visitors.
Aside from the bit of a rant above, our new template actually does not have anything with making us any more 'Jagger' friendly or to make us any 'thinner or thicker' than what we already are.
So what is our 2006 minimalist template all about?
Single Column Layout
As compared to a 2-column layout which we use earlier, our 2006 Minimalist layout is a single column 468 pixel banner-width desugn still based on the all text template design of the original affiliate script. The template system of ASM2 is very easy to work with and for this exercise changes done to the script/templates/header.tpl file is all it takes to effect the layout.
This includes modification to the header section of the template and the complete removal of the left-hand menu column. Changes to the footer.tpl file complements the enhancement. Hardly anyting else, in terms of design, is done to other template files within the system.
User navigation is, of course, slightly hampered by this design approach. This we tried to overcome by introducing the Home/Main Categories button on our pages, which, when clicked takes the visitor back to the Landing/Home page. We also defaulted the main menu display to the default.tpl file.
Hard-Coded default.tpl file
Our main menu display, sitting just below the main page name display, is a hard-coded version of the script/templates/default.tpl file. The menu items links to the product category menu, located likewise, which in turn displays the noded items of each sub-category.
One File Multi Locale Install
As this template does away with the 'In association' image, and the 'Information links' of the default script, we were able to do a bit more customization to the script/config.php file so as to enable us to work towards a single file Multi Locale install.
'Buy Button' images for each locale was added to the script/images/ subdirectory and the $orderurl variable in the script/productpage.php was modified to display the correct 'Buy Button' image for each locale the script is configured for.
The result of this exercise? You're looking at it!
