Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Hi JP,

Thanks for posting... I'm one of the founders of The xCart Store - and the lead designer of xtreme gear. We have include 3 of our own 3rd party modules within the xtreme Gear demo website:
http://demo.thexcartstore.com/xgear/
these include: Predictive Search, xMenus and xBanners

I'd be more than happy to answer any further questions you might have about our products.
You'll get a quicker response emailing our support desk directly - as we only check the forums here every few days. You are more than welcome do a little more research on us and our products :)

By the way, you might like to see how xtreme Gear can looks in the hands of a good designer (cough.. cough.. me) www.padmore-barnes.com

regards
W.

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Wow, looks good Will! Might want to update that favicon though, still seeing the default XC one. This design won't suit everyone's taste, but it is extremely unique. Well done!

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Cheers Mike,

We've presented several favicons to the client - just waiting to hear back from them.

Yes, this kind of design will not suit every company/product - but in this case, the company have just begun manufacturing and selling the same shoe designs and styles based on their original production runs back in the 1930's through to the 1980's. In this case, it was important to make the connection to the companies past and heritage, hopefully if comes across.

regards
W.

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

I've just had an SEO violation flagged by Bing's analyzer saying that: "Evaluatedsize of HTML is estimated to be over 125 KB and risks not being fully cached"

Is anyone else seeing this with this template on x-cart v4.5.4 ? If you have then obviously my next question is "what can you do to fix it?".

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Hi Davy,

We have checked your HTML code here and to be honest everything seems pretty much fine.
You are compressing all your CSS & JS files - that's good. Keep in mind, when you display a list of products - there is certain data you have to include on the page - and there are certain ways in which x-cart goes about generating the content on each page.

When I save your raw HTML page - it amounts to 82KB
So maybe WMT is calculating its figure on the combined weight of the page - this might include images, external JS & CSS files, etc.
Keep in mind, this is only a message - anything over 125KB may not be cached - this is fine as your are below this at 82KB.

If you take into account that your compressed CSS and JS files alone are:
CSS = 201KB
JS = 393KB

Then straight away you are above the 125KB threshold.
As you can see x-cart alone requires alot of resources to include its JS code - this alone is 3 times larger than the 125KB.

I'm not sure it's fair to blame the xtreme Gear template for exceeding the 125KB threshold that Webmaster Tools states. This is just a statement, informing you that the first 125KB will only be cached.

Nothing to worry about :)

regards
W.

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Thanks Will,

I'm in agreement with you. I'm used to the rather slim 4.1.11 version of X-Cart; v4.5.4 is a lot ..."more substantial" in terms of html. In fact the increase in page load speed that I had hoped for with 4.5.4 has not materialised, which is a big disappointment.

Thanks again for your outstanding support.

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Hi again Davy,

I forgot to mention yesterday - but if you check the source code of our templates, you will see that the header and footer if placed at the bottom of the file, this ensures that the unique content (unique per page) is placed near the top of the page - this ensures that the "important" part of your pages (usually the inner content) is cached first.

The header on each page is usually the same (as its repeated for each page) - therefore caching this everytime for each page would eat into your 125KB limit and as a result your important page content may not be cached. This is exactly why we have placed the header and footer at the end of the source.

When it comes to SEO - every little helps :)

regards
W.

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Hi Will,


This was the first feature of your template that I checked when I was planning our site's upgrade, as it was a MUST HAVE to get the product title, breadcrumbs and short description well above the fold.

It cartainly is a template that just keeps giving:D

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

I like that this template displays the manufacturer's logo but I wish that it didn't pull the image from the database because that impacts page load performance.

I've been looking at where the image is set within file /skin/xtreme_gear/customer/main/product_details2.tpl but its not obvious to me how I can set the img source to be in the file system instead of the database.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Re: NEW xcart template - xtreme Gear
 

Open a ticket directly with them http://www.thexcartstore.com/help.php

They will respond.