Tips For Designers Styling Their Nexternal Store Themselves
As part of your initial Nexternal store setup, styles will need to be added to make the store look like your website. The one-time setup fee covers an initial “site sync”, during which Nexternal’s in-house Design Engineers add the necessary HTML and CSS to make the store’s design match that of your website. Occasionally a client prefers to sync the store themselves, and often a client’s website gets redesigned after the in-house site sync has been performed. If you are one of these, and you prefer not to utilize Nexternal’s Design Engineers to re-sync the store for you for a modest fee, we have some tips to make your life easier when styling the store yourself.
Please note that you need to be proficient with HTML and CSS in order to perform some of the advanced store modifications. If some of the tips below make little sense to you, then you may need to get professional help. Contact your account manager to find out how Nexternal can help you.
- There is a 200k file size limit for images. Any file larger than 200k cannot be uploaded.
- External JS or CSS files can be uploaded the same way as you upload images. This way you can refer to them securely. Files and images not referenced securely (via http instead of https) will cause a security warning in some browsers during checkout. This is a browser security feature and not under Nexternal’s control.
- The store’s width is determined by the Main width plus the Cart width. So if you want your store to be 990 pixels wide, and your cart is 220 pixels wide, your main width should be 770 pixels wide. If you are using the persistent category, the width of this is included in the Main width number. No need to calculate it separately.
- The main content and cart areas of the store are enclosed in a .NET FORM tag. Any additional form tags placed in these areas will break the store in Internet Explorer and causes certain functions to not work correctly. If you need to use a form tag, create them in the Bordering HTML.
- Avoid referencing .NET generated IDs when you can. They tend to look like ctl00_ctl00_ctl00_cphMain_cphMain_tdMain – Because these are .NET generated, they are subject to change whenever the .NET framework gets updated by Microsoft.
Zoe is a web designer by day and a caped super-hero by night. Okay not really, but she really is a web designer at Nexternal with over 14 years of experience coding HTML, CSS, and other magical web things. She also enjoys helping others, which is a bit like channeling her inner hero. Google+ Profile
