Zeus Comics redesign

If for no other rea­son than finally con­sol­i­dat­ing the past five years of css style changes into some sem­blance of orga­ni­za­tion, this redesign was a long time coming.

Zeus Comics and Collectibles is an award-​winning comic book retail store in Dallas, Texas. For almost nine years, Zeus has been serv­ing the needs of the comic book read­ing com­mu­nity in the DFW area in the only man­ner one can expect from a locally gay-​owned busi­ness – fab­u­lously!

Since its last redesign, when Zeus won the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award in 2006, design trends evolved, and how we orga­nize and dis­play our code has matured. Zeus went through many attempts at inte­grat­ing its point-​of-​sale sys­tem with an ecom­merce solu­tion. I’m embar­rassed to admit, its first ver­sion, not hav­ing any expe­ri­ence in ecom­merce (how hard could it be?) used FileMaker Pro and Lasso. Looking back, I’m stunned by some on my cod­ing and design deci­sions. Some of which locked the site into arcane struc­tures from which are not eas­ily bro­ken. And some still exist.

The old method for adding some­thing to the site was sim­ple — make a new folder and add some new tables and call it good. Want a forum? Install Aterr. Want a check­list? Add a new CodeIgniter folder. After all, what’s one more, right? After a while, we ended up with many lit­tle sys­tems and no way to sup­port them all.

The site’s design needed con­sis­tency from its pre­vi­ous ver­sion as well. Too dra­matic a depar­ture and it loses its brand­ing. We weren’t look­ing for a fresh start, just a face lift (with enough skin for more adjust­ing later).

Our approach to ecom­merce was sim­ple: always be clos­ing. One of the lessons learned from out pre­vi­ous cart solu­tion was the more steps a cus­tomer has to take to com­plete an order, the more likely we’d lose the sale. When you go into a retail store to buy a comic, you don’t expect to be a mem­ber of that shop. When was the last time you walked up to a counter to pay for your goods to have the clerk ask for you user­name and pass­word. I don’t have a user name. I just want to buy this book.

This was how our pre­vi­ous cart worked. And I’ll say this first, after try­ing out X-​cart, Zen Cart, Squirrel Cart and later Magento Commerce, Shop Script was the only solu­tion with the sim­plest way for us to con­trol data from our point-​of-​sale source. After adding all the items to the cart, the user would have to cre­ate an account, add records to the address book for both ship­ping and billing, choose those records and add them to the order, and then they could final­ize their purchase.

In the cur­rent sys­tem, we’ve taken out the need for mem­ber­ship. We don’t need it. We don’t really want it. We cer­tainly don’t want to sup­port it, if a cus­tomer for­gets their pass­word. Instead, cus­tomers get a track­ing key upon return from Paypal. We don’t want your credit card info either.

In the next few weeks, I hope to have a down­load­able ver­sion of the ecom­merce solu­tion, so stay tuned.

Is zeuscomics​.com all done now? Hardly. Out of the gate, I’m already track­ing new errors plus some old ones that will be address by the next release. Fortunately, one of the design/​coding goals was to be able to change and grow the site as needed. Stay tuned for that too.

http://​www​.zeuscomics​.com