Terminology
Here's a summary of the common terms we'll be using in this tutorial:
Store - Your ecommerce website or storefront.
Admin Site - The administration portion of your store. You can access the admin site by going to http://mystore.merchanttribestores.com/bvadmin where "mystore" is the name you chose for your store.
Products - Products are the goods or services for sale on your store. You create a product for each item you wish to sell.
Categories - Categories are the parts of your store where products are displayed for sale. You can create an unlimited number of categories and products can be assigned to more than one category.
Pages - Pages are the parts of your store where you can display other content like an "About Us" page or a frequently asked questions area.
SKU - Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) is a unique code you assign to your products. A SKU should consist of letters and numbers only. If you wish, dashes (-) and underscores (_) can be used to but are not recommended. For example, ABC123 would be a good SKU. It's short, unique to a single product and easy to remember.
Many retailers use a formula to design SKUs. You may decide that the first few letters of a SKU represent a supplier or a specific product line, the next few represent a model number and the last few represent customers selections like size or color. The formula can be anything you wish but a consistent structure will make it easier to sort, filter and identify products as your store grows.
Image - An image is a picture you upload for products, categories or pages.
HTML - Hypertext Markup Language, HTML is the language used to create web pages. As a store owner you don't need to know HTML but learning the basics may help you edit pages and customize your site. HTML is a series of "tags" inserted into text. Here's an example:
This is bold and this is italicized
In the example above, the words "This is bold" are wrapped by "b" tags which makes them display as bolded text and the word "italicized" is wrapped in "i" tags which makes it italicized.
CSS - Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is the language used to specify the design, colors and fonts of your store. CSS files are text files that contain the rules which control how the HTML of your store is displayed to customers. For example:
p {font-size:13px;color:blue;}
In the example above, the CSS rule tells your store to display any text wrapped inside an HTML
tag as 13 pixels high and colored blue. CSS is a very powerful language so it may seem overwhelming at first. Don't worry, BV Commerce includes dozens of great designs that you can use as starting points. You won't have to create a CSS file from scratch and with a little bit of knowledge you can make tweaks to your store in minutes.
JPG or JPEG, PNG, GIF - These are all various type of images that you can upload to your store. Each type of image has some strengths and weaknesses. The goal of these image types is to display the best looking picture in the smallest download size possible. Smaller download sizes mean that images load faster and your customer will have a better shopping experience.
- JPGs are a good choice for photographs with lots of complex details. JPGs add a slight "blur" to pictures when making them smaller so you may need to adjust the quality to balance size and detail.
- GIF files are limited to 256 colors so they don't always make a good choice for photographs. They are excellent for line art or pictures with large areas of solid colors. GIF files can also have transparent areas where the background shows through part of the image.
- PNG files are the newest of the three formats and come in two varieties. 8-bit PNG files are similar to GIFs in that they have a limited number of colors but work well for line art and solid color images. 24-bit PNG files are better suited to photographs like JPGs but have the advantage of higher image quality. The higher image quality can come at the cost of larger download sizes so JPGs may still be useful in some situations.