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Trying to jump into the app business has proved to be quite different from how I got into the freelance business. Compared to the app business, freelancing is a guaranteed source of income as much as a full time job. A lot of developers and designs wish to get in the app business to get away from working from anyone. Even if you freelance, you still technically “work for” people, those people being your clients.

What one doesn’t think about though, is that the app business has it’s own challenges. You may not have to deal with client demands, but you have to work for months on end with no pay while creating something you hope enough people will buy so you can feed your family. Gone are the days where you get paid multiple times.

I thought through this a bit, which is why I’m still freelancing full time and working on the app on the side. Of course, this means between work, p90x, some sort of social life and time with my family, I’m left with almost no time for the app. Did I mention I’m also trying to squeeze in time to write a couple of books and have some babies? Heh.

I have to often remind myself of some advice I once gave to both of my parents, who are both stuck in jobs they hate and have been planning on starting their own business for years now. The most common excuse I hear from almost everyone is that there’s “no time” and they can’t just quit their jobs to make time because they have a family to feed. Well, doesn’t everyone? Doesn’t the guy who started Starbucks have a family? Steve Jobs? Sam Walton?

We have to make time to start a business, otherwise we’ll be stuff forever in limbo, or worse, in a business or job we absolutely hate. Sure, I work a lot of hours at my desk, but I’m young and have no children and am trying to work now to retire at least at 50, but hopefully 30. I don’t want to be sitting at this desk at 75, making websites because I don’t have enough money to live off of.

Back to today and back to the plan. What is it you want to do? How will you accomplish it? You have to make every day a day that brings you even one step closer to the goal, or you might as well give up now and stop complaining about your stupid job.

If you’re planning to go global and expand your business worldwide, the first thing you need to know is that creating a website for a foreign market means more than just translating the text of your English website. Cultural differences play a significant part in your future relationship with clients and visitors.

Although it might look slightly overwhelming at first, creating a website for a foreign market can be successfully done by following a few steps:

Stop, pause and think

Before you choose the website colour or font, you should stop, pause and think for a moment: Which country would benefit from your products or services? Which country has room for yet another online business? There’s nothing more frustrating than launching into a new market and being choked by strong competition. Check the other companies out and come up with a few ideas to outsmart them and win at their game.  After carefully choosing your new market, phase two can begin.

Act local

The first thing you need is an individual Top Level Domain (TLD). This helps twofold – better rankings on local search engines, plus respect and trust from local clients. In case purchasing individual TLDs for you foreign websites proves too expensive, use subdomains for each local site, with their location set in the target country from Google Webmaster Tools.

Cultural background

You should think of a general, unifying design for your websites, regardless of market, in order to create an image for your company. However, this does not mean that you won’t have to adapt and localise the imagery for every foreign market you want to target. For example, websites created for Asian countries should be livelier, full of colours and animations; Western websites should be simple and deliver a clear, straightforward message.
No matter how you change your website, keeping your navigation bars horizontal should save you some trouble when it comes to switching between right-to-left and left-to-right writing/languages.

More than just colours

You might think choosing the right colour is not that much of a problem. Well, think again. Colours play a significant part in day to day culture. Take for example red- it means ‘danger’ or ‘love’ in Western cultures, but it stands for ‘good luck’ and ‘celebration’ in China. For a safe pick, the general consensus is that blue works fine worldwide.

The “right” images

You probably realized by now that it’s a bad choice to use the same images for different markets and cultures. An image of an American family enjoying your product won’t have the same effect in China as in the US.
Also, you shouldn’t forget about Low Context (American, German, British etc) and High Context (Chinese, Indian, Japanese etc) cultures, and the impact the differences between them have on web design. For High Context countries, a website bursting with images, colours and the mandatory dancing animations are really important, but that certainly won’t work in the Western society.

Choose the best tools

If you’re going to create a series of localised sites and you want to quickly switch between languages without starting from scratch, then UTF-8 is your answer. With unique code for every character in over 90 languages, UTF-8 can easily switch between German, Arabic or even simplified Chinese.

Another great tool you should take advantage of is Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. This helps you keep the content separated from images. You won’t have to start from fresh if you need to change the language of your content from one localised site to another. Another great thing about CSS is that the size of the files is small and this helps the pages load faster.

If you’re aiming for fast loading pages, keep in mind that a Flash heavy website will slow everything down. Visitors won’t wait 2 minutes for a home page to load and you might lose potential clients.

Content is the heart of your website

The most important part of your newly localised websites will be its content. Nothing ruins a customer’s desire to buy your products quicker than spelling mistakes, grammar errors or odd phrasing.

While it is cheaper to use machine translation tools, such as Google Translate, or various translation widgets on your website, the safest option is to seek professional help. A native translator will ensure your copy is professionally translated, taking into account everything from abbreviations, jargon and colloquialisms to culture-specific phrases.

Cross cultural web design may seem like a lot to take in at first but the results are more than worth it. Following these simple steps and, more importantly, doing some research before you get started, will surely pave your road to going global.

I’ve been seriously contemplating writing a book on CoreCommerce theming, but until then, I’ve decided to write up a long tutorial on how to get started with your own themes.

Logging into the Admin

The admin area of CoreCommerce is pretty easy to understand, especially if you’re already used to CMS’s like WordPress or Drupal.

The tabbed navigation houses pretty much everything you’ll need to worry about, as clients will often set up the basics of the store themselves (shipping, products, etc).

To find your FTP information, simply hover over the Account links in the right hand menu and select ‘FTP’, which will give you the username, password and server you’ll need to login. Therefor, when doing this for a client, all you’ll ever need to get started is the main admin login!

The FTP

The file structure of CoreCommerce is laid out nicely and is sparse enough so you never get lost. Upon logging in, your taken to the main file structure for you site only.

Upon logging in, you’ll see that the FTP contains folders with numbers at the top, and several other folders labeled “images”, “templates”, etc. The only confusing part of the FTP, is that you don’t use any of the folders, except for the folders with numbers on them. These folders are themes that the client has installed, and it’s best to start from those when coding, as they contain styles for many parts of the site we often forget about (like the Customer Account area). In the example to the right, my client had installed four different themes, but decided to go with theme 00210-1, as it was the closest in design and colors to the template I would be coding for them (they do this from the admin area and it copies the theme to the FTP).

Inside of the 00210-1 folder (our theme number remember?), we see just two folders, labeled “design” and “templates”. Inside of the design folder, you’ll find folders for the CSS and images, and inside of the templates folder, is where we’ll be able to edit the actual site.

Templates

CoreCommerce works similar to other templated CMS sites, where you’ve got a header and footer file, except there are a few key differences. CoreCommerce has two header files, one named header.tem.php for most of the site, and another labeled secure.header.temp.php for the SSL sections of the site.

One major restriction in CoreCommerce, is that you can’t edit the HTML or PHP in the center of the page, you can only edit the header and footers files except for the product detail page (more on that below). While this seems like a huge restriction, thanks to both CSS and CoreCommerce’s settings page, it’s actually not that restrictive.

Header/Footer Files

The header and footer files look pretty much similar to any other header or footer files. The most important part of these files are some of CoreCommerce’s code that you’ll want to take note of.

For example, customers often wait until the store is finished before transferring their domain. so you never want to use a relative path or use the temporary address as the path. Instead, you’ll used CoreCommerce’s site url call:

<?php if ($config) { echo $config->getValue('merchantURL'); } ?>

This will grab the store’s URL, even if it changes. You use it inside of the url like so:

<?php if ($config) { echo $config->getValue('merchantURL'); } ?>/shopping-cart.php

Really the only difference between header.tem.php and secure.header.tem.php is the use of these URLs, the URL call needs to be changed for all images and links in the secure file, so you would changed the call to:

<?php if ($config) { echo $config->getValue('secureURL'); } ?>

You’ll also need to add the “premium” folder name to the url after the secureURL call. this enables the template to pull from your normal images folder without any SSL errors. And you don’t have to worry about SSL or moving images anywhere else Here what an image URL would look like in the secure header:

<img src="<?php if ($config) { echo $config->getValue('secureURL'); } ?>/premium/00210-1/design/images/image.jpg"/>

For the information in the header file, it’s best to leave everything in between the head tags alone. I do tend to remove the IE stylesheet calls and instead of removing the CSS for the current theme you’re building off of, I start my own custom.css stylesheet and go from there. It’s simply too much a pain to redo everything in the cart, and a lot of pages you’ll never be able to see until people start using the cart. This is especially important because most clients will only give you the design for the homepage, category page and possibly the product detail page.

Also, be sure to leave all the PHP file includes in the head tags alone, otherwise you’ll break the cart. Everything after the body tags is fair game to be deleted if you’d like

Admin Settings

In the admin area, the “Design”, “Inventory”, and “Site Content” tabs are your best friends. From there, you can change the types of layouts, styles, grid numbers and more for the site’s layout. This allows you to do several things that are impossible from the backend, due to the restriction of being able to mess with the center of the site’s code.

Here are some of the things I’ve been able to use the design area for:

• Change the category grid to display 2, 3, or 4 products across
• Change the category widget in the sidebar to show or hide subcategories
• Hide or show buttons
• Upload custom button images
• Drag and drop widgets in the left and/or right sidebars
• Control how add to cart works

There are a ton of settings you can mess with in these three sections, so make sure you spend some time figuring out what each one does.

Product Details Template

Like I mentioned above, you can’t edit any of the content between the header and footer files in CoreCommerce, except for the Product Detail page. Not sure why this is so, but it is.

To edit the product detail template, there are 3 different ways of going about it, depending on how deep into the code you want to get.

If you just want to switch the layout from one side to another, you just need to navigate to the “Design” tab and click on template layouts. From here, click on the manage link next to Product Detail. You’ll now be presented with several layout options.

You can either choose one of the layout options, activate it and leave it at that. But if you’re wanting to do a bit more, go ahead and click on “copy” for the layout that looks similar to the one you want to use.

You’ll be shown the HTML of the product detail page, along with what CoreCommerce calls “tokens”. These are basically functions wrapped with a pound symbol that you can copy, paste and move around the template. For example, the SKU token is simply:

##SKU##

If you’re like me, you really want to geek out in the product detail template’s code and see all of the actual PHP. This is easy to do for those of us who know the secret .

In order to edit the actual PHP (and be able to download it to your editor), simply give the custom template a name (the one we copied from the previous step) and save it. Activate it from the menu that shows all of the layouts and save again.

In your FTP, go back out into the top level that showed all of the numbered theme folders. Click on the templates folder, then layouts and voila! Your product detail template should be contained inside. Here you can do some real damage as you can edit and remove any or all of the PHP contained inside, so be forewarned and keep a backup!

Tips and Tricks

Display things on certain pages only
Clients never want the same thing on every page, and with CoreCommerce, it’s tough to be able to control this, since you really don’t have much control over anything between the header and footer. For example, what if the client wants to show the categories in the side bar for every page but the homepage? Conditional comments are a lifesaver.

To target only the homepage:

<?php if(!$cmd || ($cmd == CART_DEFAULT_CMD)) ?>

To target only the view cart page:

<?php if (($cmd == VIEW_CART_CMD));?>

To target a specific page ID (for the pages created under the “Site Content” tab (this example uses page ID 12)

<?php if(CONTENT == $cmd){ if($pc->getId() == 12) { ?>

Including files

There are also several files you can include into the header, footer, or product detail templates:

Search box

<?php include('templates/cart.categories.tem.php'); ?>

Categories widgets

<?php include('templates/cart.search.tem.php'); ?>

A full list of includes can be found in the admin area under the “Site Content” tab, click on “Manage Widget Settings” and then on “Widget List”

Styling all of the pages together
CoreCommerce gives a unique ID to every main container on each page type. Unfortunately, that means there’s really no way to style all of the pages together, and I often had to go through each page to grab their ID just to give it the same container styles. However, if you wrap the containers together, by starting a div in the header and end it in the footer, you’ll have a much easier time of styling everything together.

Your Questions

If you’re thinking of getting into CoreCommerce development and still have some questions, let me know in the comments are and I’ll do my best to answer them

I’ve know the company SumEffect software for over a year now and they make an awesome product called CoreCommerce. SumEffect software is an excellent example of a company that makes their own products.

I’d heard stories that the two owners Nick McDuffie (bottom middle) and Matt DeLong (bottom right) used to work for a regular design agency before starting their business from scratch. They were able to bootstrap the business together until they become a full-fledged small business, and one of Nashville’s best businesses.

I know that a lot freelancers dream about becoming a bigger business so I asked one of the owners, Matt DeLong, to take some time for an interview for us. If you’re thinking of transitioning from freelancing to a small company, stay tuned and I’ll share what I learned from Matt. (We already know that many great businesses start with freelancers.)

View the rest of  my post on FreelanceFolder »

I videoed my all-time favorite speaker this year. Be sure to listen to the whole thing, not only is he a great speaker, he’s also very funny. Here’s Justin Davis from Madera Labs speaking on toilet paper and technology silos:

This year’s t-shirt was based on the popular game, Plants vs. Zombies (I really need a pic of this if any of you guys have one, mine’s in the wash!)

Me and the Centresource friendly robot:

The CarlSays squid with Mitch of StudioNashvegas:

And a few other photos from speakers and the attendees. I believe there was over 700 people in attendance!

Did you go?

Who was your favorite speaker?