Preface

The fitting elements of digital design can make or break websites. In an e-commerce site, creating a convincing theme to support your online store makes valuable impact to your business. Customers or site visitors are the centre to the design of any e-commerce site. He/she may not know much about your company and the products or services it sells, yet he's/she's faced with the information presented on the website to make a buying decision. The personality of the web pages must be perceived as the "face" of the company or the store which gives the visitor anticipation, enticing him/her to further explore the web store. Whether you are a web developer hired to design a PrestaShop store or the owner of the store, this book will guide you on how to create new themes or modify the outlook of your PrestaShop store according to your needs.

PrestaShop is a professional e-commerce shopping cart software, which is free and easily downloadable online. It has been released under the Open Software License v3.0 (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-3.0.php).

According to the official PrestaShop website, "it was built to take advantage of essential Web 2.0 innovations such as dynamic AJAX-powered features and next-generation ergonomy."

PrestaShop considers the usability aspect where users are guided in a manner they can navigate through the e-commerce site and browse a catalog "intelligently and effortlessly", resulting into higher conversion rates from site visitors to paying customers.

The PrestaShop developer prided the software as "lightweight and speedy", which is an advantage to customers with low connection speeds. This is an important feature as Internet connectivity can still be an issue and affect a customer's experience in an online store.

PrestaShop is also user friendly both to the merchant (having a friendly back office administration) and the site visitors/prospective customers, as you will see later.

Although PrestaShop is currently designed as single shop software, where it isn't possible to feature multiple shops on one site, one of its greatest advantages is multi-user administration, where a shop owner may have a few levels of administrators to assist him with managing the online store. This feature is useful in the situation where an online store owner wants someone to assist him with updating information on his product lines featuring new sales or uploading images of new stock.

With the many winning features for functionality and ease of use, PrestaShop is also easier to style than most e-commerce software. The PrestaShop theme is a packaged file that controls the look and feel of the PrestaShop store. It enables site owners or developers to build a visually appealing site that matches the concept of the product or service the store sells.

Through a good choice of themes, site developers may create a more convincing e-commerce site for their customers, allowing them to better present or showcase their products or catalogs.

As with any other similar platform where design and the information are separated, the theme is the utmost important package that can be considered as the backbone that makes up a PrestaShop store.

An effective website will have to consider a few key elements, which include being visually attractive, presenting meaningful information and providing ease of navigation.

This book is dedicated to those who want to change and modify their PrestaShop's default theme to suit their needs and also to build a new theme using the simplest methods.

As theming is also affected by the use of modules and certain effects such as animated images this book will also guide you with tips to make your site unique by employing some of the available techniques.