Nick Bartlett

The look and feel of oscommerce is a bit behind the times as it was created sometime in the late 1990′s.  Yeah, that’s a long time ago.  Back then, browsers were not up to speed with all the CSS tricks, so structure was built on table upon table.  In some places, there is content buried 8 nested tables deep with oscommerce!

This weekend I worked away and launched a new ecommerce site based on oscommerce topfitnesssource.com.  With my other oscommerce sites, I’m always working to improve the look and feel, accessibility, and better search engine rankings.  I spent six hours removing tables from the template and product detail page and had to finally throw in the towel on the 3 column template structure.  My design has images in the left and right columns that must stretch 100% in height with the content andapparently divs and CSS aren’t up to par on that capability yet.  Check out the product detail page and you’ll find just one table http://www.topfitnesssource.com/alr-hyperdrive-30-p-10671.html .

If you intend to strip all the tables out of oscomerce, you’ve got a daunting task ahead of you!  If you don’t have a thousand hours of custom coding into your shopping cart as I do, you might consider a different solution such as prestashop, which comes with a tableless front end.