URL: www.broadcastsolutions.com

I created the first version of Broadcastsolutions.com, a broadcast video pre-owned equipment reseller,  in 1995. It was one of the first sites I built. When the owners Rick and Teresa contacted me about revamping the site a couple of months ago, I was astonished to see that they were still using the old site, frames and all.

Even though the old site was working for them, it desperately needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. the current site could not display images of the equipment they were selling, the admin was clunky, and they were not ranking for any of their primary keywords. I won’t even go into the whole thing with frames. Hey! it was 1995, frames were in back then.

This made it a perfect fit for my Wordpress and Zen-Cart combination. They loved the idea and the samples I showed from nexugen.com and georgetemerson.com. The blog was pretty standard issue, it only required a custom homepage. I did create a custom header with a nice CSS navigation bar that maximizes their keyword text in header, and is very user friendly.

I made strong use of the All-In-One-SEO wordpress plugin to set the site up for what will hopefully be a quick rise for their primary keyword rankings. With a domain that is over 10 years old, I have to think that they can get ranked once some basic optimizing techniques are applied. In this case I’ve got them on a course of content creation that should stock their blog with quality content in just a few months.

The store required much more customization because they don’t directly take orders from the site. The requirement was for a “catalog” only interface that would mail equipment requests, which would be followed up and transacted over the phone between Rick or Teresa and the client.

I was able to accomplish most of this through the standard Zen Cart admin. The rest was done through gentle tweeks to the core code. Zen Cart can be very finicky, I’ve come to learn, so I’m not a fan of tinkering too much under hood except when there is no other choice. Ultimately I turned off the all of the payment and shipping module admin settings, leaving only the Check/Money order function live.

In the individual product listing I tried various combinations of the shipping options until I found one that removed the shipping feature by configuring the product “Virtual” which removed the shipping options and form inputs for shipping address information.

Broadcast Solutions

The result is that their specific needs are met, yet if they want to start taking online payments in the future, we can transition to that method quickly and efficiently.

It was on the development of Zen Cart for this store that I experienced the nightmare “Blank Zen Cart Checkout Page” error for the first time. I’ve explained how I dealt with it another post. If you are attempting custom Zen Cart work, I highly suggest reading it.

The entire project took about 6 weeks to complete. The site in now officially launched with over 200 products, featuring pictures, blog articles, and no frames.