Mcart: How to Create a Custom Page Layout

You may want to try to create a custom page layout for Mcart, but perhaps you are not comfortable with writing HTML code by hand. Here are some simple steps you can try to create the header and footer files that Mcart needs.

1. Start with your favorite HTML page editor. (Frontpage, Netscape Editor, Dreamweaver, or whatever)

2. Create the page layout that you want Mcart to use. At one place in the page, put a line that say "Insert Shop Here".

3. Save the page to an HTML file.

4. Start your favorite plain-text editor (Windows Notepad, for example)

5. Open the saved HTML file in the text editor.

6. Find the part of the HTML file that contains the "Insert Shop Here" line.

7. Select all of the text from the top of the file to just before this line. Cut and paste this to a new file, and save it as header.html.

8. Select all the text just after this line to the end of the file. Cut and paste this to a new file, and save it as footer.html.

9. FTP these two files (header.html and footer.html) to your server, and put them in your shop directory.

10. Now enter the locations of these files into the custom setup section of your Mcart admin program, and select Preview Page Setup at the bottom of the page, to see how your layout turned out.

A bit of warning... some HTML editors (FrontPage for one) will use relative links to items in your page like style sheets or images. You will need to change these to absolute links to make sure the header/footer will work correctly when Mcart uses them.

[Thanks to Mcart user Ken Marcus for first pointing this trick out to me. -- Author]