Update 27th July 2010: Chicubes is now being looked after elsewhere and I am no longer involved in the on-going development of the site. Therefore, some of the info below may no longer be relevant.
Chicubes is a website I first built back in 2008. At the beginning of 2010 the owners wanted a refresh.
The basis for the store is Cubecart. However, besides creating a completely bespoke ‘skin’ for the store, I also added lots of jQuery to add enhanced functionality as well as implementing search engine optimisation to provide better Google rankings.
Chciubes 2010 refresh
jQuery isn’t standard in Cubecart 4 (in this previous post I detailed how to add jQuery to Cubecart 4) so once it was added the gloves were off (although as ever it was important to ensure that the site validated)! Here’s a selection of the jQuery goodies I added to Chicubes:
1. Front page carousel – the image rotates and faded ‘Next’ & ‘Previous’ buttons allow the user to skip to the next promotion [made possible with CatchMyFame's Carousel 2]
2. Smooth scroll – the ‘Quick Contact’ link gently scrolls the page to the footer so users can fill in an enquiry (then smoothly scroll back by clicking the ‘back to top’ link) [made possible with
3. Tabbed front page with anchors. Tabbed content is easy-peasy but I needed each tab on the front page to be 'bookmarkable' so users could email/bookmark a link of a particular tab. The tabs employed on Chicubes change the browser address bar, depending upon which is selected. Nice! [made possible with used scrollTo & LocalScroll ]
4. Testimonials – a nice fade in/fadeout of customer testimonials[made possible with quovolver]
5. Internet Explorer 5/6 reject – if you try visiting the site using Internet Explorer 5 or 6 you will receive a warning message explaining the your browser it out of date and won’t view the site correctly. [made possible with jReject] 
Tags: Chicubes, Cubecart, jquery, Website Design
