Prostores is a great e-commerce platform with many built in SEO tools. One problem though is that when you go to a site such as http://www.prostorestemplates.com in a browser, you are instead redirected to http://www.prostorestemplates.com/servlet/StoreFront. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a static page in your Prostores web store so that this redirection doesn’t occur?
Well you can. In fact you can create any number of static pages in Prostores using a web editor such as Microsoft Expression Web or Adobe Dreamweaver, and then use FTP to upload them to Prostores. There is one catch, which is that these static pages cannot use any of Prostores business logic like access to page template or access to the catalog, including any ssml code. What does this mean? Well unfortunately this means that the static pages you create in your web editor will have to include the html for your entire page including anything in your header or footer. This isn’t as bad as it sounds.
Let’s say that you would like to replace the homepage of your web store with a static file you create in Dreamweaver. First you will need to grab the basic html of your existing site if you would like to keep the same look and feel. Load your current website in a browser, then view the source and copy this to your clipboard. Now paste this into a new file named either index.htm, index.html, default.html or default.htm in Dreamweaver. Finally make whatever changes you may want to this file in Dreamweaver and save it.
When you are ready to publish this to your web store, you will either need to use Dreamweaver’s built in FTP program, or I prefer FileZilla for FTP. For instructions on using an FTP client to connect to your Prostores web store, refer to this article https://navisite.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB10451.
Once you have connected to your web store via FTP, you will want to upload your html file to the “Store” directory. That is it, Prostores handles the rest.
What is really cool is that you can create any number of static pages and upload them to your Prostores “store” directory and they are now available, i.e. you could create a services.html file and upload that to your store directory. This file could then be loaded via a web browser by navigating to www.mystore.com/services.html.
Why would you do this though if you do not get to use the business logic of Prostores? That is a great point, but sometimes for SEO reasons you might not want the redirection to the /servlet/… location. In particular you do not want any redirection for your homepage, and the extra effort required to make a static page that looks like your general site is worth it. A second reason is that sometimes you might not want the header and/or footer. Whatever the reason, it’s nice that Prostores includes this functionality.
References:
https://navisite.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB10383
https://navisite.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB10451
