Design Launch Overview

What is Designer Launch?

Designer Launch is a set of tools on the Vin65 Platform that makes it possible for web developers and web designers with knowledge of html and css to launch their own sites. The benefits to this are increased control over final design execution, timelines, and client relationships.

How do I get set up?

To get setup with designer launch you need to contact us to set up an account.

Once that is complete you will receive a number of things from us:

  1. A dev domain set up eg. http://yourdomain.vin65dev.com
  2. Admin panel login codes, login at http://www.vin65.com
  3. FTP access to your www folder with a generic site setup. Sample www.zip file
  4. Quick Launch code for your templates, which allow you to see how your templates will render before you upload and parse them.

What should I plan to have before I start?

This is a list of items you should have to launch a site on our platform:

  1. HTML/CSS/Images for your homepage template, content page templates, optional additional custom templates, check out/club templates, and email template.
  2. Favicon (16 x 16 pixel ico file) - this optional but recommended.
  3. Apple Touch Icon (114 x 114 pixel png file)- this is optional but recommended.

Ecommerce requirements include:

  1. Product info - this can be entered manually or imported via excel spread sheet.
  2. Shipping Rates
  3. Tax Rates
  4. Compliance information
  5. Payment Gateway information.

For any question about this please contact our service representatives at 604-852-8140

How I get started?

Once you have your account set up you will have access to everything you need to launch a site. We highly recommend cutting and producing your graphics, html, and css before integrating your site with our platform. This allows you to solve all of your display issues before introducing the added complexity of the Vin65 data points.

To the right is a simple view of your site root folder.

  1. Your css and images go in the /assets folder
  2. Your html files can go into the /html folder
  3. Your templates go into the /v65html folder

Layouts

The Vin65 template system is built around site function and layouts. To create layouts you take your html files and plug in the designer launch js code in the head of your html files and replace the appropriate sections of your html with v65 custom tags.

When viewed locally on your computer the designer launch js code parses the v65 custom tags into live data from the server. This allows you to view your templates before you upload them to the server and parse them. These tags call in items like page content, main menu, footer menu, pod content, shopping cart etc...

There are 10 different layouts on every given site and you can assign a template to each of them.

  1. Homepage
  2. Main - the default layout for most of the pages in your site.
  3. Cart - this layout should be wide in nature and not have a left or secondary nav, generally the same as Club and Checkout
  4. Checkout - this layout should be wide in nature and not have a left or secondary nav
  5. Member
  6. Club - this layout should be wide in nature and not have a left or secondary nav
  7. Blog
  8. Product
  9. Product Drilldown
  10. Print - layout for product receipt at end of check out

Often times you will use the same layout for the Checkout, Cart, and Club as show below. In addition you can create additional custom layouts if you want. In the case of the example below there is one custom layout called "Wide Page", but you may want different layouts for sub page other than the Main content page.

Once you have created your templates and saved them in the /v65html folder you need to upload them to the server and parse them through the website settings.

NOTE: It may be necessary to reload your site before you see the changes to your site. To reset your site you append the string /index.cfm?reload=1 to your url eg. http://mysite.vin65dev.com/index.cfm?reload=1