BANS Template Modification
June 22, 2008 By: Justin | 4 comments
One important part of having a successful BANS site is having a good template. You don’t need to spend hours developing a theme, but you can increase your sales by modifying your BANS template. Improving the look of your site makes it look more legit, which will make it easier to negotiate links and help you pass a visual inspection. Modification helps differentiate your sites from the 100’s of other thin BANS sites on the net. A lot of people are stuck using premade BANS templates created by others because they’re not comfortable to design their own BANS Template. My goal here is to help you develop your own BANS template by going over a few easy BANS Template Modifications.
I suggested using my SEO BANS Template as a base to start from. It isn’t much different from the standard Build A Niche Store templates, but I made just a couple of changes to improve the template’s SEO. It is the base for my other Free BANS template.
The Anatomy of a BANS Template
Header: This file contains the PHP and HTML that defines the top half of the page before the item listings. This includes the header, meta tags, logo, and search box. If your theme has a left hand menu, than this file will hold the sidebar.
Footer: This file contains the PHP and HTML that defines the page content that shows after the items. This includes the footer and footer links. This file may contain the sidebar if you have a right hand menu.
Style: This is the CSS file that contains the style elements that define color, font, borders, backgrounds, links, etc.
You can develop you own BANS template by editing these files. You’ll need to take the time to learn (X)HTML/CSS to modify these files. Its really simple. You don’t need to be able to create a brand new website, but just enough to tweak and hack these files.
BANS Header File
This file contains a couple PHP calls that are pretty self explanatory. I will list them and explain them here
<?=$front->meta();?>
This instructs the BANS software to insert the meta data for that page. This is keyword, description, and title data.
<?php print URL_PATH.”/themes/$temp”;?>
This insets the URL to the template you chose in the admin panel.
<a href=”<?php print URL_PATH.”/”;?>”> <?php print SITENAME.”";?></a>
This inserts the site name given in the admin panel and links it to the home page.
<?=$front->search();?>
This pulls in the search box.
These PHP template tags can be moved around inside a template to make them appear in different locations. You can convert a template into a BANS template by inserting these tags.
The part of the header file most people are interested in changing is the header logo. I will cover this later in this post.
BANS Footer File
In my templates, this file holds the sidebar. Here is the code for the sidebar
<h3>Site Navigation</h3>
<ul>
<?=$front->pagenav();?>
</ul>
<hr />
<h3>Store Navigation</h3>
<ul>
<?=$front->storenav();?>
</ul>
This can be modified in a variety of ways. The PHP functions simply list out links to the site pages as list items. CSS can be used to display these in different ways. You can change the titles of the menus by changing the content inside the <h3> tags.
The site footer is also contained in this file. Here is the code:
<?php echo date(’Y'); ?> <a href=”<?php print URL_PATH.”/”;?>” title=”<?php print SITENAME.”";?>”><?php print SITENAME.”";?></a>
<?=$front->powered();?>
This displays the current year for copyright, displays the site name and links it to the homepage, and then displays the powered by statement. This is fairly simple, you could add in links to pages like a privacy policy, terms, or contact page.
BANS Style
This is the major file for the template. This file defines the look and feel for the site. By editing the CSS you can change almost every part of your BANS site.
The name and comments make the styles easy to follow and understand.
Basic BANS Template Modifications
Change the Logo
Simply modify the file (/images/logo.jpg) using your favorite software, I use photoshop. Save it over the old file and the header will automatically change.
The image is defined as the background in the CSS and changes can be made to this by tweaking the CSS.
.headerimg {
margin: 0;
background: url(’images/logo.jpg’) no-repeat;
height: 80px;
width: 780px;
}
To change the height of the header, simply change the 80px height to another number. You can also change the background image and set it to a solid color.
Change Background
If you want to change the background color or add a background image, find this in the CSS file:
body#background
{
background-color: #dddddd;
}
Here is a page discussing using CSS to change the background.
Changing Theme Color
I would suggest using a text editor or Dreamweaver to do a find & replace. Locate the color code in the CSS you want to change, and do a document wide find & replace all to replace it with the color code for your desired color.
There is a site called color my BANS, which will generate the CSS for you. The only problem with this tool is that it just applies colors changes to the standard BANS template. If you want to get more advanced, you’ll need to get a little more comfortable with hacking CSS.
Learn CSS
Here are a couple of resources to help you learn CSS so you can get better at BANS template modifications.
- w3c School CSS
- CSS Wikipedia
- Guide to CSS
- CSS Lists - Can be used for menu design
- CSS Navigation Menus
- CSS Validatior
If you’re interested in another set up to promote the eBay affiliate, check out optemo’s review of BANS vs. Blogger, which compares using a Buld a Niche Store setup to using Blogger.
Filed Under BANS |
Tagged With BANS, BANS Template, BANS Template Modification, Build A Niche Store, Build A Niche Store Template Modification
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Thanks very much for this simple explanation of the bits of CSS and PHP I actually need to know: I’ve been avoiding it for a while now but this is really is a very useful post
No problem Lisise, I find my web design background helpful all the time. It really helps when tweaking themes. This post is really simple, but you can do a lot with BANS designs.
Out of curiosity, is BANS not legit?
Surely if it is, you wouldn’t need to hide it.
Although I totally agree with what you’re saying… nobody will buy from a ancient or unprofessional looking site.
One last question, why not go it alone? Why not just do it yourself, it’s simpler, better looking, faster, more SEO friendly… what’s the main advantage of BANS?
BANS is legit, but the set up makes them a little “thin” with content. The way most people set them up makes them not perform as well as they could.
Yeah, people won’t buy from a bad looking site, but most people who do BANS play a numbers game. They market to someone with a high need, which increases the chance they’ll click a picture. Once they do, they’re off to eBay, which is a high quality trusted source, which they will buy from.
Biggest advantage of BANS for me is simply ease. It can be done using other methods. I was told that BANS works well and gave it a try. I just stick with it, because I don’t want to spend the time to learn a new method.