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We all know that having just a plain old astore won't cut the mustard. Its all about wrapping or embedding your store in rich content mixed with SEO and external links.

I've just started with my 1st astore and I'm using some of the techniques I use on a daily basis for a large international bookseller

Here is my site so I can demo.

http://www.topbabybooks.com

(Please plaese no neg comments on the  content of my site as it is only in the first stages of creation. I know there's duplication and broken links at the mo).

Here goes !..... and I hope its of some help.

1) Use good a good layout and widget framework and embed your store within it.  I use the yahoo yui web framework.. its free, well documented and can be used on a standard host as its html,css and javascript only. I cannot praise this framework highly enough.. you MUST take a look and play with the demos to see the benfits it could give you. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

2)Turn off the categories and link using premalinks so that you get to create many pages all linked to getther in the mesh pattern by using your own menu. Lots of pages , each with their own description, title and content all linked together is what you are aiming for.

3) use a CSS/javsript library called  nifytcorners to round off your corners without images. Square conrners suck and look cheap. Amazon actually use this for the astore code ( View source and check the imports at the top of the page). The only other way to round corners is to use images and thats messy andds adds load to your page.

http://webdesign.html.it/articoli/leggi/528/more-nifty-corners/1/

4) Use the new CSS override facility to modify the look of your astore. The one thing you must do is to give images a border if you are using a white background as I am. Theres loads you can do here.. you just need a bit of css experience.

4) I also use a Java based templating system called Sitemesh but I'll leave this out of this discussion unless anyone wants any info.

Once again... my sites content is not ready yet but the principles are sound.. so watch this space.as the site progresses.

Glad someone else is enjoying the benefits of the YUI framework.

The page widgets are the best I've seen as a complete package.. The documentation is clear concise and comprehensive. .. and best of all you get the backup of the one the largest players on the web and its all FREE gratis with no adds or anything...

The other good point with this framework is that it promotes web standards .. so if you are still coding columns with tables.. go get the Yui font-reset-grids css package and tidy up your pages. It'll increase your Search engine visibllity also.

At the moment I'm mainly using Yui for its Css & layout framework elements:

• Reset
• Fonts
• Grids

These allow me to create very clean pages that wrap an astore within my content.

I'm also using the YUI menu widget to link to individual category pages within my astore with permalinks.

My store is still only in the very early stages of design but I'm already acheiving #7 on Yahoo for one of my target keyword combos with this approach despite not having much targeted content in place yet.

http://www.topbabybooks.com

I'm plan to use YUI dialogs for displaying large product images and I may use the YUI tree structure for as a nice site map.. mainly for SEO reasons.

All the YUI components are based of web standards design principles so you can code clean with DIVS and ULs etc which SEO .. and I guess this is the main goal of our sites at the end of the day.. to get those free clicks and sell.

I plan to drop the astore basket and go for product links instead though.. i don't see customers trusting astore much as I would'n't

nice store!

How did you get rid of the huge gap, which usually crops up between the end of the astore and the end of the page when astores are embedded within a site page?

Like this: http://www.plesiosauria.com/store.html

thanks!