I've been trying to break away from the standard "header, footer, 3 column grey layout" that osCommerce ships with out of the box. I find that particular look awful – and I would never buy a product from such a store. After all, if the Store Owner is too lazy to change the layout a bit, they are probably going to be as lazy when it comes to delivery, customer service and all the rest of it.

With that in mind, I've been coding up little cosmetic tweaks and trying to make things "sexy". I've been using jQuery (basically a javascript toolkit) on a number of sites and I came across "FishEye"…

What is FishEye?

It's a graphical "menu" that interacts when you pass your mouse over it. In this case, the images get bigger. It looks cooler than it sounds, trust me.

Here's a video

This video is very jerky, but that's because of my screen capture software – the operation of the images getting bigger and smaller is actually very smooth.

The upside

For starters, it looks great! And I have also managed to pass the SID (Session ID) through the links as well. So it all works well, osCommerce-wise.

The downside

There is a big downside, which means that this code is not really usable on a live commercial site…the script requires JavaScript to be turned on in the viewers browser. If JS is not turned on, this menu doesn't degrade at all well. This is a major problem and is something I need to take a look at before using in a live store.