In Zazzle’s “Advanced Store Customization” system it’s possible to do a heck of a lot with your gallery/store there. But it can be confusing at the beginning – so here is a step by step tutorial on something you may want to do – create an entirely new, custom page that will show up in the links in your store sidebar.

First things first!

Now You’re Ready.

You may want to add completely new pages to replace or enhance your “About” page, or to add interesting content that will impress your visitors and Googlebot with how authoritative your shop is.

Do be sure to follow the rules in Zazzle’s Terms of Service when you add new content to your store. Play nice!

The good news is that it is not hard to add a new page. But it may look complicated, because it involves adding or changing content in all three areas of the advanced customization system.

I’ve worked out this simple set of steps using the default configuration for a store. It should work for everybody. However I can’t give you exact content for the second and third steps – because you want to start with the way your store is already set up. So I’m just telling you what to copy and paste, and what changes to make once you’ve done that.

Step One: Add this to your CSS

This isn’t necessary to add a page, but you may need it to adjust the alignment of your new page so that it matches the dynamic pages that Zazzle serves up for you.

Go to the Appearance/Advanced tab, scroll down to the CSS window, and add this to your CSS. Make sure it’s below the first line, or above the last one!

You will be able to adjust those left and top values later, if you need to.

Validate and save.

Step Two: Create a Content Definition for your Custom Page

Go to the “Edit Content/Advanced” tab in your store’s configuration.

Copy the “home” page definition. Paste a copy at the end of the list – make sure it’s above the line that reads:

In this new copy, change this line:

to this:

…and delete these lines from your new template:

They may look a little different in your store – but the idea is that you’re deleting everything between:

and:

At this point you have created a custom page that is set to be invisible. That’s because it wants to use a template that isn’t there yet, and because there’s no content in the page yet, anyway.

Validate and save.

Step Three: Create a custom template for the new page

Go back to the “Appearance/Advanced” tab. In the Layout window, copy your maintemplate. Paste your copy after the maintemplate.

In this copy, replace this:

with this:

Now, after this line:

Paste this:

You’re nearly there, although a page that says “Custom content goes here” hardly seems worth the trouble. Whether now or later, you will replace that line with the HTML for your custom page.

Validate and save.

Step Four: Turn it on

Go back to “Edit Content/Advanced”.

Change this line:

to this:

Validate and save.

Your custom page should now appear in the sidebar, at the end of the block where your Gallery Icon and Home and Products links are.

It has a boring name and boring content. You can change the name by changing the page ID in the Content Definitions list. You can change the content by replacing “Custom content goes here” with your own HTML.

Adding the HTML in the template avoids the problems you have in page description HTML (where everything needs to be entered on one line). But it also requires a little XHTML/PHP style formatting – all tags must be closed.

Still it is much better to add HTML this way.

If you see that this page doesn’t line up exactly with other pages in your store, this is the time when you want to play with the left and top values in the “paneshift” style.