One of the more important decisions a CubeCart store owner makes is which skin to use. A skin is a collection of template files, JavaScript, CSS and images which together determine the design and layout of your store, and to a degree the features available to your customers. Skins can also provide sub-themes, which allow variations such as a different colour palette or a slightly different layout while still using the same underlying skin.
It is easy to treat a skin as decoration, but it decides several things that directly affect sales.
Speed. The skin controls how many stylesheets and scripts load, how images are sized and whether anything blocks the page from rendering. A heavy skin can undo all the work done on the server.
Mobile. The majority of store traffic is now on a phone. A skin that merely shrinks rather than genuinely adapting will cost you orders at the checkout.
Structured data and on-page SEO. The template markup determines what search engines understand about your products, including whether prices and availability appear in results.
Your upgrade path. A skin that is not maintained will eventually block you from upgrading CubeCart itself, because new core features often require template changes.
CubeCart ships with a single basic skin called Foundation, built on the Smarty template engine. Some store owners use it unaltered, but it was never intended to be used that way. It was designed as a starting point for development, whether that means a few tweaks or a complete new skin built on its structure.
There are relatively few choices available. A number of the skins on offer were originally written for CubeCart version 5, and many are dated in design with only small colour or layout differences between them. Some are no longer actively developed or supported, which becomes a real problem when a core release requires template changes to enable new features.
That is worth checking before you buy any skin, from us or anyone else: when was it last updated, and which CubeCart versions does the developer currently support?
Havenswift Hosting have designed, and continue to develop, four CubeCart skins.
Retail Therapy is our flagship skin and takes a different layout approach from the conventional CubeCart arrangement.
Nautical, Party Time and Trade each offer a distinct look, with Trade being aimed at stores selling to business and trade customers.
All four are built for current CubeCart 6 releases and are updated as new core versions appear, so upgrading CubeCart does not leave you stranded on an old skin.
All four are built for current CubeCart 6 releases and are updated as new core versions appear. Prices are shown in our client area.
| Skin | What it does | |
|---|---|---|
| Retail Therapy | Our flagship skin, and a different layout concept from the conventional CubeCart arrangement. | Buy |
| Nautical | A clean, uncluttered skin with an alternative header layout option. | Buy |
| Party Time | A brighter, more informal design with homepage slide support. | Buy |
| Trade | Full width and warm editorial in style, aimed at stores selling to trade and business customers. | Buy |
Every skin we supply includes our Skin Configuration plugin free of charge. It lets you change a growing number of settings from the CubeCart admin which would otherwise require editing the skin files directly.
The benefit is not just convenience. Because your choices are stored as configuration rather than as edits to template files, you can install a new release of the skin without losing your customisations. Anyone who has hand-edited a template and then faced an upgrade will recognise why that matters.
If you are unsure which skin suits your store, tell us what you sell and who buys it and we will point you at the right one. We also build custom skins and modify existing ones, so if you have a design in mind that none of the available skins matches, that is a conversation worth having.
See also our range of CubeCart plugins, which add functionality rather than change appearance, and our CubeCart hosting plans.