This article is about changing your shop's look and feel, in particular the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). This controls the colours, fonts and other style attributes associated with your shop.

There are two options available for this: a basic method, which allows you to edit the colours of various components, and an advanced method, requiring a knowledge of CSS and best left to your web designer.

To access the online colour editor, log in to your shop's admin area at http://www.yourdomain.com/catalog/admin/ and select Tools then CSS Editor.

Here you can set the colours of the various components of your page. Select the item you want to change from the right hand column and either select from the palette of colours, or type in a hex code for a colour value not on the palette.

You can find several good resources including colour wheels to help you choose colours here.

Some of the options on the right hand page are not associated with a colour, but with a font name and size. You can change the font name and size with the pull downs. Some options are associated with both a colour and a font.

Note: the CSS Editor uses a program on the webserver to update update the css file. It can take up to 10 minutes before changes you make to your site in the CSS Editor to be live on the webservers.

The advanced method of changing your CSS styles is to download via FTP the file www/catalog/stylesheet.css and www/catalog/tmpstylesheet.css, change them in an editor locally to your PC, such as Dreamweaver, and upload them back to your site.

Note, the stylesheet used by the catalog site is stylesheet.css. The other file, tmpstylesheet.css is used by the CSS Editor module to rebuild stylesheet.css when changes are made. If you make any changes to the stylesheet.css, you should make the same changes to tmpstylesheet.css so that you can continue to use the CSS Editor module in the future.

If you have made changes to stylesheet.css and not to tmpstylesheet.css, those changes will be overwritten if the CSS Editor ever gets run.