As the last of those Christmas sweets are eaten and the shops begin to fill with their Spring/Summer ranges, the online Christmas sales figures are beginning to trickle through and just like our waistlines after one too many mince pies they’re on the increase!

The latest figures for ecommerce sales during the month of December show an increase of 30% year on year, with sales for Christmas week being almost double compared to the previous year.

There were record levels of internet traffic with 2.18billion visits to online retailers in December, but, according to Experian Hitwise, this reached its peak with Boxing day achieving the biggest day ever for online retail in the UK with 96 million internet visits to retail sites, an increase of 19.5% on the previous year.

Much of the traffic to ecommerce websites came from search engines. A massive 43% of all visits came from search engine click throughs with Google providing 9 out of 10 of those visits.

While many big name high street stores have announced they are going into administration over the festive period, it seems that ecommerce is continuing to grow year on year. Even supermarkets are announcing their best online figures for grocery shopping during December, some reporting as much as 34% increase.

Companies with successful online stores are continuing to report growth, making an ecommerce website a fundamental part of any retail business. An ecommerce website offers many advantages including 24/7 access, the ability to compare products like for like to find the best buy and of course the convenience of having your items delivered to your door. For the ecommerce store owner there is also the added advantage of lower running costs, a very big advantage in the current economic climate!

Impact Web Solutions specialise in the design and development of Magento Commence stores which offer many great benefits to both the store owner and customer. Last month Magento reported in their blog that many Magento store owners were smashing their sales records in the run up to Christmas and that they were citing Magento as the reason for this success. The many extensions available allow store owners to add features that assist customers in making their purchases and increasing conversion rates.

As Magento specialists we also provide Magento search engine optimisation services to increase your visibility in search engines making your website easier to find. As I already mentioned, almost half of the visits to retails sites in December came from search engines so if your website isn’t on the first page of results, your customers will be going to your competitors who are.

If you want to find out more about how Magento can boost your online sales, visit our website at http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Commerce Web Design

Christmas is fast approaching and as people begin to panic about finding the right gifts and making their final purchases, you can guarantee that online shopping will make a sudden increase.

In America, Black Friday and Cyber Monday mark the beginning of the shopping rush with the majority of retailers offering special highly reduced purchases to draw the customers in. This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday appear to have gone especially well for Magento website owners as they report that they have smashed previous year’s sales records!

With easy to set shopping cart rules and special pricing, retailers are able to create time specific discounts and bundles ensuring that customers will be able to purchase products at the best possible prices while increasing sales.

Magento websites are easy to navigate letting your customers find the products they are looking for and purchase them quickly and easily.

Developer enhancements allow retailers to provide an online store that can support large amounts of users simultaneously perfect for dealing with the Christmas rush and ensuring that your website is available at all times.

Retailers and marketers often begin targeting holiday specific keywords through their search engine campaigns months prior to the holiday sales allowing them to maximise their sales further.

Is your website ready for the holiday season & sales? If you want to find out more about what Magento can do for your business, not only during the Christmas season but throughout the year, visit our website at http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

So, what does the acronym stand for and how can it help a Magento website?

A is for Attention or Awareness: The first part of the sales process is to attract the customer and to make them aware of your products or services. By optimising your Magento websites pages individually with product specific keywords, your products and services will appear in a wider range of search engine results ensuring that relevant prospects can find your website. When the prospect clicks through to your website, it is vital that your website makes a good first impression. Make sure that your Magento website loads quickly, presents a professional image and is easy to use. Most visitors to a website have a question in mind or a product that they are looking for, make it clear what you’re offering and tell them how they can get it quickly and easily!

I is for Interest: Once you’ve got their attention, you want to make sure that you gain their interest by demonstrating and focusing on the advantages & benefits of choosing your products or services over those of your competitors. Ways that you can gain interest are by highlighting special pricing, showing linked products and recommending relevant products. Anything you can do to make the process easier and to assist the customer will allow you to keep their interest for longer.

D is for Desire or Decision: By providing as much information as possible about the products and services you provide, showing reviews from other customers that have purchased the product and found it useful, or by creating a sense of urgency by showing an offer valid until date, you can help to convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.

A is for Action: The most important part of the whole process is getting your customers to take action and to purchase your products or services. Having a well laid out Magento website with lots of product information and cross selling are great for getting customers to this point, now you need to make sure they can easily locate the shopping cart (add a link to every page!) and once they have, give them the choice between registering and guest checkout and make the payment process as simple as possible (why not even cut the whole thing down to a single page?!).

For more information about Magento web design by Impact Web Solutions visit http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

The first and perhaps the most important thing you need to do before you choose a web design company is to think about what you want and need from your website. Make a list if the features and functionality you require (you can find tips about things to consider in our blog ecommerce & seo: the important part you play).

Different web designers specialise in different types of websites on many different platforms. If you decide your business needs an ecommerce website, choosing a specialist ecommerce web designer will mean that you get the best possible solution. Impact Web Solutions specialise in building Magento ecommerce websites. The Magento platform is a robust system offering a wide range of add-ons to cover pretty much any function you can imagine.

As specialist Magento Web Designers, we have an expert understanding of the platform, its capabilities and how it can increase sales for your business.

Visit our demo Magento Commerce store.

Does the company focus on how your online store will increase your sales?

The main purpose of an online store is to make money for your business. Is the Magento Web Designer talking about your sales and return on investment; or are they just focusing on pretty designs and the latest technology?

Impact Web Solutions have over 10 years’ experience of building ecommerce websites that focus on increasing your conversion rate and making you sales while you sleep.

Do they have a portfolio/examples of previous work?

Any established Magento Web Design Agency should be able to provide examples of work they have completed for other clients.

Although you may require something completely different, viewing their portfolio will give you an idea of the standard of work, the type of clients they’re already working with and their ability to complete a project.

Remember, a poorly designed or developed website can be detrimental to your business and actually reduce your conversion rate, by checking out their previous work you can become more familiar with how their designers and developers work and decide whether they are right for your business needs.

Can they provide details of clients you can contact for a reference?

The best advert for any company is a happy customer and if they are doing a good job they should be able to provide details of a few clients that you can contact for a reference.

Speaking to their existing clients gives you the opportunity to find out whether they are reliable, proactive, responsive and stick to agreed budgets.

Have they worked with similar sized companies to yours?

It is important to discuss with your Magento ecommerce web design company the size of their existing client companies to determine whether they have the experience and resources to handle your project effectively.

If you’re a small business, are they able to provide examples of other small businesses they have worked with and demonstrate how their business has grown as a result of their ecommerce website? If they are used to working with large businesses, will the services they provide be suitable for your small business needs?

If you’re a large business, do they have sufficient resources available for your project?

Do they have a separate web designer and web developer to work on the project?

There are many amazing web designers out there and lots of very skilled web developers but they don’t always cross over all that well. Make sure that the agency you choose has a separate designer and developer to work on your project.

Check that the developer has all of the skills necessary to create everything that you want to include in your website. The Magento Commerce platform has a vast range of extensions available to provide all kinds of functionality but if there isn’t an extension available are they able to build one for you?

Check whether the designer will create designs specific to your companies’ requirements or will they be working with premade templates that restrict how the design can be changed? How many concept designs will the designer provide?

Are they local?

Choosing an agency that is local to your business will make it much easier for you to contact them and to keep up to date with the progress of your project.

If the company is local, you will be able to meet with them face to face giving you access to various members of the team ensuring the project keeps flowing. Visiting their offices will also give you a chance to see where and how they work and to get a feel for the company as a whole.

If they will be providing support for your company, being local also ensures they are available during your working hours which is essential for fixing any bugs with the least amount of inconvenience to your customers.

Is the work completed inhouse or outsourced to a third party?

This is an important one. If you choose a company because they are local and they outsource the work to a company in India it kind of defeats the object.

Ask your ecommerce web designer if any aspects of your websites development are outsourced and if so, what kind of affects this will have on your project. Does the company they are working with complete the work quickly, do they provide regular updates to your Magento web designers and what happens if they can’t complete the project i.e. do they have a backup?

How will you be kept up to date with the progress of your project?

Regular updates will allow you to keep up to date with the progress of your Magento website project. Will you have a project manager or an account manager that you can contact to discuss your project with?

What is the payment schedule?

This is an important question for two reasons.

1. We have spoken with many companies who have paid a web designer the full amount up front to create a website never to hear from them again. Not only does this leave the company without a website, it also leaves them out of pocket – often affecting the budget they have to pay another company to create what they thought they were going to receive originally.
   Paying for the website in more than one instalment, e.g. a deposit and a payment on completion of the website means that if the worst should happen, you still have something in reserve to complete your project with another company.
2. We all know that the current economic situation is a little dire and that many companies are being forced to close for whatever reason. Again, paying by instalments will give you that extra peace of mind.

Honest, well established companies that have no doubts about their ability to deliver should be willing to accept payment by instalments. If the company demands full payment up front, you should consider carefully whether they are the right company for your project.

For more information about creating a Magento Commerce website with Impact Web Solutions, visit http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

Speaking in a language that is relevant to your visitors is also important. Don’t complicate things by being overly technical unless your target customers are going to understand. Keeping things short and to the point while providing the information your visitors require is the most effective way to keep their attention. The tone of the website should be friendly and conversational.

Design – The design of your website can play a key part in the success of your online store.

Having a well designed website provides a professional image to your visitors. Keeping the website uncluttered and having ‘white space’ allows your visitors to easily find what they are looking for and to focus on your products and information. Keeping backgrounds plain and light make it easier for your customers to read the content of your pages.

Navigation – Navigation is a very important part of your websites design. Clear navigation lets your customers easily find the product or information they are looking for and lets them navigate back to that page from other parts of your website. Navigation should be present on all pages, pages without navigation are called orphaned pages, the only way back from these pages is to click the back button on the browser, this looks unprofessional and may cause visitors to leave your site.

Functionality – The Magento Commerce platform allows store owners to add a lot of functionality that will assist customers in purchasing items from the website, and store information for future visits.

Some great features to include in Magento websites are wish lists, send to a friend, product comparisons, reviews, recently viewed items and recommended products – these features allow customers to purchase items quickly and easily, and also gives you the opportunity to cross sell.

Search – Search boxes allow you to quickly check whether the item you’re looking for is actually on the website saving your visitors time. Magento websites also feature a predictive search box that finds items matching words as you type, often giving similar item suggestions.

Product narrowing and sorting – Sometimes you just don’t have the time to sit and look through lots of products to see if they have the right size, colour, etc. Product narrowing lets your visitors select certain options to locate the products available saving them time.

Product sorting also allows the customers to view the products by price, name or other variables.

Images – When customers visit your website, they aren’t physically able to see the items like they could in a bricks and mortar shop, so having plenty of good quality, clear photos will help them to decide whether the item is what they are looking for. Magento includes a zoom feature on images so your customers can really check out every little deatil of the product!

Product Information – As with images, a good product description is vital for helping your customers to make a decision on whether to purchase the product or not. Including as much information as possible such as measurements, colours, material, etc will also keep your customers happy by providing them with the correct item for their needs.

Product information is also helpful for search engine rankings as the product specific keywords will allow your website to appear in a wider range of search results.

Clear pricing and availability – Hidden charges can be the difference between a purchase and an abandoned basket. For example, I visited a website earlier today to purchase some tickets, the price was great. Then I went to pay and there was an additional £1 booking fee… oh well, not going to break the bank I thought and continued. Your postage will cost £7.50, and how about some insurance for an extra £2? Finally, the payment screen.. but wait, what’s this, a £3.50 charge to pay by credit card?! So my tickets are now £14 more than the original cost! Not such a great price after all!

Make sure that your charges are clearly displayed including any delivery costs, insurance and admin costs.

Another sure fire way to annoy your customers is to send them through the checkout procedure only to have to contact them later to tell them the item is out of stock. Make sure it’s clear whether items are available. Magento lets you to set stock levels so your customers will be unable to place orders for items that are out of stock.

Checkout – Another thing that causes shopping cart abandonment is not offering your customers the choice of checking out as a guest. Making it compulsory for customers to sign up for an account can put a lot of people off of purchasing from an online store as it increases the time it takes to place an order, and also means they have to store their personal details on the website.

Long drawn out checkouts also lose customers, make sure that there are as few stages to your checkout as possible to keep things quick and easy.

Email confirmations – So the customer has made a purchase, don’t forget to send a confirmation email to say the order has been received and that someone is dealing with it. Magento allows you to set up auto responders, it also lets you send out notifications to inform your customers that certain parts of their order have been completed, e.g. the order has been dispatched.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

Magento Search Engine Optimisation is quite different from the seo performed on general brochure and catalogue websites. As a specialist Magento Web Design agency, our team of internet marketing professionals are experienced in optimising Magento websites to ensure that your site appears on the 1^st page of Google, exposing your business to a wider audience.

There are many ways that our Magento search engine optimisation team work to increase your website rankings, here are 6 basic tips for optimising a Magento website:

• Optimise the default page title – When you set up a new website using the Magento Commerce system, the page title tags are set to ‘Magento Commerce’ by default. The default page title is highly unlikely to reflect the nature of your business so it is recommended that the default page title is changed as soon as possible to something more relevant to your company. By changing the default page title you will maximise the optimisation of your online store.
  You can change the default page title by going to Systems > Configuration > Design via the Magento dashboard, this will access the html head section where you can input your desired page title.
• Optimise CMS pages – In the screen where you create your cms pages and add content, there are also options to set a custom page design and to add meta data. By accessing the meta data screen, you can add a page description and keywords to your page. The page description you type here, is the description that will be visible in search engine results – so this is really your opportunity to draw the customers in. Most search engines set a 160 character limit so keep your description relevant and to the point while trying to include your main keywords for that product or service.
• Optimise categories – In Magento, you can also optimise your categories through the Catalog > Manage categories menu. For each category you can add a page title, page description and a keyword rich url through the ‘url key’ field.
• Optimise Products – Optimising your products is a very important part of Magento search engine optimisation as it will help your products to appear in a wider range of search results. You can optimise your products through the Catalog > Manage products menu. While creating your product, you can add a meta title, keywords and a description through the ‘Meta information’ tab. Any title added here will overwrite the default website page title.
• Optimise Images – Making sure that your website images are optimised is another important part of Magento search engine optimisation. Optimised images will appear in search engine image results creating an additional source of traffic for your website. Optimised images also add additional keywords to the copy of your website, again assisting with website ranking.
  While creating your product in Magento, you can add alt tags through the ‘Images’ tab, once your product image has been uploaded there will be a field to enter a ‘label’, this is the same as the alt tag.
• Duplicate content issues – A common reason for duplicated content on websites is that there can often be several paths leading to the same page. Search engines class these different paths as individual pages meaning that your website will be penalised for duplicate content and that you will lose link juice. Magento offers the option to use categories in your product urls creating at least 4 different variations of the url per product.
  To disable this feature go to System> Configuration > Catalog and under Search engine optimisation set the ‘Use categories path for product urls’ to no.

For information about how Magento Search Engine Optimisation by Impact Web Solutions can help your business visit  http://www.studio2online.co.uk/search-engine-promotion.php.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Search Engine Optimisation

There are many great extensions available for Magento websites, covering a whole range of functionality and features. Here are 5 Magento extensions that we like:

Twitter Integration Bundle http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/MagePlace/extension/7589/twitter_integration_bundle

Social commerce is fast becoming an integral part of many business’ marketing strategy allowing customers and fans of the brand to share products and services via websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

The Twitter intergration bundle allows you to connect your Magento website to Twitter providing the following functionality:

• Visitors can sign up to your website using their Twitter account cutting the long registration process down to a single click.
• Customers can share content from your website to their Twitter account without leaving your website.
• Visitors can follow your Twitter account by clicking the onsite follow button.

SEO Suite Pro http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/MageWorx.com/extension/2448/seo-suite-pro#overview

One of the biggest problems we face with ecommerce systems is that they automatically generate information about your pages which can lead to problems like duplicated content, urls that are difficult for search engines to read and access to pages that we would rather search engines didn’t visit! The SEO Suite Pro extension covers several of the issues that affect Magento Search Engine Optimisation including:

• Converting automatically generated urls to be search engine and user friendly.
• Creates 301 permanent redirects for various urls that access the same content to avoid penalisation by search engines for duplicate content.
• Xml sitemap optimisation including the ability to hide certain pages that you don’t want to be indexed.
• Frontend sitemap optimisation.

Speed Booster http://www.aitoc.com/en/magento_booster.html

Magento is a feature rich system, this means that there will be times when the pages of the store may take a little longer to load. In order to speed up the websites load time, making both your customers and search engines happy, there are numerous speed boosting extensions that can be added to your Magento website.

We like the Speed Booster extension from Aitoc which includes does following features:

• Complete cache of all visitor areas.
• Javascript compression.
• Automatic cache refreshing when products are out of stock, edited or deleted.
• Up to 10 times faster performance for visitors.

Advanced reports http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/advanced-reports.html

There is no denying that Magento offers a lot of helpful reports in its backend that allow you to track the performance of your online store. If you are looking for even more advanced reporting then this extension includes:

• A sales by day of the week report allowing you to compare the sales of two days.
• Sales reporting by any criteria e.g. SKU, manufacturer, cost.
• Sales by product, this lets you track a product over a period of time or even compare it’s performance against another product.
• View customer conversion and retention rates all on easy to understand reports.

SBOeConnect http://www.sboeconnect.com/

Adding all of your products to Magento can take a while if you have a lot of them! One way to speed up the process is to integrate your online store with your inhouse solutions such as Sage or SAP.

With the SBOeConnect extension you can do the following:

• Synchronise the SAP system with the Magento website to import product details.
• Synchronise product stock levels.
• Set up tier and special pricing.
• Export multiple product images from SAP to your Magento website.
• Bi-directional customer information synchronisation.

If there are any great Magento extensions that you think deserve a mention, why not head on over to our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/ImpactWebSolutions and add them to our discussion on Magento extensions.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

Magento websites are great because you don’t need a vast amount of technical knowledge to use them, something most store owners will be pleased to hear!

When you sign in to your Magento Commerce backend, you will see this page:

This page is the Magento dashboard and it contains lots of helpful information about how your ecommerce store is performing. The dashboard includes the following information:

• Lifetime sales: This lets you see the total of all your orders, great for checking your websites ROI!
• Average orders: This shows you the average order value, great for working out whether you need to include cross-selling to increase your order value.
• Last 5 orders: This shows you the last 5 orders including the customers name, amount of items and order value.
• Last 5 search terms: This is helpful as it lets you see what people are searching for, perhaps even highlighting a gap in your product range!
• Top 5 search terms: This shows you the most popular search terms, highlighting your customers’ must have products.
• Orders graph: This section allows you to view a graph of your sales based on amount or value of order for various periods of time. There is also a summary below the graph showing you values by revenue, tax, shipping and quantity, perfect for collating your business figures and projections.
• Order summary (see blow): This gives you a summary by Best sellers, Most viewed products and customer, perfect for keeping up to date with your most popular products.

One of the great things about the Magento Commerce backend is that everything is linked to via the easy to navigate menu. I’m sure all online store owners will agree, the most important thing they need to find is the orders screen! This can be found on the 1st menu under ‘sales’:

Clicking on the ‘orders’ option will take you to an overview of your orders which looks like this:

This screen allows you to view the details of the order along with the order status. You will see at the end of the rows there is an ‘edit’ link, clicking on this opens up the full order. The orders (see example below) contain all of the customer, payment and product purchased details, as well as one click options to send an invoice, mark the item as shipped, to cancel, place on hold or reorder.

Yesterday I heard a client asking a very good question about the Magento system, “does it automatically create an invoice for the order?”, well the short answer is yes and the default looks like this:

While this invoice provides all of the information the customer requires, it may not look exactly how you would want it to – this isn’t a problem though as your Magento Web Designer will be able to change the layout, colours and logos to get it just right for your business.

Another helpful menu on the Magento backend is the reports menu. This menu contains the following sub-menu’s:

The ‘sales’ sub-menu lets you create custom reports showing you information about sales, tax, shipping, total invoiced, total refunded and coupons. You are able to create reports for certain time periods, great for checking the success of a special offer campaign or completing sales reports. Once your reports have been generated you can even export them to Excel and csv.

The ‘shopping cart’ sub-menu provides information about abandoned carts and products in carts. These are helpful, especially for email marketing purposes and are perfect for targeted marketing.

You can also compare added to basket v purchased on the items in cart screen, highlighting areas where there may be a conversion to sale issue.

The ‘products’ sub-menu provides information about bestsellers, most viewed, downloads and that all important low stock report – again all of these can be exported to Excel or csv.

The ‘new accounts’ sub-menu contains information about new customers, customers by order total and customers by number of orders. These reports are great for offering special welcome promotions or customer specific pricing for your best customers.

The ‘tags’ sub-menu contains information about customer tags, product tags and most popular tags. Tags are a great way of matching your products to what your customers are searching for. The search report (see below) shows a list of the terms your customers are searching for as well as the number of results returned for that phrase. You can use the information in the search report to create better product tags increasing the chances of your customers finding the products they are searching for.

Below is an example of the search report, this can be exported to Excel or csv.

• Top tip: Why not email a copy across to your Magento Search Engine Optimisation Engineer so they can come up with some new and relevant keywords for your campaign?

Finally, just to show you how easy it is to create and update your products, under the ‘catalog’ menu there is an option ‘manage products’, this takes you to the product management screen which looks like this:

On the product management screen, an overview of the product details is displayed. As with the orders page, you will see there is an ‘edit’ link at the end of the row – clicking this takes you to the ‘product information’ page where you can amend any of the product details.

In the top right hand corner of this screen you will also see a button to add a product.

To begin creating your product you must first choose the attribute set (i.e. the type of product such as clothing, furniture, etc) and the product type (i.e. simple product, bundled product, etc).

Then you will be taken to the screen below where you can enter all of the product details. The additional tabs to the left allow you to add further information such as setting related products and upsells/cross-sells, create meta information for search engine promotion and setting custom designs (each product can potentially have a different design).

To view a live demonstration of the Magento system visit http://ecommercedemo.studio2online.co.uk/ or for more information about how a Magento Commerce Website built by Impact Web Solutions can help your business call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

What is Magento?

Magento is an open source, feature rich, ecommerce platform. Open source software is software that allows others to access the code it is written in so that they can change and modify the code to further extend and develop the functionality available.

Because Magento allow access to their code, there is an ever increasing store of extensions available allowing you to add all kinds of additional features to your Magento website, giving you flexibility with the look, content and functionality.

Magento also features a robust backend giving you access to various reports to assist with marketing, search engine optimisation and catalogue management.

Can Magento be customised or am I restricted to premade templates and set functionality?

Magento can be fully customised, from templates and design; to the functionality for both the website owners and customers. Magento have thousands of extensions to choose from so you can create a website tailored to your specific requirements.

As well as the vast sea of Magento website templates and extensions that are available, you can also choose for your Magento web designer to design a custom template in keeping with your companies’ branding or for your Magento web developer to create an extension to perform a specific function if one isn’t currently available.

What payment gateways are compatible with Magento?

Magento websites are compatible with all major payment methods including PayPoint, PayPal, Protx and Worldpay.

What are the benefits to my customers of having a website built using the Magento Commerce platform?

Magento ecommerce websites allow for a lot of customer focused functionality.

One of the main advantages of having your website built in the Magento platform is that you can create clean, easy to navigate websites that encourage sales. Magento commerce websites can include functionality such as previously browsed items, similar items and recommended items as well as wish lists, favourite lists, side by side item comparisons, single page checkouts with guest checkout option and much, much more.

Magento websites let your customers browse for, and purchase items quickly and easily.

I’m using social networking to promote my business, what does Magento do to support this?

Magento have a growing selection of social networking extensions to assist your websites online marketing. There are extensions that allow you to add your websites products directly on to your Facebook fan page, to follow your company on social networking sites without even clicking away from your website and to easily share your pages via social networking and bookmarking sites.

What should I do to ensure that Magento websites cover all of my companies’ needs?

Before meeting with your Magento web designer, we suggest making a list of exactly what you want your online store to do for both your company and your customers, it is also good if you can write down your goals for the website, this way your Magento web designer will be able to recommend the best functionality and may even suggest things you hadn’t considered.

Where can I view examples of live Magento websites designed and developed by Impact Web Solutions?

You can view live Magento websites created by Impact Web Solutions by clicking on the links below. These examples will give you a better idea of the flexibility provided by developing ecommerce websites on the Magento platform. You will see that the layouts and designs are very different for each website and that the functionality also varies from site to site depending on the clients requirements.

Window wallpaper http://www.windowwallpaper.co.uk/

Palmer Metals http://www.palmermetals.co.uk/

Metro Furniture http://metrofurniture.co.uk/

G-Force http://gforcesportswear.co.uk/

Pineapple Shoes https://www.pineappleshoes.com/

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

I have written in the blog before about how wonderful Magento websites are from a buyer perspective and also for the store owners; but today I want to discuss Magento from a website developers’ point of view.

I asked our Technical Team Leader Gareth to give me 5 reasons why Magento is great from a Web Developers perspective, this is what he said:

“The software is Open Source” – Magento Commerce is open source software, this means that Impact Web Solutions are able to access the code that the system is written in, something that many ecommerce systems don’t allow and that is usually only available to the copyright holders.

As Magento web developers, this allows us to change and modify the code to create the fully bespoke websites that we develop for our clients.

Also, because Magento allow everyone to extend their code base, this means there is an ever increasing store of extensions and modules which we can integrate with your website to allow pretty much any ecommerce function you can think of!

“It is flexible” – Because Magento Commerce is open source, it means the possibilities are endless for your website! Whereas other Ecommerce platforms may restrict how you can develop your online stores, Magento encourages integration with other platforms and systems.

“It’s Modularised” - One of the best parts of Magento is that everything is modularised, this means that if you want your Magento ecommerce store to perform a specific function, there is most likely an extension or module available to integrate the functionality. If there isn’t an existing extension or module, your Impact Web Solutions Magento Web Developers are able to develop one for you.

Also, because Magento is modularised, it is quick and easy to install new options meaning that we are able to add new functionality to your website even faster.

“It has templated design” – What this means is that the templates are separate from the core code of the website, the templates are in the websites frontend and the functioning code is in the websites backend, the two come together and form the website.

The main benefit of this is the build time is quicker and therefore it costs the client less. Another advantage is that the website loads quicker due to it only having to cache small html files.

“Easy Product Management” – With Magento Commerce, it is simple to import/export products and create a variety of product types. There are many product types to choose from (i.e. simple, configurable, grouped, bundled, downloadable and virtualised). Each product can be assigned to multiple categories and have a variety of related items, cross sell items and upsell items assigned to them. All this functionality allows our clients to easily manage their website and products once the website has launched.

Product styling is also easy; for each product on your website,  you could design and assign a different page layout. Alternatively you may wish to apply a seasonal template around Christmas time to give your website that festive feel, this is possible by creating new template files and assigning them in the admin area. The new templates can also be set to appear for a specified time period, your website will then revert back to the default templates after that period has passed.

Also, you can create permissions based access so that members of your team are only able to view and update certain areas of the website.

If you would like more information about Magento Ecommerce Websites, visit http://studio2online.co.uk/ecommerce-website-packages.php or call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Developers Leicester