0 - Magento in 3 months

[ehasler]

There have been a few "how do I upgrade/build a website" posts recently, so this is a little different as I've just upgraded my own site and thought it might be useful for anyone looking to do similar.

I run an ecommerce site, which was originally launched in 2010 and was built by myself using Zen Cart - a pretty easy ecommerce system to install and use, but even then it was showing its age. As I learnt more about running an ecommerce site, I realised it had some several major limitations, and towards the end of last year I decided to upgrade.

I looked at various options, and decided to go with Magento CE as it is modern, used by a large number of other sites and ticked all the main boxes for functionality I wanted. I decided to do the work myself, as I couldn't justify the cost of hiring a pro, and I also wanted to have full control of how it looked and worked.

It didn't take too long to get to grips with Magento, and there is a lot of information and help available online. I bought a template which was similar to the design I wanted, then dived in to the css and PHP files to make all the changes I wanted. With the Magento platform, there are a number of extensions available which provide extra functionality which are usually simple to install, but some did need a bit of tweaking to get them working as I wanted - nothing too difficult though, and often the developers are willing to make changes to customise them to suit your requirements.

There's still a little bit of work to do - e.g., improving the content for SEO purposes, but overall I'm very happy with the results. It took about 3 months from installing Magento for the first time, to launching the new site last night although a lot of that time was spent migrating product descriptions across from the old site, and re-doing all the product image photos.

If you're interested in taking a look, the link to my site is in my profile.

[ehasler]

Frimley111R said:

Nice, clean and simple. I like it.

It might help to add some other content so that you have more menu options, as much as anything because currently such limited menus make you look a little small (just IMO of course).

Thanks

I decided to go for a simple menu structure as this was more intuitive when using the site on a tablet, plus feedback I had from the previous site was that there were too many menu options. A few more categories will be added as there are still some products that haven't been listed yet, but I will try to keep it simple.

jammy_basturd said:

Looks good!

Did you have much SEO weight with the old site? If so you might want to look at what links the search engines have indexed for your website, and ensure they all still work with the new site. If not then put redirections in place.

I've added redirects for the top 20 visited pages from google, so this should cover most search traffic. I've also tried to make the 404 page a bit more user-friendly as I'm sure there will be some visitors who end up there!

Thanks for the other suggestions - I was trying to get more attention on the delivery details, so it's good to see that works

[ehasler]

sumo69 said:

By the way, I am still waiting for your response to my e-mail??

David

I'm sure I replied to your last mail - I'll double check when I get home this evening.

jammy_basturd said:

You'll probably find that on most tablets and phones, people won't be able to use the dropdown menus because as soon as they tap/click on either 'Dog Products' or 'Cat Products' they'll be directed to those categories before they've had a chance to choose a sub-menu option. There is no 'hover' on a mobile device.

The design of the site changes depending on the screen width, so you get a more touch-screen friendly menu structure on a tablet, although it was still easier to use with less complicated menus.

jammy_basturd said:

For me, the delivery details took my attention before I was able to work out what you sold. Personally I would have thought that getting across what you sell, along with other details such as special offers, great products, etc should come ahead of whether or not you can send them to me?

That's a fair point, although the majority of traffic comes from people searching for a specific item, and I'm trying to see if highlighting the free postage option generates more higher-value orders. It's something I'll look at though - thanks.

[ehasler]

It's not unusual to have Magento running the store side of your site, and Wordpress installed alongside to power the blog. So for example www.yourdomain.com would point to the Magento store, and www.yourdomain.com/blog would have all your blog content.

Getting them to run alongside each other is easy, but there would be some work involved to get the design of both to be the same, so you have consistent menu structures across the whole site for example.

Magento itself isn't bad for SEO, but isn't designed for creating regular wordy content - which is where Wordpress comes in. So there are advantages for running both together.

BGARK said:

In addition can you have several "white label" sites, each selling unique products with individual URL's, again I was told this is not possible or google might bin the results?

Magento does let you do this, but there is no reason Google would penalise it unless you used the same content on each site.

I've noticed a few visits to my site from this thread, so just for anyone who's interested - the Magento site I started this thread about no longer exists, but the site in my profile is custom written by myself, with Wordpress running everything under /blog.

[ehasler]

That does seem to be the most common configuration, bu you can have it configured how you want - for example Wordpress running under "/" and Magento running under "/shop"

There are also various plugins to further integrate the two apps, but I don't have any experience of these. It's worth taking a look at the Magento website, and seeing what's available and how it's used.

BGARK said:

Also ehasler, with your pet website. I really like the drop down box thing on the home page. Is this a standard add on function.

I have an issue with some products where we have hundreds of choices (built/assembled to order items), and showing them all on the site looks messy. Could this function also have images that change each time you select through the choices?

The pet food drop down box thing on the top left of the home page is a mixture of JavaScript, PHP and MySQL. I wrote it myself, but there are loads of similar examples online.

As standard, Magento does have the functionality to select different configurations for products (e.g., a T-shirt with different sizes and colours), but the images don't update when you select different options. It's been a year or so since I last used Magento, so I don't know if there are any plugins that make this happen.

One thing I found with Magento is that it is very powerful, however if you want something that isn't available as standard or from a 3rd-party plugin, it isn't particularly easy to get things modified.

Edited by ehasler on Thursday 23 October 13:33