Everyone wants to make money online. Selling things is probably the easiest and clear-cut way to do this. To sell effectively, you need a website that not only looks great, it must be reliable and secure. I manage a few websites that net over $1 million in annual sales. We are looking to fully redesign these ecommerce sites with the newest adaptive design and other technologies. Being an "old-school" web programmer, the frameworks, templates and CMS's that have cropped up to assist businesses to launch a full-out web presence faster while looking better and being more reliable than ever, is quickly reaching its apex. So much technology and innovation happen on the web so quickly, it's a bit overwhelming trying to live your life, do your job, and just keep up with all the changes and improvements. The cycles of innovation are shortening and the lifespan of websites and designs are shortening even faster.
Your websites need to adapt to new devices. If your website is not fully integrated to accommodate touch screens and tablets, you might as well start thinking about redesigning your website now. More than 50% of your website visitors won't be using a mouse come late summer 2014. The time to think about adapting and redesigning your web assets to improve your customer experience with your brand and increase your sales has long past. It's better to react late than to stay the course with your outdated website with the small pull down buttons that most people on a tablet either won't be able to read or won't be able to click on.
Our team did some extensive research and decided to go with a shopping cart system and an easily-customizable theme. We looked at all the options, including a bunch of free shopping cart systems. The features in some communities are lacking, but we found Magento, www.magento.com, offered a "community" version that was full of features and affordable add-ons (or "plug-ins") that would reduce the SLDC (software development life cycle) from 3-4 months to less than a month. We went with Magento and bought a theme pack from Envato.com that gave us the ground work already built within the Magento framework, saving us weeks of conceptual design phases. Even though the customizable theme was less than $100, we still needed it to be adaptive so our website would look good on any device. By the way, there are plenty of basic themes that look amazing on any device for the very low price of ..... free, you just have to look.
We wanted some extra features with a particular design and style so we opted for a gorgeous template (I don't believe I'm saying this -- remember when "templates" looked so gaudy? You could spot a template right when the page loaded? Not any more. Web developers, beware, if you're more of a web designer, you best refine your programming and database skills, because you will be going the way of graphic design for the print industry if you don't adapt....) Anyway, it only took about 20 minutes to download the theme and install it into Magento. It integrated seamlessly as you would hope, but probably not expect. (I say "not expect" because that's when you usually get some cryptic error to only find out your web host doesn't allow you to change file permissions for certain directories in which case you should look for a new host.) Speaking from experience, please make sure your web host accommodates Magento and ask for them to provide any guidelines in the case their server requires some changes to some files or settings before you go full bore into an install only to find out later you have to changes hosts or upgrade to a different server.
Magento's back end can be a little daunting, but there are tools that you can install to make life a little easier, including to help you automate the uploading of your products, images, and information in case you have a lot of SKUs and different product lines. Depending on the size and scope of your online store, and the type of merchandise you have to offer, I would highly recommend saving the time and limited resources in the development process by setting up this free system instead of insisting your development team write it all from scratch. I have developed plenty of websites from scratch -- the shopping cart, their back end and product databases, to the front end and full design from the ground up. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when the open-source community has fully taken on the upkeep of these more labor and code-intensive (not to mention mundane) functions. Imagine what you can accomplish by freeing up your business resources and the web talent around you to focus on more effective design, marketing, and performance! You could treat your web development team to breakfast and boost morale instead. (Sorry, subliminal message there, please ignore.)
Speaking of marketing, Magento is fully integrated with the big players in the industry. Your website will end up high on searches very quickly, it's SEO performance index is astounding. More people will find you faster because search engines trust sites that use Magento. Setting up payments is as easy as plugging in your Pay Pal merchant account information, your Authorize.net, or whatever you use within minutes. Magento handles many other tasks as well, such as customer log-ins, wish lists, customer reviews. There are modules to help you "recover" abandoned carts. Sales reports and everything you need to keep you up with accounting and tax records are built right in.
All these tools are managed through Magento's back end as an administrator and require very little actual web coding knowledge, though it would help tremendously if you had someone who could write PHP and knew CSS and HTML to refine pages and fix any issues that may arise. There's so much to Magento, I couldn't begin to cover anything but the basics here. I highly recommend visiting its website at www.Magento.com and learning more about the "Community" edition. It's amazing what open source gives the masses access to. Come to think of it, "open source" is the masses -- it's true empowerment for all, worldwide. Long live open source code, the engine of innovation, the "Libertarians" of the web.
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