I just wanted to share my (very modest) Magento store with everyone - to show what a complete non-designer non-developer can achieve by just using the existing templates. There’s no customisation, no template development, nothing really special but I’m liking the way it looks and feels.
Would be really interested in any comments (Be nice!),
Hi Mott - the unfortunate truth is that I’ve done everything manually!! I prepared all the images (athough the batch processesing feature on photoshop helped) and then have been inputting products, one at a time, into the admin system. Really couldn’t recommend that as the best way to do things, but I didn’t really have a choice.
I had that product import/export error that other people had encountered (see other forum threads) which meant the batch upload didn’t work (I’ve put in the fix proposed by other members and so that fixed now). Now as I get new product I input manually, duplicating and editing existing products rather than starting each one from fresh, which helps speed things along a bit.
If I were starting from scratch now, I’d get the whole site build done MUCH quicker!!!
Very impressed, particularly with choice of attributes and how the filtered navigation works.
Did you have any troubles with getting the UK locale working?
(I have struggled, and need to know how to do it, what folder name and where...)
Looks great. I’m a budding developer myself and I was totally overwhelmed when I first started out and now my site is looking great (I’m not sharing it yet since I’m still working on it).
So to all of those of you wondering if you can do this, hang in there and start with one piece at a time. You’ll figure it out.
Good Work. Couple of questions. Are you going to try and get rid of the graphic around the search box which still shows evidence of the old theme? And slightly off topic.... I tried to use the batch editor in photoshop and found that I couldn’t get the images as small (KB) than when I did it individually with the “Save for web command”. Using the latter method I could get 300 186x186 px images each down to less than 12KB, with many as low as 5KB - 6BK. Using the batch method they started at 12KB and went up from there. Did you test this at all? I want all my images to be as small as possible (in KBs not px), for faster loading times.
Looks good. What amount of work have you done to the original store? Did you simply replace the images with your own or have you edited css at all?...I’m asking as a total noob lol ... hoping to produce something as good-a-looking as your site!
Initially I did nothing to the CSS but started by replacing the header / background images, then the product and banner images and finally just used the inline editor and template hints functions to identify each page element as required and edit or replace them. Then hacked the .phtml templates about (moved blocks of code rather create anything new) on the product page and finally did change some colours in the CSS, but really no development - just trial and error and simple changes.
I notice you had parcelforce on the watches site. After reading your Ts & Cs you are charging a flat rate for shipping, so i probably answered my own question ... but if you are using a slightly more complicated method, how did you integrate parcelforce into the shipping ?
Is there a set of cost/weight tables from parcelforce it is possible to download that can be imported staright into magento ?
kind regards,
nigel
