Magento

We’ve just completed streamlining and moving this urban clothing site from Monster Commerce ($100/month) on Network Solutions to Magento.

Esoterik Enterprise

We’ve got a really good grasp of the layouts, themes, and unique ways to style everything from navigation to product layouts.

We will be adding some Flash Elements to this store this week to finish things off.

We’ll be adding two things soon to Magento Connect:
- Mac Styled Magento admin interface theme
- Produc Image Flash Component (Zoom Capabilities & swaps images when a thumbnail is clicked instead of pop-up)

Let us know what you think.  Thanks Varien for a great Open Source product!

I like the very clean design. I also enjoy the logo and use of variation throughout. I might suggest adding different shading or different variation of graphics in different sections so that entire shopping experience dosent seem to run into what looks mundane.

Overall, i really like it.

THanks cjack.

We didn’t do the layout and design.  We are just migrating the design over from MonsterCommerce. 

We’ll see if we can’t diversify the look here with the addition of the Flash elements.  Thanks for the feedback.

hey skooks,

i am about to try a magento cart aswell, full customization like you’ve done here. i’ve heard the magento is hard to skin though. eek

could you help me with a couple of questions?

about how long did it take to make the new site (from start to finish)?
any bugs/spots that were tricky?
any hints/tips?

any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

cheers
Mike

hi mooty.

My first attempt with Magento was difficult and the store we built ended up on another shopping cart system that I"m more familiar with… I didn’t give up on Magento so I came back with this project and this time it was easier.  It took me a little time to get familiar with their logic and layouts.  Now that I’ve completed this site I love Magento and the flexibility in design and layout is second to none. 

Magento is not anymore difficult to skin than any other app. like Joomla if you have a simple grasp of layouts / themes as well as a working knowledge of CSS.

I use a tool on Firefox called Firebug that allows me to manipulate the CSS and even the html to get a feel for what and where to style things live on any site.  This has become my most used tool for sorting out the design and layout. 

I also turned ON/ OFF the Template Path Hints dozens of times so I could achieve what I wanted.

I started this project with the sample data so that I could work from a live store with product and categories and strip it down and manipulate the layout to achieve the desired result.  It seems easier to do it this way than to try and start from a blank layout & inventory.

The last little bug was getting the images to not distort so I used the extension Direct Resize from Magento Connect.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/153/direct-resize

My Tools For This Project:
Photoshop w/ desired layout
Flash w/ desired SWF’s
FireFox & FireBug
FireFox & FireFTP
WordPad (For editing phtml & css)
** I recommend using Dreamweaver or a PHP/CSS editor so it checks errors to ensure clean and error free code.

I have no words. The store looks great!

It keeps telling me your website is not available ... :/

hey sherrie,
Our hosting company was having issues yesterday and I guess some people couldn’t access the site.
We’ve also found an IE 5, IE 6 & IE7 Bug with it.  We are working on that as well.

Try Firefox to access the site and if that doesn’t work try back later today.
Thanks!