Blog

Due to growing interest in my Magento work, this is a quick blog post outlining some my key Magento skills and live Magento websites:

Languages-Direct.com

Languages Direct is a mail order business set up with a niche list of customers. The main goal of the web site was to support the physical printed catalogue and provide an alternative payment option to customers. There are many customizations to underlying Modern theme such as enhancements to the shopping cart, product view and product listing pages.

After spending some time experimenting with the Magento cron system I now have some good results and some helpful hints from a well placed source. During my tests I setup a cron command to launch the Magento cron.php file at intervals of 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minutes.

Here is what I have found out:

I have finally sorted out the Aheadworks Blog so that duplicate URLs are a thing of the past. Check at the live example at: audiomates.com/blog. My changes to the module also include integration with Yoast Canonical URLs, this fix is a simple template change and doesn't involve editing the Yoast module. Nice!

I have also reworked the aw_blog Google sitemap file generation code. It was a very simple fix in the end, check out my fix for this issue here: Aheadworks Blog Google Sitemap Fix.

Update! Please see my new blog post about setting up the Magento cron system to get the most out of Magento and bypass major headaches in understanding how Magento works with cron schedules.

After months of transatlantic development I am pleased to announce that Audiomates.com is live to the world! This new language learning software application was developed by Bibliotek, LLC and I designed the interface, website and packaging for the product. I used Magento for the CMS backend; this will soon be extended to features on-line shopping and (hopefully) more digital products. The current website has been designed to facilitate version updates and for promotional purposes. Enjoy!

This is an attempt to demonstrate to one of my Bristol SEO buddies that internal linking is good, but the overall semantics of a decent SEO optimised content management system (CMS) is even better!

Search engine optimisation has many flavours; one such flavour was raised in a recent post on the underscore mailing list in Bristol and is of particular concern for people who misunderstand the underlying of a decent search engine optimisation consultant.

UPATE 2: New Version posted today! The new module is updated to allow custom pages to be used across your entire site meaning your custom templates are no longer limited to CMS pages. You can now use your custom templates for Blogs, Checkout Pages, Shopping Cart, etc.

UPATE 1: New Version posted today! The new module is radically different from the old module and works perfectly with the latest version of Magento, so please delete all previous files before uploading the new version.

A major new survey by PayPal, the online payment gateway, suggests that online sales are set to double over the next two years as shoppers turn their backs on the high street in favour of online shopping.

The report carried out by Experian reveals that nearly 9 million adults shop online in the UK at least once a week. As an emerging retail growth area, e-commerce is sometimes viewed as a sideswhow, an added extra with little bearing on real world sales. However, this misconception is due a correction as more consumers head for online stores instead of the high street.

Magento has the ability to handle distinct base currencies for multiple shops running off one code base. This offers great flexibility in pricing your products for different territories.

Using a well known online ecommerce store as an example (Apple.com) this article will demonstrate the benefits of choosing Magento commerce as your online shopping platform.

This example assumes that you serve customers in 3 global locations. You serve:

It's that time of year again when the bikes get dusted down and polished to high sheen. So if you are looking for a great charity motorbike ride this April then check out www.fredsrun.info and get yourself in the saddle for a brilliant day out!