27Jan/111

Show Some Creativity Poly-Lumber-Furniture

We offer fully custom Magento theme design. Our designers have been working with Magento since the beginning and we pride ourselves on creating a new and unique look for every client we work with.

So....we hate it when we see a blatant copy of someone else's design work. None of our designs are included here, this is just an example of when a company is too lazy to design something fresh and new.

If you have been working in the e-commerce world for a while, you will have heard of Hayneedle (www.hayneedle.com). They operate over 100 hundred niche stores with some great domain names. They recently changed their name from NetShops and did a great job rebranding and rebuilding all of their websites.

Now here is someone you have never heard of: Premium Poly Patios (www.poly-lumber-furniture.com). Although, with a great brand and domain name like that I have no idea how they aren't a household name yet. [/sarcasm]

Here is a screenshot of Hayneedle's first checkout step (taken 1/27/2011):

This is a very well designed interface that flows well. In my opinion, they have a few too many options on this page, but i'm sure it works great for their purposes.

...and here is the hilarious copycat (also taken 1/27/2011):

Seriously?! An absolute copy paste of a very key element of the checkout process. The colors aren't anywhere close to matching, the fonts are different, the design concept doesn't match anything else on the site....etc..etc..etc. I'm not even going to give these guys a direct link. If you want to see it, visit polywood-furniture.com, add a product to cart and start the checkout process.

It doesn't take long to design something fresh and new. If you need help, contact us. Every time we design a new Magento store, we start with a blank slate.

[/rant]

18Jan/110

iPhone E-Commerce Tip: When Users Enter Product Quantity, Only Show Them Numbers!

Here is a quick and easy tip that will make your website a bit more usable for iPhone users. The best thing to do is implement a mobile friendly theme, but that is time consuming and can be difficult to get working 100%. With just 16 characters, you can modify your quantity text box so that iPhone users will automatically see a number pad when they choose it.

Here is a screenshot as an example:

iPhone Show Numeric Keypad

Open the file app/design/frontend/default/{yourtheme}/template/catalog/product/view/addtocart.phtml

Find the input box for quantity. Add this snippet of code to the input tag:

pattern="[0-9]*"

Here are some other cool tips for iPhone users:
Display a telephone keypad: <input type="tel">
Display an email keyboard: <input type="email">

Having trouble with this? Let us know in the comments...

Source

Tagged as: , No Comments
17Jan/110

Only Allow Numbers In A Text Box With Javascript

If you are using a text box for quantity in your Magento store, users can enter anything they want as a quantity, letters, dots, symbols, etc... With a few lines of Javascript, you can make sure they are only able to enter numbers.

17Jan/110

Showcase: Green Town Toys

http://www.greentowntoys.com/moon-roof-funhouse.html

Check out this extensive customization of the default Magento theme. We can take your ideas/sketches/concepts and turn them into a fully functioning Magento store. We have been designing themes for Magento since version 1.0 was released. Our expert designers and coders are USA based and available by 800 number during business hours. Contact us right now to get a free estimate on your project within 1 business day.

Visit Green Town Toys - Earth Friendly Kid's Play Structures

30Dec/100

Automatically Show A Message When Your Office Is Closed

If you offer phone support, it is extremely important to tell your customers what hours your customer service is available. A simple 8-5 Mon-Fri next to your phone number can increase the number of potential customers who will call in. No one wants to call and leave a message, let them know if a live person is available!

However, with the holidays, those hours can be pretty erratic. Is your customer service center closed for New Years Eve and New Years Day? Or just one specific day? Here is a quick and easy way to show a message that will automatically expire whenever you need it to.

14Dec/103

How Can I Rename The Product Details Heading?

We were asked to rename the standard "Details" heading on the product view page to something other than "Details". Since it is the Description attribute this should be easy to rename, right? Ha! You'd like that, wouldn't you! Unfortunately that doesn't work. I looked at the template catalog/product/view.phtml and found a rather confusing bit of code:

    <div class="product-collateral">
<?php foreach ($this->getChildGroup('detailed_info', 'getChildHtml') as $alias => $html):?>
        <div class="box-collateral <?php echo "box-{$alias}"?>">
            <?php if ($title = $this->getChildData($alias, 'title')):?>
            <h2><?php echo $this->escapeHtml($title); ?></h2>
            <?php endif;?>
            <?php echo $html; ?>
        </div>
<?php endforeach;?>
        <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('upsell_products') ?>
        <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('product_additional_data') ?>
    </div>

Notice the 5th line. This is where 'Details' is printed out. But where does it actually come from? Let's take a look at your theme's layout/catalog.xml file. Find the block "catalog/product_view_description". It explains a lot:

<block type="catalog/product_view_description" name="product.description" as="description" template="catalog/product/view/description.phtml">
    <action method="addToParentGroup"><group>detailed_info</group></action>
</block>

We find that it loads the template catalog/product/view/description.phtml. And that's where it comes from. Take a look at the file:

<?php $_description = $this->getProduct()->getDescription(); ?>
<?php if ($_description): ?>
    <h2><?php echo $this->__('Details') ?></h2>
    <div class="std">
        <?php echo $this->helper('catalog/output')->productAttribute($this->getProduct(), $_description, 'description') ?>
    </div>
<?php endif; ?>

There you have it. Now you can change it back to "Description" so it actually matches the attributes title. Or of course to whatever you like...

Filed under: Uncategorized 3 Comments
6Dec/103

Magento Stratus beta finally here! …and it’s kinda weak

We finally got access to our beta of Magento Stratus. Sadly it's not anything near what it was hyped to be. Performance is ok, but nothing great. Definitely faster than a shared hosting setup but nowhere near the performance of a good dedicated server. We have no FTP access to the site, just a Magento admin and frontend. It is running Enterprise 1.9.85505.0 so the feature set is pretty cool.

Filed under: General Continue reading
2Dec/101

Resize A Magento Product Image

Here is a quick snippet that lets you resize a product image (and in this case, set it's url as a variable) when you are writing code outside the media.phtml file:

$thumbnail_image_url = Mage::helper('catalog/image')->init($product, 'image')->resize(235,235);

30Oct/103

Want To Showcase Your Magento Store?

We get thousands of visitors every single day. Post a link to your Magento store in the comments of this post, we will review every single one and if we find some really killer sites, we will do a full post on each on. This is a great way to get a free backlink to your store and get some exposure in the process! We can't guarantee that we will showcase your store, but we will definitely look at everything that is sent in.

Tagged as: , 3 Comments
29Oct/102

Details on Magento Project Stratus

Magento has just publicly announced Project Stratus, a cloud hosting offering that will be available in Qq 2011. They don't have many details available, except for a couple basic FAQs and a beta signup page at: http://stratus.magentocommerce.com.

Here is what we do and don't know...