Ecommerce Developer Content
Add Attributes to Magento's Admin Product Grid
Customizing the Magento administration panel can lead to significant workflow efficiencies. This is especially true for merchants that sell apparel or other products that include multiple options like size or color. In Magento, products like clo...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Nine: CSS Begins, Font Glitch
CSS is the language of appearance. It shapes and reshapes HTML markup, changing its presentation based on contest. In this article, I will begin writing the style sheets for the Alien Authority website. The site is built on the WordPress platform...
31 Ruby Gems for Developers
Developing on the Ruby platform offers the bonus of adding functionality with ease through the reusable code packages known as gems. Here is a list of excellent gems to add functionality to your Ruby application. Nearly all the gems are hosted o...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Eight: Draft HTML5 Markup
Creating a basic HTML markup before trying to add PHP and platform-specific functions can help to speed up the WordPress development process. It can be pretty tempting to just dive into a various template files found in an existing WordPress them...
Manage Customer Calls with Twilio
Some customers just want to talk. Unfortunately, many small online retailers struggle to offer customer service over the telephone. This need can create an opportunity for web developers. Twilio offers a programmable PBX-like phone service that i...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Seven: More Functions for the Custom Post Type
Custom post types allow developers to extend WordPress and include content like product detail information. This article is the seventh in a series created to demonstrate how to use WordPress to develop an ecommerce site that sells virtual produc...
45 Tutorials for Magento Go
Magento Go is a software-as-a-service ecommerce platform from Magento. It is a simple and customizable option for developers who need to create and manage cost-effective stores for their clients. Magento Go has four pricing plans that range from ...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Six: Create a Custom Post Type
In WordPress, custom post types allow a developer to define the administration interface for content like product detail information. Creating a custom content type for product detail pages requires surprising little effort, and what follows is a...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Five: Install WordPress, Copy Theme
WordPress is one of the easiest web content management systems to install and use, which no doubt contributes to its popularity. Perhaps one in six websites use it. The platform's flexibility also makes it suitable for basic ecommerce application...
Importing Mechanical Turk Results into Magento
One of the most surprising challenges in retail ecommerce is how difficult it is to generate good, customer-facing product descriptions. But savvy web developers can use Amazon's Mechanical Turk service and Magento's API to rapidly import product ...
20 New jQuery Tools and Tutorials
jQuery changes the way that you write JavaScript. Fast and concise, jQuery makes it much easier to implement JavaScript on a website. Here is a list of new jQuery tutorials and articles. There are tutorials to display sliders, text elements, and ...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Four: Facing Design Challenges
Transforming a graphic design into a working site typically includes challenges. As much as possible, it is a good idea to anticipate and address those challenges before you begin writing code. With this approach, I am going to describe several k...
Book Review: The WordPress Anthology
Experienced WordPress developers Mick Olinik and Raena Jackson Armitage have released a new book that provides detailed, tutorial-like explanations of how to optimize the WordPress loop, create custom content types, and write plugins. WordPress, ...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Three: CSS Grid, Home Page Design
Responsive site designs that adapt to a user's device are a keystone of good web work in 2012. Responsive design, however, can and does add a level of complexity and some extra work as the web worker needs to create additional graphic designs, st...
11 Free Graphic and Image Editors
Web designers do not need to purchase expensive editing software to create compelling images. There are a variety of free editors available — both web-based and software download — to manipulate product images and site graphics. Here is a list of...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Two: Logo and Color Palette
Whether a site is displayed on a smartphone, a desktop, or a television, how it looks will affect how much visitors trust and respect it. With this in mind, planning and executing a graphic design should be one of the first steps in a web develo...
7 Tactics for Better Product Detail Page Design
In ecommerce, the product detail page is where business is done. So web designers and developers should be careful to build these pages with selling products in mind. The well-appointed product detail page should be a combination of good content,...
Installing Magento Community Edition on an Ubuntu LAMP Stack
The popular Magento ecommerce platform is built to run on a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack and installing it on Ubuntu 11.11 takes just a few simple commands. At the time of writing, the most recent version of Magento's free Community Edi...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part One: Defining the Project
WordPress, the popular, open-source content management system, can be a good choice for developing ecommerce sites. This article is the first in an Ecommerce Developer series that will describe in some detail how to use WordPress to develop an ec...
12 Resources for Graphic Design
Designers need not reinvent the wheel. When creating a site, you can find a variety of free online graphic elements, which other designers have shared with the community. Here is a list of free resources for graphic design. These sites provide ...