Magento Site

richard · 12th December 2009, 02:24 PM

Hi guys, would appreciate any constructive feedback for our new Magento site.

It will eventually replaceour oscommerce site which has been in production for about 6 years: .::OneVideo::.

New Magento site: Home Page - OneSecurity.

Rich

Vger · 12th December 2009, 02:47 PM

Just a quick look. Too "grey" to be inviting IMO. A bit more colour would not go amiss.

Also, I'm getting secure/insecure content warnings when switching to https pages.

Can't say I blame you for switching to Magento though.

Vger

richard · 12th December 2009, 02:51 PM

Hi Vger, thanks for the feedback.

Grey.... problem is to inject colour we would need someone with some taste to help us out... we are all technical guys...

Where are you seeing the insecure warnings, and in witch browser?

Thanks again!

Rich

richard · 12th December 2009, 02:57 PM

Magento: to be honest its been a nightmare... OneVideo (Oscommerce) took us about 4 months to get live, OneSecurity (Magento) has taken 20 months so far and we are still working out some wrinkles...

Rich

Vger · 12th December 2009, 08:36 PM

Hi, The Browser is IE7, no errors in Firefox, one JS error in Safari for PC.

Re., the colour - try using some dark and light Blues.

Vger

richard · 12th December 2009, 08:42 PM

Hummm I'm on IE8 and can't see the issue..

Rich

Vger · 13th December 2009, 12:00 AM

That's the joy of cross-browser compatibility (or not).

Vger

TygerTyger · 13th December 2009, 08:07 AM

I'm getting an error at this line, saying it is not a function.

Code:

jQuery("#main-photo-slider").codaSlider();

Vger · 14th December 2009, 01:23 PM

Are you calling in a jQuery function before calling in jQuery?

Vger

richard · 17th December 2009, 07:19 AM

I should have cleared that codaSlider issue now...

terraGirl · 19th January 2010, 09:31 PM

Hi Richard - how did you find the switch to Magento? I'm always getting asked whether to choose Magento or Zen Cart, would be great if you could give an idea why you made the switch and how it went.

On the site itself - I really like the codaslider, seems a lot smoother than some of the sliders I've used in the past and stop on mouse-over is a nice feature.

The watermarking on images I find bit heavy.

On the design, yes, it's very grey, but clean and well laid-out. Looks to me like it was done by somebody who cared about how customers used the site and made it very functional.

On the checkout, like the one page checkout, was surprised though that guest checkout was not enabled.

I think it's a solid site, well laid out, very thorough product descriptions, professional. Makes a good impression and instills trust.

richard · 19th January 2010, 09:39 PM

Hi TerraGirl,

The switch has been very painful. Our current cart was OsCommerce and took about 4 months this is 20+ months and counting. In fairness to Magento we have had a bad time with developers (internal) and in fact are currently looking for someone external to step in and provide us with some ongoing support.

Overall Magento is a great platform. In retrospect I would have held off until aprox now and the 1.4 release. Starting again it probably wouldnt take any longer than the OsCommerce site, it was just we were struggling through when Magento was too fresh.

Thanks for the kind words, yep we really do care, and your observations really do represent our values..

Watermarking - desperate to find a way of fixing that in magento..

Rich

terraGirl · 19th January 2010, 09:51 PM

Hi Richard - sorry, should have signed my message - it's Edith

With watermarking I normally do it via batch processing in Adobe before uploading, so not sure about script based solutions.

Interesting to hear your experiences, does validate my opinion that with Magento a good developer is vital, whereas with osCom/Zen you can much more "muddle" through. Not a reflection on your coding skills, just on the Magento structure. Just installing the dam thing on Xampp and upgrading the version turned into a lesson about command-line coding for me ... Still love it, but always recommend with a proviso.

All the best! Edith from TerraNetwork

mark.willis · 20th January 2010, 02:39 PM

Watermarking with ImageMagick on the commandline is really easy. If you want to watermark every image in a directory with the same watermark - it's only going to be 3/4 lines of code in a bash script then set it too run.

Can help if you need it.

Mark

dutchy · 1st April 2010, 02:44 PM

can i ask....

why did you move to Magento?
i dont mean "because osC is dead" but why pick Magento over the other open carts, CMS' with cart mods, or commercial carts.

Im a Zen Cart fan myself, (tho you'd not think so with all my moaning in the ZC forums.. haha)

I have tried Magento a fair few times and i just dont like it! (plus to get all the functionality out of Magento that i get free in ZC would cost me a few grand short of 20k)

Not that i am ripping your decision.. i am just curious why Mag was your choice.

Vger · 1st April 2010, 03:17 PM

Zen Cart and Magento (in my opinion) appeal to different users and site owners.

Zen Cart has a lot going for it, in terms of free add-ons and available functionality from the get-go. It can be added to by anyone with a basic knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS etc. What you don't get with Zen Cart is multi-site capability - and I don't think that anyone is going to try and port the osCommerce Multi-Sites add-on over to Zen Cart - it's enough of a nightmare on osCommerce's structure. Additionally, the Zen Cart code structure is out of date when compared to Magento.

To work with Magento you do need to fall into the "developer" group of site managers. A little PHP knowledge won't do, and you definitely need at least basic skills in command line work via SSH. The speed of Magento has definitely increased, and the number of available "free" add-ons has also greatly increased.

I'd say Zen Cart for Small to lower-Medium sized businesses, but Magento for higher-Medium to Large businesses (or those that aspire to be some time soon).

Vger

dutchy · 1st April 2010, 04:10 PM

Cheers Vger,

"What you don't get with Zen Cart is multi-site capability - and I don't think that anyone is going to try and port the osCommerce Multi-Sites add-on over to Zen Cart"

I believe there is a multisite mod for ZC, MultiSite Module, ecommerce shopping cart software by Zen Cart ecommerce solution

see this is where i struggle and i have asked this question a lot on the ZC forums. My largest zc site has about 1800 products and has an annual turn over of about 100k. I thought that was a large site! (not yet ported over to UH, not looking forward to that!) In fact I thought it was bloody massive, but recently i have been having private chats with a guy who has a ZC store with an excess of 15000 products and an approx annual turnover of 1.5M who has said he wouldn't dream of moving from ZC.

yet when i ask people to define a small/medium/large/enterprise site.. no one can answer me straight?.. if size is relative (said the vicar's wife lol) how can I chose the best platform to use?

lol