Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Magento is one of the most powerful, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you the ability to create and manage a profitable online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition provides guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition guides you through the installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders. You will start with installing Magento on a hosting provider or on your local machine for testing purposes. From there, you will learn everything Magento has to offer, from working with products to adding additional functions.After installing Magento, you'll learn how to set up your first store and add multiple stores in the same environment. One of Magento's strengths, the product catalogue, will also be discussed thoroughly. From there we'll continue to set up payment and shipping methods. You'll learn to use themes to give your store the look and feel you need. As well as that, you'll start using extensions to expand Magento's functionality and you'll learn to process your first orders.You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your personalized store and also about Magento's directory structure and find out where some of the elements of a store are customized. As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a complete, working online store.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Magento Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Choosing between a pre-made and a custom-made theme


The first important choice regarding your store's theme is whether to use a premade theme or to have a theme custom-made for you. In the following table you will find the advantages and disadvantages of both. These are rules of thumb and greatly depend on the suppliers you pick:

 

Premade

Custom-made

Price

++ (possibly free)

-

Technical quality

+

++

Graphical quality

-

++

Match with your vision

+/-

++

Uniqueness

--

++

Time before you can go live

++

--

As you can see, you can assume it will be cheaper with a premade theme but the quality and uniqueness of the theme will be less. Because you can start selling quicker and the price is lower, a downloadable premade theme can still be a very attractive option to start with. Also remember it's possible to start with a premade theme and to have a custom-made theme built at a later time, when you have the time and money for that. A common way to work is to start with a premade...