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Magento Theme Design Tutorial Intro

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First thanks for visiting my blog in this post I would like to introduce a series of video tutorials I have stated regarding magento ecommerce content managemnet system. These tutorials will base themselves primarily around the design aspect of magento shopping cart system.

First a brief introduction.  Starting off I would like to list a few benefits of Magento and mention a few cons as well.  Magento comes in two versions,  the open source community version, which can be worthy solution for most smalll and medium size businesses. This version is completely free and can be downloaded after creating an account.  The negative factor of this version is that it is unsupported and is provided for expirmental purposes.  The other version is the Enterprise Edition version that offers full support staff and enhanced security features. That version comes at quite a significant price tag around 13000 Usd per year.

In this Tutorial we will be using the free communty edition lets go into deeper detail of some of the benefits surounding magento users.  The benefits to developers and designers are:

1. Simple to use for people that have made themselves famliar with web tachnologies and other programming languages. Magento is programmed in Zend PHP, Zend is probably the most distributed PHP framework.

2. A large community of users already exists that can help you to answer some of your questions about magento theme design. Large community established where your questions have already been asked.

3. Magento has a long list of features and is probably one of the most advanced shopping cart type CMS on the market. I have yet to encounter a CMS that can do more. This makes it easy to offer to your design or coding customers.

4.  Tons of free and some paid addons programmed and available for download off of the magento ecoommerce site.

5. No limitation to layout or design. Theme folder is divided into two parts allowing for extra security. Anyone knowing css can already make significant changes to the default theme.

6. The magento structure has been worked with all the options possible to help enhance a sites ranking in the SERPS.

7. Lots of web hosting companies even have a script built into their servers that allows you to install magento with one click via cpanel control panel.

Lets talk about some cons Magento has a bit of a steep learning curve till you can do everthing with it, will take some time of hitting the books and the forums to get things sorted. Also it has a very deep and complicated folder structure that would scare off the uninitiated.

 The documentation on the magento site itself is also somewhat complicated and sparse.  Doing some simple things can be somewhat tricky at first,  like loading up the shopping cart and making the items appear on the first page. Plenty of  good free video tutorials online describing how to do that.

In this tutorial we will focus more on how to create your own Themes in Magento. The first of the video series showed how to install PEAR into Wondows 7 (comes in handy with magneto connect).  The next video will show how to setup magento via the installer. The one after that will advise on file foder structure.

This concludes the brief introduction on magento theme designs. To get started head over to our video  page and start viewing and learning. You will find our video tutorial page here: Visual Magick Tutorials


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