Magento provides e-commerce platforms to small and medium sized businesses. The reason I am discussing it in this blog, is that we have a number of clients, for whom we have built Magento e-commerce sites. Some of Magento’s most prestigious clients include Ford and Swatch.

The idea behind eBay’s decision is that they want to merge Magento with the company’s own open source, online retailing platform X.Commerce. Precisely how X.Commerce will work, and what part Magento has to play in it will only be revealed in October during eBay’s X.Commerce Innovate Conference.

As far as we are concerned, we think eBay’s reasoning is sound. By buying Magento, eBay can marry this up with previous acquisitions such as Paypal, to offer a turnkey ecommerce solution, from hosting to payment processing to mobile. Mobile is a large growth area, and the leading players are staking a lot on it’s potential.

eBay now has a strong suite of enterprise-class ecommerce developer tools, through which they could offer large retailers help with building their own storefronts along with mobile and social commerce.

Our first full Magento based e-commerce site www.sportsgolfstores.co.uk went live recently and gives a good idea of how flexible this platform can be for e-commerce web sites. It is the home of Karl Kertess Golf and also a great place to buy golf trousers and associated products so do take a look.

The White Horse Inn at Clun have also had a new site launched. As regular readers will know, I take it upon myself to quality test any pub or restaurant we work with (!!) and I can certainly recommend Jack’s establisment. If you are looking to find a good real ale pub in Shropshire that also provides B&B and an ongoing events programme I’d give them a visit. The site also provides interaction with their various social media channels and we would recommend everyone in the same gane look at using these channels to promote their business.

In association with Hunter Bevan we also worked on the development of the new Leema Acoustics website. As a Hi-Fi buff to some extent I’d certainly suggest taking a look at some of their award winning products.

We have also launched a new site for Marc Beaumont. Marc is one of the world’s top downhill mountain bikers and the site should help his many fans keep up to date. Personally, I get frightened even hearing Mark talk about what he does! This site is built on the WordPress platform.

Having developed the original Fabric Spray website on behalf of The Needham Group we have now set the Irish version live at www.fabricspray.ie. It’s a pretty amazing product so take a look!

We have also revamped www.fine-boxes.com for Andrew Crawford. Andrew is looking to teach more people – his work is really quite exceptional so please take a look.

Lastly, but not least, we set G Bryan Jones live. Locally based, in Bishops Castle, they are your port of call for all things farm machinery related.

I think that is it … working on a good few more at present so watch this space. The sites above give a fair idea of the range of work we do so if you need any help yourself, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Both agencies produce high quality work in the areas of graphic design, branding and corporate communications and we are proud to be associated with these companies. We look forward to developing the relationships over the coming months and years.

If you are a design, marketing or PR agency who feels you could benefit from a reliable and effective development partner, please do not hesitate to get in touch – we use open source platforms including WordPress, Drupal and Magento in addition to any bespoke system development that is required such as integration with in house platforms.

We have now decided to change our philosophy somewhat. This blog for instance is written with the WordPress Engine – there is surely little point in writing a new blog platform if an open source version exists.

Why? Apart from the fact it is free, there are any number of devlopers out there who keep building extensions for the platform, such as the Twitter feed you see running to the right.

The same philosophy can be extended to Content Management and E-Commerce. Indeed WordPress can operate as a Content Management platform itself – if you know how to program in the extensions. We have therefore decided to build our sites using Drupal or WordPress for those that are content managed (all our sites are content managed) and Magento for E-Commerce.

What does this mean? – It means that we can develop sites more efficiently for our clients.

It does not mean that we will take a whole lot less time for the base site build – unfortunately for those of you who thought we’d start building £500 E-Commerce sites there is still a fair degree of development work involved! It does mean however that the base site build is likely to contain more options as standard. It further means that when a client wants a particular add on that it likely exists already and  it will therefore be a quicker build and less money for the client.

New projects from 1 July are being built using the new methodology, so they will be up early August … we’re quite excited about this development and would obviously be happy to discuss implementing something for you, so drop us a line or call on 01743 244204.