Website Design Peterborough, Jigowatt - Magento Web Design, UK » Magento

Introducing Magentosphere

Jay — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:47:41 +0000

Today we soft launched our latest project, Magentosphere.

After our successful foray into the digital product marketplace through the envato marketplaces (ThemeForest & CodeCanyon), we decided to set up our own store selling Magento related products, namely Premium Themes and Extensions.

As of launch Magentosphere is offering two Premium Magento Themes and we plan to add our first extension (a Google maps based dealer/store locator) within a week.

Our themes will differ from those you have probably seen elsewhere by being designed to suit a range of different online Magento stores. We’ll not only be creating themes for superstores with thousands of products, but also smaller boutiques who may only have a handful of products, similar to the recently launched StickaStyle web site (designed by Jigowatt our selves).

Co-inciding with our recent induction as a recognised Magento Solutions Partner we feel that this will help secure our position as one of the UK’s leading Magento design and development companies.

So go ahead and check out Magentosphere right now!

Add Magento Category Links to your Footer Template

Chris — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:56:24 +0000

A useful bit of code for those who want to start optimising their website towards visitors and importantly Google for great SEO.

In your footer template file add the following code snippet where you want to display a list of your Magento categories.

app/design/frontend/default/your_theme/template/page/html/footer.phtml

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$helper = $this->helper('catalog/category') ?>
foreach ($helper->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>

echo Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->setData($_category->getData())->getUrl(); ?>" title=" echo $_category->getName() ?>"> echo $_category->getName() ?>

endforeach ?>

This modification is Magento 1.4 compatible.

FREE – Credit Card icons for your Magento store

Jay — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Download the Jigowatt Credit Card icon set (337)

An essential part of every online shop is clarity in which payment types/credit cards are accepted at the shop. There’s nothing more infuriating than picking a product, choosing your size and colour only to find out, when you want to hand your cash over, that you cant! So we always like to display some icons on Magento shops we build to inform customers straight away whether they will be able to pay at the store or not.

In the past we’ve created and used several different card icons after searching and not really finding what we wanted on the world wide web. There, for some reason, seems to be a shortage of good credit card icons. That’s why we’re sharing the set that we made.

At present there are icons for; Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, PayPal and Google Checkout which are the standard payment options here in the UK. If there are requests for more, we will happily add them.

You can also find several more credit card icons over at Smashing Magazine.

Dont forget to check out the other Digital Products we offer via ThemeForest, let us know what you think of the icons in the comments section below.

Enjoy!

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Display WordPress blog posts in a Magento page

Jay — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:08:39 +0000

Due to Magentos lack of a solid news system and WordPress’ general awesomeness we often find ourselves integrating the two which is a fairly painless process. Once integrated, one of the first and most important things we want to do is display some posts from the WordPress side of the web site, be it news, blog posts or articles inside a Magento page. The easiest way to do this is to utilise the feed functionality built in to WordPress. We use the following code to do so:

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$channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://www.jigowatt.co.uk/feed'); // Your RSS Feed Address
$limit_result = 3; // The amount of latest items to output.
$i = 0;
foreach ($channel as $item):
if ($i < $limit_result) {
echo '

';
echo '. $item->link . '">' . $item->title . '
';
echo $item->description . '

';
echo '

';
$i++;
}
endforeach; ?>

Paste the above code into any page you want to display WordPress posts on.

The only lines you really need to pay attention to are 3 and 4. In line 3 you simply replace “http://www.jigowatt.co.uk/feed” with your own feed URL and on line 4 you can set the amount of posts to be displayed.

This code will actually work with any feed, be it WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or any other CMS.

Enjoy!

5 of the very best Magento web sites

Jay — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:00:23 +0000

As you may or may not already know, Jigowatt runs the popular web gallery Magento Showcase which, as the name suggests showcases some of the most beautiful and / or functionally efficient online shops built on the Magento platform.

As keen Magento developers ourselves we delight in adding as many high quality sites to the showcase as we can find and while all are good, some are great… but a handful are just awesome.

And so, with Magento Showcase standing 50 posts strong we’d like to share what we feel to be the 5 very best Magento sites we’ve stumbled upon.

Without further ado:

Cacties

One of the very first sites added and one which opened our eyes to the true flexibility of Magento. Cacties demonstrates how far removed from the Magento default theme you can go without damaging the usability of the platform. Cacties has a unique look and successfully pulls off being a “boutique” store which suits its products down to the ground.

Lodger

Lodger, like Cacties before demonstrates just how flexible Magento is. We believe that one of the best qualities in a Magento site is that, without doing some digging, you don’t even notice it’s a Magento site. Lodger achieves this and more. The site boasts some really cool features too such as the alternate product views, unobtrusive shopping cart and extensive navigation structure. Lodger also goes a long way in proving how vital professional photography can be in an online shop.

MyDeco

While not perhaps as aesthetically stunning as the previous designs, MyDeco makes up for that in functionality. It’s hard to believe this site has been built with Magento when you consider a feature list which includes the ability to create a 3D representation of a room in your own house, decorated hypothetically with products available in the MyDeco store, detailed user profiles where one can save and share their own room designs (an amateur (and professional) interior designers dream!) and a feature rich, current magazine and perhaps best of all… the products in the store are pulled in from various big-name high-street chains such as John Lewis, so you have the full high-street choice of furniture at your finger tips. Ordering, billing and shipment is all automated so that the customer deals directly with MyDeco… A truly awesome site!

Spacecraft

Spacecraft is another good example of a site so customised, you just wouldn’t recognise it as a Magento shop. They’ve really thought outside the box with the page layout, the product details page is particularly impressive. A lot of AJAX has been utilised but it never becomes intrusive or confusing. Cool stuff.

Shop Outdoors

Shop Outdoors is a representation of what Magento is most commonly used for: A fantastic portal to sell a huge amount of varied products and I felt it was important to include a site of that sort in this list as the previous ones are all niche, boutique’y shops. Shop Outdoors demonstrates that you don’t have to move a million miles away from the default Magento page layout to hide that fact you are using Magento, it’s been very elegantly designed leaving all of the default Magento features intact. A great example of what can be achieved with this unrivalled platform.