While Magento web development is becoming an imperative part of any business or organization selling their products in retail, it is becoming more ‘a’ more crucial for the designers and developers to avoid making some silly mistakes and sharpen their designing and development skills to bring out-of-the-box eCommerce solutions for the retailers willing to grow their business online using Magento.
Designing and developing a compelling eCommerce website has become a need in today’s fiercely competitive internet market for the survival. If you’re planning to make your career in Magento custom web development or Magento website design, it is important that you follow a few simple, but effective designing and development tricks. In this blog post, we’re going to cover top 8 tricks for the front-end developers & designers and coders to create powerful eCommerce websites using Magento.
For the front-end developers & designers –
• Create a custom theme rather than customizing the core Magento theme files.
• Try to understand the package or theme relationship and how to utilize them effectively for your website. Often a clever use of the package or themes can enable for creative ways to tackle subtle differences clients require among the templates or pages.
• Never use the wrong starting theme, specifically in the community. Whenever dealing with the community projects, the blank theme saved a lot of time as it stripped out a lot of the unwanted CSS styling, which at the end help front-end developers speed up the overall development process.
• Always keep in mind that Magento uses tables in some places. It is always beneficial for you to review the sample or demo site to view source and cloning said source as the HTML you use whenever building your own CSS.
For the Magento programmers –
• Whenever you try to extend the functionality of any core class, it is important that you don’t overwrite the core class by placing the same file path on the local code pool, app/code/local/Path to core class/…. Rather than this, you should use class rewriting to overwrite. The new class should also inherit from the class you wish to extend. This allows for greater compatibility and reduced chances of things breaking when upgrading to a newer Magento version. It is quite useful to overcome the module conflicts.
• Don’t overlook nested collections. Each and every collection is a query, which means if you have a collection within a look, there must be a query within a look that will slow down the overall speed of your site.
• It is good to write a module, but don’t forget to test it with full page caching. Many times module work perfectly over the local server, but fail to perform well over the live site. Therefore, it is important to test it with full page caching to overcome such issues.
• Not being wary of the namespaces used for custom modules, which may conflict with the namespaces of core Magento modules.
Ensure that you keep in mind all these designing and development tricks to make your Magento web development venture successful. Do you’ve more tricks to share? Share your views in the comments…!
