Niklas Hammarstr̦m РNews, Interest, CV

This must be one of the hardest tasks I’ve tried so far. With my small e-commerce project I needed a CMS in the background and wanted to continue my testings of the Magento eCommerce platform.

Before I started the new project I had the design for the entire site coded in perfect CSS/xHTML and thought it would be easy to just hock it up to Magento. But boy was this a misstake, I have now read several hundred pages of the online documentation for Magento and so far I haven’t managed to get my new design working ontop of the CMS.

The biggest problem so far is the way the entire design is structured with XML and small snippets of HTML. Basically you store your HTML skeleton in the app/design/frontend/theme/default/template under different sub-categories. And then you have the rest of the structured in the app/design/template/frontend/theme/default/layout as blocks of XML that are calling for the html files.

It looks like this,
<block type=”page/html_notices” name=”global_notices” as=”global_notices” template=”page/html/notices.phtml” />

<block type=”page/html_header” name=”header” as=”header” template=”page/bimp/header.phtml”>
</block>

Okey it gets even weird’er when it comes to css and images, since they are stored in a different part of the three structured and called through a lot of different sets of rules.

I’m not a coder, I haven’t written a single line of code for more then three years. I should probably leave this to the professionals. So I will probably post this a new project on GAF if I don’t solve these issues before the weekend.

Things are finally progressing. It took a while to get the designer to make a design for my new project but now it’s finally in the hands of the CSS/xhtml coder and I will get all the pages back on monday. I’ve been thinking about making this a affiliate project, but now I can tell you it will be a 100% e-commerce project.  I’ve established contact with a good supplier within the EU, that will drop ship to my customers.

I feel that I can’t give you the entire business yet, but since it will be online before the end of June I promise I will write more about it during next week. Last year I made some tests on the Magento platform and until last week I had plan to use that for this project. But a friend of mine introduced me to Shopify that already have a great working platform with everything you need to a good price. And the best thing is that you can style it any way you want.

So, I’ve started working on one of my new projects this week. I will be a mix between a regular e-commerce site and a lead generating site. Today I’ve been sitting at the office with the designer and made a really good looking layout for the webpage.

Next thing is to get the page coded in perfect CSS/XHTML and thanks to previous work I have good connections for that in South America. Hopefully it will be finished by the time I wake up tomorrow. After that I will start doing the back-end coding in PHP.

I’ve also contacted some potential partners for this project. The project will be two sites, one English for UK and one Swedish. The will have different content but almost the same design.

Since I’m going to sell things on the site but don’t want to handle a large stock of products, I think I will solve this with Drop shipments. That means you don’t have to keep all the products in stock, you have someone else keeping the goods for you. And they ship the products to your customers. One other way that I’ve been talking to friends about would be to link to other e-commerce sites that have affiliate programs. I haven’t decided what way to go yet, but I will before the end of the week.

I will have these two projects up before the end of June.