Joshua Johnson over at http://designshack.co.uk has written a nice piece on getting the best from limited content

“When you don’t have much to run with, a blank page can seem huge and you’re left wondering how in the world you’re going to fill it. Let’s run through a few common scenarios and see some example solutions for each.Only One Photo, Minimal Text
This is a fairly common issue designers. You need to produce a quality, finished design but you’ve only been provided with a single image to work with. To make things worse, you only have a few sentences of text. If you were given a full page ad or an entire web page, this could seem fairly disheartening.”

read the full article at http://designshack.co.uk/articles/layouts/doing-more-with-less-tips-for-designing-with-limited-resources

We were moving a Magento store for a client through wemoveanysite.com and found the 404 error on the new server whenever we tried to visit the admin pages. All fronted pages were operating correctly.

1. Open up your database via PhpMyAdmin
2. Click SQL
3. Run the following SQL Query:

Most months we move or get asked to move 10-15 Magento sites – either from development server to live server or as the majority are moving from one under-performing host to another (better?) host. Due to this requirement we have now set up a little side project called wemoveanysite.com.

The premise is simple – we move your site from Server A to Server B for a small fee. Your sites are backed up in the process and this back up is available for you to download for your own archive.

We move the site set it up again and test it for you. Visit wemoveanysite.com for more information.

I was running a SSH install of Magento today using wget:
[code]
wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.5.1.0/magento-1.5.1.0.tar.gz[/code]

[infos] Full info on ssh can be seen in the Magento Wiki [/infos]

Once the SSH part was was completed I navigated to the install url only to be met with a 404 permission error

A quick look at ownership of files on the server showed the ownership was 532 & group was 522.

All that needed to be done was to update ownership & group to the correct ownership & group. To do this via ssh just run these two simple commands – one for files and one for directories.

Files:

[code="php"]
# find . -type f -exec chown user.group {} \;[/code]

Directories:

**Change user.group accordingly to your user & group

[infos]Further reading on chown – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chown[/infos]

Magento – Cannot initialize the indexer process.

Came across the indexer issue again today so ran through the following steps:

[notice] //Remember! Back up before running any of these tips [/notice]

[list_icon color=black type=icon_ticked]

• Navigate to /var/locks and delete all items within the locks directory
• Your Text 2
• Your Text 3

[/list_icon]

5 Great Resources for eCommerce Startups

Starting up a new eCommerce operation can be a daunting task, particularly if you haven’t really had experience in the area before. Like for any type of business, there are dozens of things you need to be thinking about, from branding and design to your marketing strategy and how you will handle customer service. To help you in the process, here is a short list of tools and resources which can be beneficial both during the early days, and in some cases in the long-term too.

1.) Smashing eBook 5: eCommerce
This is great bedtime reading for both newbies and those who are more experienced. The book is selection of the best eCommerce related articles published in Smashing Magazine in 2009 and 2010. It covers nearly every key aspect of eCommerce, from choosing and setting up a payment gateway service to merchandising, and much more. At 7.90 euros (± £6.70), you really can’t get better value for money.

2.) MessageBase
Customer service is an aspect which unfortunately is too frequently overlooked by businesses, and yet, good customer service is absolutely essential. During the early days, if may not be possible for you to employ staff to answer customer calls and you, personally will (hopefully!) be far too busy doing other, more exciting things. So how can you provide a good level of customer service? MessageBase, a telephone answering services company, that provide a range of services, ranging from simple message-taking to a fully outsourced virtual receptionist could be a solution.

3.) Balsamiq Mockups
When thinking about your website’s layout and design, creating a set of mockups for your various pages can be a huge time and money-saver (particularly if outsourcing to a designer / agency). Balsamiq is an app available on Windows, Mac and Linux that lets you easily create mockups, using a vast range of stencils. You can even test your mockups by inserting dyanamic elements using the Napkee add-on.

4.) KISS Metrics
Developing a website that sells is a continuous process of trial and error. There are many ways of testing the impact of various design and functionality changes on customer perceptions, such as A/B testing. However, a simple solution is that which is provided by KISS Metrics, which plays a complementary role to Google Analytics by allowing you to better understand how customer’s interact with your website.

5.) The Noob Guide to Online Markeitng
Once your website is ready and good to go, the next challenge is driving quality traffic to your website. The Internet provides an enormous range of marketing tools and deciding where to start can often be daunting task. Thankfully, the good folks over at SEOMoz (a great place for SEO resources) have put together an exhaustive guide which covers almost every fundamental technique under the sun, breaking them down in monthly tasks set out over the course of a year.

Twice this week I have been asked by two people, both work at different design agencies, about an ecommerce checklist? As they both are getting a lot of clients wanting ecommerce sites.

I’ve been using a questionnaire for a while with my clients. It’s been edited, added to, and changed quite a bit over years but I still find it useful

It’s by no means a complete list and I am sure some of you will see some elements missing. However, it works for us. If you have suggestions post them below.

To be fair though we have found the questionnaire is most successful at getting the client to think about what they really want. Rather than just an ‘ecommerce store’

Any way the sudden interest in the questionnaire prompted me to set it free to anyone that may find it useful. Whever your a designer or a developer that needs a starting point for your own list, or a client thinking about ecommerce and want to solidify your thoughts. Feel free to download and use as you wish.

download: ecommerce questions 2010

This week I came across another new ecommerce platform that has a slightly different USP compared to the majority of other offerings in the ecommerce market.

Wazala, bills it self as the no code ecommerce platform that you embed into any website.

It is also sold as easy to use and you could be up and running in 15 minutes.

Well, I have to say I was intrigued so decided to give Wazala a try. Signing up for the free plan was easy and once verified I was able to use the platform intuitively.

It is extremely easy to use and has a nice user interface. There are some things lacking at the moment such as multi currency, UPDATED, I incorrectly stated that the Wazala platform doesn’t have multi currency, It does. You can set your store up in over 24 different currencies. However, I couldn’t find a way to enable the customer to select which currency they would like to pay in as they can choose their language out of the box END UPDATE.

To my surprise I found my self wanting to use the platform and I have already added it to this site as a way to enhance sales of our cloud hosting products.

If you want a quick and easy way to attach an ecommerce element to a current site, or don’t need all the bells and whistles that a platform like Magento offers I would certainly consider wazala.

In fact, I may be using wazala a lot more in the future. Find out more http://www.wazala.com/

Quick screencast on how to download Magento Extensions without Magento Connect -

http://freegento.com/ddl-magento-extension.php

http://freegento.com/ddl-magento-extension.php

These two blogs have made Magento development so much easier – Thank you! – They are just awesome.

http://www.devinrolsen.com/category/magento-tutorials/

www.fishpig.co.uk