Zeald Magento Website

Magento is built specifically for ecommerce from the ground up and includes the following benefits that suit Medium and large businesses:

More powerful ecommerce function - Magento ships with built in powerful ecommerce features including (multi store capability, complex configurable products, multilanguage, layered navigation....)
More Secure, fewer plugins required which means fewer loopholes
A more robust database structure that better supports serious customisation and integration to automate business processes.
More Scalable - thousands and thousands of products and orders (woo-commerce practical limit is 2500 products /variations)

See WooCommerce vs Magento - What’s Better for Your Business? (Video)

1. A new interface takes time to learn - Especially a beast like Magento

As with any system, there is an interface to learn and with it a learning curve. You need patience, time and budget for you and the team to upskill and gain experience in the new technology. You will likely be familiar and comfortable with your existing website management software from many years of experience. You might expect your new system to work the same or similar to your current system. Website software is designed and built by different people from different backgrounds for different purposes (ie. Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging software).

Magento is very powerful and so more difficult to learn. The more powerful and feature rich the system is, the more complex the interface needs to be to house the controls and necessary levers and variables required to run the website.

Magento does not currently come with a content page builder. The Magento CMS is very powerful and works well for products. 90% of Magento is managing products and ecommerce. Managing content has been less of a priority for the Magento developer community. There are third parties plugin page builders available (usually associated with a theme). Third party themes and page builders vary in quality (in terms of support, usability, function, and bugs). Page builder and themes can often conflict with the base Magento software and other customisations/ plugins, when ongoing updates are applied.
The most advanced page builder plugin is Bluefoot which was purchased by Magento. Bluefoot is available in the enterprise edition (US20k / year). Magento is due to release the Bluefoot page builder in their next upgrade to 2.3 (due in Q1/Q2 2018.) Zeald is waiting for Magento to release Bluefoot and do not support a third party page builder by default. You may invest in a page builder plugin and we can help install and configure it for you (Please ask for an estimate).

2. Magento leverages proven templates for design and layout

Zeald uses the Magento theme Lumo, which provides the template design/layout of your pages. You can view an example of the page design and layout on our Demo Magento Website

Your Marketing or Technical Specialist will help you plan, wireframe, design and build a custom design/ layout for your homepage.
Second level pages such as Product pages, are based off a template. The template defines where and how the data is displayed on the page. The template design for each page has been well tested and optimised over a long period of time with many websites. This means the design is user-friendly and features are located, displayed and function how users expect.

If a unique design is important for you and your business, you may choose to invest in customising the design and layout of these key pages. Keep in mind customisation requires additional cost for both the upfront development and the ongoing maintenance. You should discuss this with your Digital Business Specialist (DBS)

3. It takes time to develop Magento following best practice

Magento is a hugely powerful and complex system and takes longer to code than other Website engines such as Wordpress. Wordpress, for example, thrives on its simplicity and “Click and build” architecture. Wordpress leverages a large plugin ecosystem which makes it quicker and easier to customise.

With Magento there are fewer plugins and they generally cost more. In most cases, there is a setup the developer needs to work through and often additional development is required. Unlike WordPress where a developer can utilise existing code to save time.

Best Practice (which is often the ‘long way’) needs to be followed to ensure the benefits of Magento are realised. This affects construction, theming, customising and administrating the site. Wordpress is designed to make it quicker by not enforcing these practices on the developer. WithMagento the developer might have to write 5-10 x more code to achieve the same function in Wordpress.

4. Magento is a powerful system and requires powerful resources to run

The more complex a system becomes, the more it takes to ‘run’. Magento requires a lot of server resources to perform well.

5. Magento requires ongoing updates

Magento like any open source website platform requires regular updates to be installed to remain secure and benefit from improved performance & feature enhancements.
You or your developer can choose to do this yourself, or you can get Zeald to help out on a Time & Materials basis.
If your website is complex or customised, we recommend that you purchase a maintenance programme in addition to your hosting to assist with the scheduling and testing procedure.

6. Zeald assembles your website, leveraging software developed by third-party providers around the world

As with all software, both the platform and or the plugins may have bugs and limitations. The third party developers that own the software decide if and when bugs are fixed or new features are developed.

Zeald can help you (via time and materials or a Monthly Maintenance Programme):

Test and identify bugs and limitations with third-party software
Log issues and communicate with the third-party developers on your behalf to learn priorities and timelines
Research, and recommend alternative options for you
Scope, plan, design and develop fixes or new features to achieve your requirements

If there is a particular function that is key to your business, it is important you do your own due diligence. You should research the platform and or plugins to ensure it is well supported, stable and secure and that it will remain so into the future. You should test your specific requirements upfront before you build the website. Let us know and we can help you setup a test environment. It can be a worthwhile investment to avoid finding out later on, that the software doesn't perform a key function or work the way you were expecting.

7. It is important you take the demo website for a test drive before you purchase

You wouldn't spend thousands of $’s on a new car without first checking the specs, looking under the hood and taking it for a test drive.

We have setup a Demo Base Zeald Magento website for you to “try before you buy”
This website is setup with all the Standard features and layout of a base Magento Website that Zeald builds as standard.

If you can't see your specific requirement please speak to your Digital Business Specialist (DBS)
If a unique function or design is important for you and your business, you may choose to invest in customising the website. Keep in mind customisation requires additional cost for both the upfront development and the ongoing maintenance.

Index

A new interface takes time to learn - Especially a beast like Magento
Magento leverages templates for the design and layout of key pages
It takes time to develop Magento following best practice coding
Magento is a powerful system and requires more powerful resources to run
Magento requires ongoing updates
Software developed by third-party providers around the world
It is important you take the demo website for a test drive before you purchase

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