If you’re trying to install an extension using the Magento Connect Manager, the below error message will probably be a familiar site:

Magento Permissions Problem

This can be fixed in 2 simple steps:

1. Make sure the FTP details are correct:
FTP Host: This needs to start with ftp://
FTP Login: FTP Username
FTP Password: FTP Password
Installation Path: Most of the time this will be /public_html/ or if you have the website in a sub directory /public_html/directory/

2. Make sure the folders have the correct permissions:
The following files/folders require writable permissions for normal Magento operation. This doesn’t always mean permissions of 777, It just depends on the server configuration.

  • Downloader
  • Var and all Subfolders
  • Media
  • App/etc/use_cache.ser

All other files can generally be set to 644 and directories to 755

 

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As mentioned in one of our earlier blogs, a portfolio of major completed/in-process works is an essential supplement for any company offering website design services. A glance through the company’s portfolio helps the client determine the kind and quality of services offered by the website designer. A portfolio can be presented in various forms, such as Online (as a part of your Website), PDF (which can be mailed to clients, either on demand or during cold-calls) or Printed (in the form of a booklet, which can either be couriered to clients or carried to client meetings). Each of these options has their own positive and negative aspects. We discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of an online portfolio in this blog.

An online portfolio is probably the most popular type of portfolio. It involves designing the portfolio page and placing it on your website. If your website offers web design services, then an online portfolio is the perfect choice since it provides information about your projects to online visitors.
Advantages
-    They can be easily sent out as a link.
-    They impart a comprehensive look to your website – your website would include details about your company and its contact information, and the portfolio page could give your past project experience and current order book position (if you so desire).
Drawbacks
-    Designing the portfolio page is a time consuming process.
-    Technical knowledge is required for its set-up.
-    More expensive, since it requires paying for the domain name and web hosting charges.

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Here are a few tips to help increase the presence of your Ecommerce website:

-    Submit your Ecommerce website’s products to Google Shopping (a free service by Google)
-    Create a free Google webmaster account and make certain you submit your sitemap
-    Make sure you have the latest sitemap for your website
-    Make unique descriptions of your product
-    Make sure your Meta Titles and Descriptions are exclusive all through your website to help more pages be indexed by search engines
-    Make certain your website doesn’t contain any duplicate pages – you can locate duplicate pages by checking in your Google webmaster account

The best way to get a better rank in search engines for your Ecommerce website is to spend time in optimising and writing product descriptions. There are some Magento Development companies which can build you a professional website, but ensure that you spend time to prepare write-ups about your products. Search engines rank both home pages as well as internal pages, so the product description should be informative and contain the keywords for the product. Always bear in mind – you need to write for humans not search engines.

Lastly, it is possible to move your Ecommerce website to the powerful Magento platform swiftly and easily without losing any data, orders or customers. If your Ecommerce website is starting to look outdated, then you should truly consider Magento for its user-friendliness and great SEO features. There are some Magento Developer companies which can move your current Ecommerce website to the Magento platform with all your data transferred rapidly. If your current Ecommerce Website is based on platforms like osCommerce, Zen Cart, Prestashop, then you may move on to Magento platform with the help of such companies.

If you would like assistance in increasing the web presence of your Ecommerce website contact us for more information, we offer  Ecommerce Web Design and Development services.

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If your Website Design services include Ecommerce web design, Graphic Design, Magento Developer, etc., then a well-designed portfolio of your successfully completed projects is handy in attracting new customers. You can use your portfolio of completed works as a part of your pitch to prospective customers. For companies offering Website Design services, a portfolio should include successful projects in reverse chronological order – that is, with the most recent projects first. They should also include a short description of each project with images.

A portfolio can be presented in various forms, such as Online (as a part of your Website), PDF (which can be mailed to clients, either on demand or during cold-calls) or Printed (in the form of a booklet, which can either be couriered to clients or carried to client meetings). Each of these options has their own positive and negative aspects. The type of portfolio to be used depends on your budget, time you have and type of work. If setting up a website is costly and time consuming for you, you should use a PDF format for your portfolio. A printed portfolio is useful to show off your best print work during meetings. However, it is the most expensive and inflexible form.

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Jan/12

27

Custom-built Website Design

Custom-built website design means the website is tailored to suit your requirement. There are many types of websites on the internet today, including blogs, forums, tutorials and Ecommerce websites. It helps the company to present a good impression of the website owner. Besides having a consistent layout of the Ecommerce website, custom-built websites could be designed to be more appealing by adding flash openings about the company. One of the benefits of having a custom website design is that the website can have electronic reports, brochures and catalogues. This saves printing cost and also allows periodic updations to the reports, brochures and catalogues. This makes the customer feel more comfortable with the company since the product description given on the website exactly matches the actual physical product specifications. A custom website design allows the user to be more elastic with the website’s content and the design.

All Ecommerce websites are intended for making online purchase. An Ecommerce web designer plays a key role in building a website which promotes and facilitates easy online purchases. People stay on any website only when the Ecommerce web design is able to make a favorable impact. An attractive Ecommerce web design can get more customers to your site. Hence, deciding a suitable Ecommerce web designer is equally essential. There are some companies which offer professional web services like web designer, Magento developer and Ecommerce web design with custom built solutions for your business. Such companies can design a website according to your business needs.

While evaluating a custom website design and a normal template design, it is preferred to select the custom one. A website is constantly sighted by many users of the internet which is why it is essential to have a custom made design so that the website stays on in users’ memories. Once a user remembers a web site, he would absolutely visit the web site another time. Thus, a custom web site design is a better option.

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Many people like to know who our main points of contact are, we have a strong team of designers and developers behind our customer focused leaders of our teams.

Here are a few contacts from 2J Design

Sales / Marketing: Nicola Fletcher – 0114 321 8635 (nicola@2jdesign.co.uk)

Creative Graphic Design - Neil Morley – 0114 321 8635 (neil@2jdesign.co.uk)

Web / Graphic Design and Illustrations – Daniel Keeton – 0114 321 8635 (daniel@2jdesign.co.uk)

Web Development – Ryan Eshelby – 0114 321 8635 (ryan@2jdesign.co.uk)

SEO Account Handler – Rachel Pagowski – 0114 321 8635 – (rachel@2jdesign.co.uk)

Financial Director – Erik Meekel – 0114 321 8635 (erik@2jdesign.co.uk)

MD / Director of Sales / Development / SEO – Jamie Jackson – 0114 321 8635 (jamie@2jdesign.co.uk)

Any of our experienced staff will be happy to assist any of your enquiries, our strong web design and development team are on hand to quickly resolve issues and questions related to all aspects of web and graphic services with 2J Design.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

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Jan/12

26

Magento-Fact and Fiction

While looking for the right platform for their Ecommerce websites, some people are told that Magento is a slow system which requires a high-tech committed server to run. Practical experience shows that this, however, is not the case. Magento is a truly great system though it is a large platform and uses more server resources than some other less powerful Ecommerce platforms. When designed by an expert Magento Developer, an Ecommerce website on the Magento platform need have no speed or performance issues. Moreover, this system can be easily modified to increase its speed and performance without necessitating the use of a dedicated server to run.

Magento is one of the best online Ecommerce platforms with great features, safety and solidity. It provides stunning SEO capabilities and many more user friendly features like product browsing, catalog browsing, etc. Magento gives customiability options to Magento developers so they can easily modify and enhance its performance. Due to the prevalence of this wide range of features, people tend to think of it as a high cost platform. On the contrary, the Sheffield-based Magento developer, which specializes in providing Ecommerce web design, web development and Magento development services, offers extremely cost effective solutions for Ecommerce development.

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White space divides different website elements like texts and images. White space is an open space between design elements which can be present between letters, words or paragraphs of text. It is also present in and outside of graphics and between all of the elements of the webpage. It is necessary for providing spatial relationships between visual items. White space also guides readers while moving from one point to another. It is a significant component of layout designing. Any web designer needs to carefully take it into consideration.

Visually, since web pages put more strain on the visitors’ eyes than any equivalent printed matter, it is difficult to go through the same amount of web pages as print pages. White space provides eyes with a breather before they continue to imbibe the next lot of objects presented. A web designer should consider white space as more than just a background – it is a vital component to web page design and should be used appropriately in order to make web design easy for visitors’ eyes. While designing a webpage, the web designer should give careful attention to the spacing between webpage elements like graphics, images, text and paragraphs etc. Without sufficient white space, it would difficult for the user to read text contents and also decipher highlighting of the graphics. This, however, does not mean that spacing between elements needs to be kept very large, it only means that the elements should have balanced spacing between them.

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Graphic images play a vital role in graphic design. It is necessary for a graphic designer to make effective use of graphic images. Sometimes while trying to make a good looking web design, a graphic designer makes overuse of graphic images in web pages and they don’t give much attention on creating functionality. This impairs the website performance and also adversely affects its functionality. A graphic designer should understand that increased usage of graphic images results in slow speed and more downloading time for web pages. Therefore, graphic images should be used judiciously in the website.

The different types of graphic images which are normally used in graphic design are as follows.
-    Navigation buttons:  They assist the website visitors navigate within the web site
-    Image maps: These too are used to help visitors navigate within the web site
-    Logos: They create business identity and enhance brand name recognition through use of visual stimulus
-    Bullet points: They are used to draw visitors’ attention to the key points of any document
-    Mastheads: These are also called as a title graphic. Their main function is to let visitors know which web page they are on

A clever graphic designer should plan the use of graphic images so that it looks good and also downloads quickly. For this, one of the methods is to reduce their size without losing the integrity of the image. Graphic images are primarily used to improve web page functionality.  If graphic images result in a very large increase in download time, then the options are to either reduce the size of the images or to replace them with smaller images or other types of graphic images.

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Jan/12

23

Self maintenance of a website

As a cost saving measure, self maintenance of websites is increasingly becoming prevalent, especially for the following types of businesses:
-    Those which are small to medium in size
-    Those who already  have their own websites
-    Those which allow online additions to their websites
-    Those which have budget constraints for website maintenance
-   Those which have databases that often need to be updated

Web designers have recognised this growing demand for self maintenance websites and are providing specialised services to cater to this segment. There are two chief objectives behind self maintenance.  The first is to save money and the second is to have control over website. Customers can save money by doing the website maintenance themselves. They also look for the freedom to be able to of make regular modifications, updates, additions and deletions to their website to reflect underlying changes in their businesses or products, than to work with third parties for the same. Many web designer companies are now offering a complete set up for Ecommerce websites allowing website owners direct control over maintenance issues of the website.

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