Redstage Magento Blog

A couple weeks ago, we had a post about Free Magento Themes which was a big hit. There are some amazing Magento Themes out there at no cost, but there are thousands of beautiful themes that you can grab for a low cost as well.

Using a template for your e-commerce site can work, it won’t work as well as if you have a Custom Magento E-Commerce Brand design. However, when you’re starting out you can use a modified template to get used to Magento and get started with your e-commerce business.

We went through and found a bunch of sites that have TONS of Magento themes. Here are some of our favorite Theme sites and top template from each.

http://www.silverthemes.com

Silver Themes has some extremely clean and crisp designs. Their themes run as low as $125.00 and up to $150.00, and based on certain features it can run higher. The link to their demo store to preview the themes doesn’t seem to be working though. It links to a fresh install of Magento.

Aside from that, these templates are very nice. One of my favorites is the Megastore Theme.

This theme has a very simple, minimalist design that would be easy to adapt to most businesses that are selling a variety of products.

Here’s a link to the Megastore Theme page.

Most of the Silverthemes Themes are layed out the same, with top & left navigation, 3 main feature banners in the center and a basic layout.

There is one that stands out called Sigyn Pro which is a much darker and grungy theme. Very cool.

Here’s a link to the Sigyn Theme.

Take a look a their other themes, at Silverthemes.com.

http://www.templatemonster.com

Link to Magento Themes Page

TemplateMonster has the largest selection of themes we found. They have 150 different Magento Templates ranging from $160 to $250 for the regular price, or $1100 to $7500 for the unique price. The unique price, when purchased, pulls the template off the site so it therefore becomes “unique”.

TemplateMonster’s themes are all fairly different. They cover dozens of industries and product types, color schemes and layouts. A bunch of them rely on high quality stock photography to really come alive, which makes them a bit less “out of the box” than a simpler theme. Basically, you’ll need to customize those graphics to fit your business before using the theme for your store. Overall, with the selection they have, you should find something to start with. I’ll show you a few examples below.

I like the look of this theme. The vibrant colors and the real “Home Depot” feel make it work for a store selling power tools. However, when you’re looking through and choosing a template, remember that anything that is a graphic and has anything specific in it will have to be redesigned. In this template, the “Free Shipping” graphic and 4 featured products will have to change if you don’t offer free shipping at that price level or have those products at those prices as well.

Take a look at the Tool Store page, and the Tool Store Demo. This template as of now goes for: Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $5400

This furniture store template has a great color scheme and layout. I particularly like the effects and details used in the graphics. Again, be aware that these images are just examples and will most likely have to be customized to suit your products and offers. These are more generic than the Tool Store theme above but unless you’re selling very similar items, this is another example of a template that looks good, but is not “out-of-the-box”. It’s a great start though if you have a medium to high end furniture store.

Check out the Furniture Store Page, and Live Demo. This theme now goes for Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $5400

This theme for a Men’s Fashion store is very slick and expensive looking. A lot of the look of this template relies on the product photos, so make sure you’re ready for that. However, the overall look and feel, and colors are a great start for an upscale online clothing store.

Take a look at the Men’s Store page, and Live Demo. This theme now goes for: Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $2800

The “Woman’s Store” theme looks great, with bright colors and a more generic design. Since TemplateMonster gives you the Photoshop files you can easily customize these graphics which are mostly text to suit your needs.

Check out the Women’s Store page and Live Demo. This theme goes for: Regular Price: $250 / Buyout Price: $7500

I really like this theme! Regardless of what you’re selling, this is a cool design that uses excellent colors and transparency
to display your products in a really high quality way. The catalog page is laid out very nicely. One critique… change the product page font color to something a bit lighter and more legible. Otherwise, great theme!

Check out the Sneakers Theme page, and Live Demo. This theme goes for: Regular Price: $250 / Buyout Price: $3200

Last one from TemplateMonster. I like the design effects on the background and right column graphics on this theme. I hope that TM gives you the fonts you need to change those graphics since they look great but will need an update. This is a very fun and inviting theme!

Take a look at the T-Shirts Theme page and Live Demo. This theme goes for: Regular Price: $180 / Buyout Price: $2650

http://www.hellothemes.com

HelloThemes Magento Themes

HelloThemes has a great portfolio of Magento themes. Most of them look like they are for electronics stores but a couple are for clothing/fashion sites. Here’s a snapshot of their portfolio. You can even get all of their themes for $300, which is a good deal. Check it out.

Nice, Clean Design. Some social media elements on the homepage make it a bit more modern. The content slider at the top will need to be filled with product / sale features. Overall, the theme is nice, and generic enough to display nearly any product line.

Demo | Info

Dark theme, very cool. The effect on the background graphic brings it all together. Also, using CSS text-shadow on the right column filter titles as well as the category title adds a cool look to the catalog page.

Demo | Info

The “HelloGlam” template looks like a t-shirt store from the thumbnail but seems to have been repurposed to be a lingerie store (in the demo). In reality, it would work for any woman’s apparel store as the design is clean and very girly.

Demo | Info

ThemeForest.net

Link to ThemeForest Magento Themes

ThemeForest has 46 Magento Templates that are in teh $60 – $10 range. Take a look at the different styles and layouts they offer on their site. Since it seems that there are submissions from various template designers and developers the themes vary quite a bit.

The yarn theme has some cool graphic effects in the header and offers a great way to display artistic, organic or “green” items.

Take a look at the demo or get more info here.

The Antiqua theme is another one that has a nice graphic feel to it, epecially the lined paper drop down menus and neat textures throughout the template. Very cool for anything handmade!

Demo | Info

These were the themes that really stuck out but there are hundreds more that are excellent as well. If there’s a site that we missed that has a bunch of themes or a particular one that you like, post it below in the comments! Thanks for reading!

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on 13 Featured Magento Themes Reviewed and Links

One of the most frequently asked questions amongst online business owners is, “How do I get more TRAFFIC to my site?”. You might have the greatest business, best prices, friendliest customer service, but if no one can find your store, you won’t get any sales.

It’s the same principle as if you had a restaurant. You can hire the best chefs, have the best ambiance, wait staff and ingredients but it’s in the middle of the Sahara Desert or the Island from LOST, I bet you’re not going to get much foot traffic going by or too many phone reservations. You want to be on the busiest street in town!

Just having a storefront (physical or online) is only part 1/2 of the equation. An excellent website, with memorable branding, good prices etc… is a great start but the other (and arguably moreimportant) factor is getting a ton of people to your site so you can make sales!

So it’s imperative that you promote your site and get as many visitors to see your products as possible. There are numerous strategies including Paid Search, Social Media and Search Engine Optimization.

Let’s go through an overview of each type of marketing.

Paid Search

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an easy way to start getting traffic to a new website. The most widely used PPC services(in order of popularity) are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN (Bing) AdCenter.

The best part about Paid Search Advertising is that it is Non-Interruptive marketing. Most advertising (TV, Billboards, banner ads) interrupt the target and force them to look at an advertisement. The genius behind Paid Search is that you can put your ads in front of people who NEED your products or services by targeting a specific keyword, or phrase.

Think of it this way… if someone searches for “improve my golf swing” the ads are all about books, videos and other training that sell the answer to that exact issue. There’s little guessing when you’re dealing with a search term submitted to a search engine like Google. The person “Googling” the keyword phrase, is looking for a solution to their problem or a cure for their pain and you can easily slip your marketing right in front of them when they are searching. It’s extremely effective and that’s why Google makes billions of dollars selling this advertising!

Social Media, Networking and Bookmarking

In the past couple years, a there have been books written about Social Media Marketing. It’s a very hot topic with the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Buzz & Wave, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and thousands of others socially based websites.

Social Media presents business owners with the opportunity to communicate and connect with prospects and current customers in a way that was never before possible. If you had a website that had golfing equipment, you can socially target golfers by searching their Twitter Tweets, Facebook Interests, and tons of other socially shared data.

In the same way that paid search lets you almost get into your prospects head, SMM uses their submitted and public data to laser target your marketing to communities of like minded people all over the world.

Facebook Pay-Per-Click is also something worth checking out since you can target people demographically with a ton of specificity. You can even target them based on what they “Like”, and more… check out this post written by Ed Dale (a BRILLIANT marketer): Facebook Bombshell.

Like I mentioned earlier, the strategies, psychology and specific plan for each Social Media site could fill a wing of a library. If anyone out there wants more info about Social Media Marketing, leave a comment below.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a fundamental source of traffic. The difference between Paid Search and SEO is that SEO is based on 100’s of variable that the Search Engines use to organically rank the results of a keyword search. The more “relevant” your website is for the particular search term, the higher in the results it will show up.

The actual, specific algorithm that Google, Yahoo and Bing use is a mystery but there have been thousands of marketers that have broken through and figured out what counts and what doesn’t.

There 2 types of SEO: On-Site and Off-Site. On-Site SEO includes the content, linking, structure and code on your website. Off-Site SEO includes the sites that are linking from other places on the web to your site.

The most important part of SEO is a strong inbound linking strategy. Yahoo recently wrote a nice overview of how to get inbound links, here. Basically, you can go out to forums, blogs, article sites and social networking/bookmarking sites and post links to your site. The other way is to get links naturally by posting EXCELLENT content to your site and getting links from bloggers and other sources. On the web, content is KING.

Conclusion

The final lesson for this post is that none of these strategies work without an overwhelming dedication to promoting your business online. Put yourself out there, and tell everyone to tell everyone else about your idea and make it spread.

One of our friends, Mike who owns SuteArrival.com, is a great example of this e-commerce entrepreneurial passion. He’s always tweeting, status updating and promoting his website. He learned from some of the greats like Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com, and Gary Vaynerchuk who are incredible marketers who everyone should follow and study as well.

So with that overview complete, make sure that you keep learning more about traffic generation and studying the new trends in these areas.

What would you like to know more about specifically? If you have any questions and would like more information about marketing your website, leave a comment below! I would be more than happy to dive into any topic above in more detail.

Or give us a call 1-888-335-2747!

Learning Magento can be a tough process. Luckily, over the past few years as Magento has gained popularity, the community has grown and contributed incredible amounts of information about the program.

We looked around the web and found 100 videos that showcase various features and additions to Magento that can help you install, set up and work with Magento E-Commerce. We had to put them in 9 different pages
since loading 100 embeded videos was taking so long. Each page has a category or 2, and a bunnch of videos!

Hopefully this will serve as a resource in the future as you work with Magento, or as an inspiration to get started! If you like this type of post, and would like more like it or anything specific, leave a comment below! Thanks!

And if you have any questions, feel free to get in tough with us regarding Magento Development or Magento Support!

Categories:

General Walkthrough (19) | Magento Installation Videos (7) | Advanced Installation (10) | Content Management (12) | Specific Extensions (24) | Payment Related (6) | Product Management (17) | Shipping (3) | Template Installation (1) | User Management (1)

General Magento Walkthrough

This set of videos show basic information about Magento setup, configuration and features.

Magento Administration Screencast Part 1 from dZero Design on Vimeo.

Disable Caching During Site Development from steve warshaw on Vimeo.

Magento – a quick review of the admin area from Shayne Sanderson on Vimeo.

Changing a Magento site’s favicon is one of the most frequently overlooked tasks.  But it’s just as important as customizing the logo, implementing a unique theme, and changing email templates.  Best of all, it’s the easiest thing to do.  Once you have your favicon, it’s just a matter of uploading it to the right locations.

Where do I upload my favicon?

Traditionally, we used to be able to place the favicon in the web root and it would automatically be picked up by the browser.  With Magento however, this “default web root” convention is overridden by new paths, as defined by two <link> tags in the document <head>.  We can discover what those new paths are by simply looking at the page source.

Look for:

<link rel="icon" href="…" type="image/x-icon" />
and <link rel="shortcut icon" href="…" type="image/x-icon" />

These (look at the href) are where you should upload the favicon.

How come I can’t see my favicon?

There are a few reasons why, even after uploading your favicon to the aforementioned locations, you still see the default Magento favicon.

• Servers may cache favicons – If you’re running an Apache web server, try reversing these “Cache Your Favicon to Speed Up Your Site” steps.
• Browsers may cache favicons – Try viewing your site using a browser that hasn’t yet visited the site.  If it works in a different browser, but not your original one, then you have a browser-cache issue. Since the process of clearing favicon cache varies from browser to browser, check out “Clear the Browser Cache to Display Your Favicon”.

Ted.com is one of my favorite websites ever. The entire site is filled with some of the most interesting, captivating, thought provoking and mind blowing presentations from the world’s top geniuses and experts. I highly recommend clicking around Ted.com and learning something…

I recently watched this particular video called, “Are we in control of our own Decisions?” by Dan Ariely. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist and wrote the book “Predictably Irrational” (Official Site). His TED Talk is brilliant and has a few ideas that we can use in our online marketing and on our e-commerce websites.

Watch the Video here:

Default Options

One of my favorite takeaways from this video was the idea that a majority of people will simply agree with or comply with the default option. This was evident in the studies that showed the countries with high and low rates of citizens willing to donate their organs. If the question was, “check here to opt in” the country had a low acceptance rate, and when the question was “check here to opt out” the acceptance rate was extremely high.

How can you use this in your marketing?

You can use it in an upsell process. You have to be VERY careful, and transparent when you’re doing it so customers don’t become alienated by your website or flood your customer service number with complaints. Don’t just add extra cost to the checkout, make sure it’s apparent to the customer that it’s happen. There are many marketers and checkout processes that do (usually in the domain registration space (GoDaddy is king), web hosting and info marketing).

Think about this. A product is in your inventory and listed on your site for $10. After the customer gets the product in their cart, and gets to the checkout there is an automatic upsell before the order confirmation. This upsell charges $X that might change the shipping or improve the actual the item in some way by adding a feature, it could be a warranty, insurance, or even an extra product (for example, if you sell glasses, upsell a cleaning and repair kit). If the upsell’s price is marginal (based on the price of the original item, probably adding around 10% – 20% to the order), and the upsell is included by default, you might expect a low rate of opt out based on the data shown by Ariely in the video.

The upsell should be very obvious though so the customer can easily choose to opt out. Just imagine all of your order values increasing by adding in a few upsell options in your checkout and making them the default choice.

Price Anchoring (forcing a Good Deal)

The other takeaway that I thought was excellent and applicable was the price anchoring technique that The Economist magazine uses to drastically increase the number of subscribers that would take a higher priced item. They offer a web only, print only and a web + print option. The Web Only option is $59, the print only is $125, and the web + print is $125. Look at the results that Dan Ariely got from polling students at MIT, with the print only and without the print only options.

The results when the print only deal was an option:

and the results without the print only option:

This is incredible! When people think they are getting a good deal, they are likely to take the good deal but when there are two distinct and different options, price usually wins. Try positioning your products, shipping options or upsells in a way that your customers are getting something for nothing or getting a great deal… A/B test and see what happens. Brainstorm how you can do it like The Economist Magazine did it.

Think about Amazon.com – they offer free “super saver” shipping on any orders over $25. I know that I’ve added an extra product or two into my cart just to get over the minimum price, usually sending it to over $30. I doubt I’m the only one… have you ever done the same thing? This increases the average order value for Amazon which improves their marketing ROI and average $/Visitor among other important stats.

Thanks for reading! Have any feedback or some other ideas from the video? Leave some comments below!