With SEO being such a big part of web development, it would be good to know some tools to help evaluate progress and how well your optimizations are going. Thankfully there are numerous sources to reference as well as free easy to use tools that will come in handy.
If your project is to SEO an existing site I’d recommend running some of these reports before beginning the project. This will allow you to show the client or whomever at the end of the project how well you were able to improve their site. It will also give you an idea of what to look for if you are unfamiliar with SEO or what needs the most work on a particular site. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re in the finishing phases of our first e-commerce site using Magento. In the beginning, the project was daunting. If anyone has tried using Magento, you might already know that the learning curve is incredibly steep. Trying to navigate the file structure and learning where everything is coming from is an uphill battle. The fact that documentation is sparse and hard to locate doesn’t help. Luckily there is a small but dedicated group of message board users and forum posts to sift through which can help find answers to many of your problems. I strongly recommend to anyone starting their first Magento project to join the forums, the users there have helped me numerous times in the beginning of this project.
Having an understanding of the MVC (Model-View-Controler) design pattern is a good idea before diving into Magento, the core code is heavily based on this design. Id also recommend taking a look at the Zend Framework.
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