For many businesses who don’t have a technical person on staff anything web based can feel overwhelming. You know that your business needs a online store in order to reach more customers than ever before, but in developing an online store you will also need someone to monitor and handle updates. It’s like having a store manager for your bricks and mortar shop, you need a manager for your site.
If you’re choosing to build your ecommerce website on Magento, you are going to need to know a few things regardless of if you have a in-house store manager or have hired a digital firm to handle your sites management.
Knowing what to look for and ask for will help you get the most out of your site and more importantly will help you have a hands on approach to one of the most important aspects of your business. Here are our essential tips for working with Magento.
Use Magento eCommerce Developers
Starting with the best path for your success, when you choose a firm to design and build your site, make sure they have Magento ecommerce developers on their team. Though this platform is open source, which means anyone can develop for it, familiarity will always win out. It's as simple as asking the firm if they've been working with Magento before and then asking for sample sites.
Utilize the SEO elements
In digital, standing out in a sea of competition is an overused term, but it's what you need your website to do. This is where SEO can be your best competitive strategy. Magento has built-in SEO options, including Metadata. You can easily look at each product, category, and web page to ensure that all of your meta data is filled out. This includes SEO-friendly URLs, titles, and meta descriptions.
Understand basic HTML/CSS
Learning how to look at code, just the basic elements, will help you understand how your website is structured and will be a huge help in making basic changes. Magento does include a visual editor, but sometimes you need that coding to make your updates exacting.
Create a product checklist
Making sure all the boxes are ticked when you are adding your products is important. The best way to add bulk products is to do so from a .csv file. You should allow your Magento store to build the structure and categories of this file for you. Do not change the file structure, and ensure to fill out each category possible.
Take a good look around
It will be a lot when you first get into your Magento back-end dashboard. The best way to familiarize yourself with the software is to take a look around. Click through each part of the upper navigation and any secondary navigation. Learn where things are located. If you aren't technical, be careful not to touch or change anything. Your design and development firm should coach you on using the platform once the website goes live.
Our last piece of advice is that if you want a feature for your website, you can have it with Magento. There are so many plugins and apps available on the platform from other developers that the "extra" features aren't difficult to incorporate. Think automation between your Magento site and your HubSpot portal.
Magento website development services
Interested in building a site on Magento or learning more about the benefits of Magento, Request a free consult from our Magento eCommerce developers team below.
