Magento custom development and hosting services
Does your business need a website or an update to the existing site? Do you have a product or service that can be utilized better through the web as an ecommerce site? This article is going to cover the capabilities and possibilities for developing a custom ecommerce website using Magento in specific.
Whether you are looking to create your own website, or use professional services to develop your website, Magento can be a great solution for the developers that are modifying the website, and the portal administrators who are monitoring and running the site. Let’s learn more about Magento, and why people are using this technology for their website.
Learning about Magento
Magento is one of the most used ecommerce SaaS (software as a service) products on the web today. There are many reasons why companies and individuals choose this system to build their website. Among some of the reasons include:
Mobile & SEO capabilities
Magento marketing menu
Magento comes out of the box with enhanced SEO and mobile responsiveness capabilities. While keeping up with the mobile responsive trends, Magento is also staying up to date with its SEO capabilities. Having such a mobile experience can make or break a potential customers decision. With the different versions of Magento available, the platform keeps up to date with the latest SEO changes, which will convert in more sales for your ecommerce website.
Enhanced administrative capabilities
Magento administrator menu
The administrator UI (User Interface) comes fully equipped to handle many products, pages, and content out of the box. It has an intuitive administrator menu that can accommodate those who are more product and marketing oriented. Unlike many of the other ecommerce platforms, Magento is completely open source, which means that you can host the platform on your own servers, and manipulate the code to suit your needs.
Customizable
Magneto content menu
As mentioned in the above paragraph, Magento is open source. This really opens the door to possibilities for custom development, as well as the implementation to large company websites with red tape restricting the back end security. Since you can manipulate and host the entire platform, you can ensure the platform is fully compliant with any restrictions you may have by making modifications to the platform. In addition to the modifications you can make, are the actual features and functionality of the platform. The administrator UI is great to build more features on top of with your own development team or use a custom development service.
How to create a Magento website using custom development & hosting services
Since Magento is such a popular solution for building an ecommerce website, there are many resources available for developing your own Magento website. What if you do not have the knowledge or time to develop the site yourself, but you still want to use Magento to manage the site? Or want to add new features that are not available on the app store, or need to be manipulated to function in a particular way? This is the perfect scenario to use custom development and hosting services using professionals to build the site that you need for yourself or company.
Let’s look at the steps that it takes to create a custom ecommerce website.
Step 1: Using custom hosting services
To build any website, you need to purchase a domain name and host the website. If you want, you can host the site yourself if you have the servers and expertise. As the vast majority of people do not know how to host a site, you need to choose a hosting service. This could be difficult with the many hosting services out there. Trusting the host for your website is essential. You need to make sure that your host can handle the traffic, data, etc.
If you are going to be building a custom website, it is a great workflow to use the same development company as your host. This keeps everything on one platform, so that the developers have full access to your site, and can easily debug any potential issues in the future. DevRadius provides professional enterprise fully managed dedicated and shared hosting for Magento. Included with the hosting package are automated data backups, monitoring, and SSL certificate. This ensures that the website is secure and can be restored in case of an emergency. The DevRadius web stack is fully optimized running on dedicated hardware for low latency and fast response times.
Step 2: Choose the technology to build the site
Every website needs to be built using some type of technology. In today’s day and age, you cannot simply build a website from scratch without using any technology. We suggest using Magento for this article as explained earlier it is the most popular CMS and can be manipulated and easily maintained.
Step 3: Customize and build the site
If you are not building the site yourself, make sure to use a professional development agency that has a good portfolio of past projects. Also, make sure you understand the development process before paying for anything. It is recommended to stay away from those agencies that only charge a flat fee for the development services. This can potentially end up in more money spent in the end, or an incomplete website that has bugs.
An effective alternative workflow for development agencies is the prepaid method where you can pay for blocks of time for working on specific tasks. For example, a task could be developing an image feature on the site. This can be estimated as a single task. The task can be prepaid for, instead of prepaying for the entire site. This makes for a more straightforward and easy to track process for the manager or owner of the site to check the progress of the development. Otherwise, you won’t know what is being done on the site. This is part of DevRadius’s workflow and management of each website/project.
The DevRadius workflow
The first step to develop any custom website is to create a set of requirements including mockups and wireframes. DevRadius has both developers and designers. So if you want us to create mockups or wireframes of the entire site before starting the development process, this is entirely possible and recommended. Once you have the requirements document, you can then send it to a DevRadius representative. Depending on the size of the project, for medium to large projects, the discovery process may be needed. The discovery phase is a way to estimate the entire project by breaking it down into smaller tasks, and providing an estimate on the smaller tasks to provide both a low and high level overview on the projects development. This estimation time is prepaid for. You will then be able to fully create the website and work with DevRadius to complete the project.
Step 4: Launch the site
Once you have finished the development process, you can launch the site, and maintain it. Over the years, the site should also be updated in terms of new versions of Magento, as well as the UI.
Learn more about Magento, and the DevRadius development workflow to help with your new website by watching the following video: