The Best Magento Development Extensions for Blogs

Blogs are an extremely important part of websites. It nurtures your website with valuable thoughts and, information, news and much more.

Here is some of the best Magento Development Blog Extensions:

1. Blog – Community Edition by aheadWorks

The blog extension from aheadWorks is reckoned as the best for creating buzz and word of mouth marketing tips. It not only provides you regular customers with up -to- date information but brings additional visitors to your site, builds relevant SEO-friendly text links, and serves as assistance in building sales strategy. This Magento blog extension helps you in creating relevant and valuable content to attract and engage target audience.

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It gives you a noteworthy opportunity to communicate with your regular customers and casual visitors. With a blog you can create an interactive two-way communication platform to provide official information on your store news, upcoming products, promotions, and get customers’ feedback.

Blogging has proved to be one of the best effective marketing tactics. If your customers feel that they are listened to and their needs are responded to, they are more likely to come back to your store again and again.

2. nBlog – Blog Extension by Neotheme

nBlog from Neotheme enables you manage your blog without need of any additional framework. This extension is integrated into Magento backend so your eCommerce store and blog are both in one place. You can change blog layouts from the backend without need of any programming knowledge. Moreover, you will have complete control over the blog publish date and time.

3. Blog Pro

Blog Pro from MagPleasure is a new and extra powerful Magento blog extension of excellent quality. This blog extension comes with the social sharing ability which means you do not need to add any extra tools to allow your customers share your blog posts on social networking websites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc. It has intuitive interface that makes it easy to control each aspect of blog posts such as tags, description, comments, category, URLs, author etc.

Read Also: 6 Amazing Magento Extensions to Improve Your Online Store

4. Simple Blog

Simple Blog Magento extension gives you an opportunity to run blog for your eCommerce store and helps you boost your content marketing activities. It is easy to install and manage extension comes with 15 days money back guarantee.

5. CMS Pro News/Blog by MageWorld

Manage your eCommerce store news and blog easily. CMS Pro News/Blog by Mageworld Magento extension is very useful and easy to install. It works brilliantly without any issue and delivers exactly what it promises. Customers who visit your store will see the latest news on the home page as well as the side bar. You can control the number of blog news to be shown per page with pagination support.

6. Blog Post

As we all know, today it is impossible to imagine a website without blog since blog is one of the effective ways to tell people about your blog stores upcoming deals and offers. It helps you interact with your customers. Blog Post – a Magento blog extension from Magegaga is a handy tool that helps you present the information on your Magento store and increase store traffic.

7. Blog by Innobyte

One should use this extension to communicate the latest Information (how to buy, current promotions, latest arrivals or even job openings) to regular buyers and on- site visitors. With this extension you can have user – friendly links which increase the opportunity to attract new visitors to your store. This extension is compatible with CE and EE edition and comes with 30-day money back guarantee. With Blog by Innobyte, it is easy to manage and create your store’s own blog.

Recommended Read: 6 Major Companies That Provide Magento Extensions

8. Magik BlogMate

Magik BlogMate is a very powerful, yet simple blog extension for Magento eCommerce websites. It provides an easy way to keep your customers connected with your store announcement and offers. It also helps build SEO – friendly URLs for better link building strategy. This extension enables you to create an unlimited number of categories disable comments for some post.

9. Marketplace Blog

Marketplace blog enables you create blog posts for your lovely customers and improve shop presence on the internet. Blog is one of the ways to improve shop sales and conversation. Use this extension for your Magento eCommerce store which comes with WYSIWYG editor for the blog post creation and generation of SEO friendly URLs.

10 Awesome Magento Customization Tips

Magento is a flexible and extensible e-commerce platform that allow customers to optimize as well as customize their sites. It is a leading platform having more than 14000 stores which run either as magento enterprise, professional, go or magento community editions.

Conversion oriented interface of magento platform helps businesses to grow and helps to manage online stores better. Magento installation and configuration is easier but when it comes to customization it is rather difficult.

Here are the ten awesome magento customization tips:

1.Debugging Magento Store Layout

Magento provides powerful logging method in the controller. Enabling debug mode is easier and one just has to follow the code.

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2.Contact Form on Magento CMS Page

Contact form is given great importance for any e-commerce site. Contact form is the primary means of getting in touch with customers. Hence every magento store owner needs it working in the store. For better navigation, it is better to create a contact form using CMS page.

Read also:Why Choose Magento For Your Responsive Site?

3.Display category Name on Product Detail Pages
Magento store owners always keep product category name on the product detail page. This will be useful information to customers as they get details of where they are and what they are buying. There is certain codes that can be added to show product category name wherever you want within your layout.

4.If users are not logged in, hide product prices

One has to edit the following file for hiding product prices or to display tired pricing to logged in customers:

app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view/tierprices.phtml.

If the requirements are little complex we can use Magento Hide Prices, which is a comprehensive extension to hide price of products, add to cart button, disabling cart, displaying call for prices, or displaying inquiry forms etc

5.Remove credit card information from transactional emails

Magento store owners would never want to show their credit card information openly in transactional e-mails. Sending such information is highly insecure. One can remove displaying credit card information from transactional e-mails following the method:

Editapp/design/frontend/default/your_theme/template/payment/info/cc.phtml file

6.Add language pack

Magento is used as a multi-lingual store by all major brands. It is pretty easier to create a new store in Magento. There are several steps that should be followed to create a multi-lingual store in Magento.

7.Adding social media on Product Detail Pages

It is a good way to promote brand using social media. The like button in social medias like facebook, twitter, google+ etc can be helpful in the promotion of brands. Grab attention with social media.

Recommended read:What’s New and Cool in Magento 2?

8.Hide Empty Cart

It is futile to display cart in the sidebar if there is nothing in cart. Follow the steps to hide empty cart from sidebar:

Editapp/design/frontend/default//template/checkout/cart/sidebar.phtml file

9.Add custom comment box

Each product in the cart has option, add custom comment. While ordering, customers can enquire Instructions, requirements or specifications of the product in the comment box.

10. Custom Add to Cart button on CMS pages

Selling products via customized landing pages is not new; Marketers can do all sorts of efforts and thus can create pages to bring customers. With the CMS pages, customers can add certain products in the cart.Inorder to add products one have to follow certain codes and procedures.

Better Business for Better Future

All these ten tips can help in the customization of magento. It can be a difficult task for beginners involving magento front end customization.

Good Customization can be an added advantage to every ecommerce site especially a popular e-commerce site like magento.

Why Choose Magento For Your Responsive Site?

With the rise and growth of E-commerce worldwide, owning a web based business store has become a dream come true.

Web based sales immediately kicks out all the difficulties associated with maintaining a real world business shop. Right from the payment of lump sum amounts of rent every month to the strain of employee management is vanished in front of your eyes.

Read also:What’s New and Cool in Magento 2?

Even when you stick on with your shop, having an online store provides an additional income for your business. The only investment you will ever need is the initial capital you must invest while developing your website.

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Ever since the release of Magento in the year 2007, it had a very great response from the world of e-commerce.Magento ecommerce services are open-source, which means you don’t have to waste your time and money focusing on the developmental of your site. Going responsive makes your initiative time-saving and cost-effective.

When you want to have an amazing framework for designing the website on your e-commerce venture, e-commerce platforms comes to your rescue. You don’t have to take any extra pain in building base codes. Hang on to Magento ecommerce services and you can take it for granted.

What does your site going responsive signify?

“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms,and browsers that need to work with your site grows.Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come”-Jeffrey Veen

A responsive website means that it will respond and fit to all screen widths and resolutions, no matter whether you access the site from a personal computer, a tablet or a mobile phone. The advantages of using a responsive website include easy readability of content, better aesthetic appeal, and improved navigation through its contents. This could in turn enhance user experience and allow your business to reach a wider audience and grow.

What makes building a responsive site necessary?

Some benefits of using a responsive site are:

  • Ease to use: With more and more people using different devices to access your website, it is necessary that your website content is organized for better usability.

  • SEO friendly: Google recommends responsive mobile specific designs that ensure faster page loading time and SEO advantages.

  • Values your effort: Instead of spending your valuable resources on several sites, you can focus on developing and maintaining a single site.

  • Richer experience: Improved user experience and satisfaction.

What’s new?

Magento ecommerce services have included features that promote great adaptability and versatility for your e-commerce website over various devices. Instead of spending time and money developing separate sites with different themes for different platforms and devices, it is a wiser decision to invest on a single Magento responsive site that could be used on all devices and platforms.

Recommended read:7 Reasons Why Magento Is Excellent For E-Commerce

Magento services have recently released Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14 and Magento Community Edition 1.9 that features more than 50 enhancements to improve quality and security of your website, as the company promises. It also promises that it will enable responsive sites in half the time. They have also included a new payment option (The Bill Me Later service), streamlined checkout (PayPal Express Checkout) and Cross-Border Price consistency (For International customers).

It is perceived that the Bill Me Later service has increased sales for merchants, by at least 10 percent. The streamlined PayPal Checkout automatically tries for alternative payment options when a customer’s credit card is rejected. This also helps in increasing the total sales. There is a new configuration option called the Cross-Border Price consistency which lets your product price to be displayed alike for worldwide customers, irrespective of the tax rates applicable for each country.

So there is every reason that one should seriously consider Magento development services for their future e-commerce initiatives.

Build Your Ecommerce Store with $1000 Using Magento

“Ecommerce sites are no more a luxury now-a-days, they are a necessity”

The business world’s focus has shifted from traditional business to online business. Ecommerce websites have     become very common in the recent business environments as people prefer the online method to fulfill their requirements due to their busy schedules. What would we anticipate when we want to start an online business swiftly or to make your business online? I am sure, there will be many important things in our “to do list” which we want to execute perfectly. However, the top most priority should be nothing but a better online identity.

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As a result, you would probably seek for appropriate solutions by using most modern techniques at low cost. At the end of it all, what you’d expect to have is a perfect platform which allows your ecommerce business to perform smartly and comfortably within your limitations.

Read Also: 7 Reasons Why Magento Is Excellent For E-Commerce

So, if you are either looking forward to start a business or planning to take your business online, then Magento should be the software you should choose. It is one of the greatest in terms of its capability in search engine optimization, which is indeed an inevitable aspect in online business. Moreover, you don’t have to spend huge chunks of money and time. A quality Magento ecommerce store can be set up within $1000.

Raising that much money is not an issue at all. Especially when you have resources such as Kabbage . They help small businesses with all types of business financing, including building magento ecommerce stores.Their blog has lots of useful tips as well.

Magento has been one of the most common ecommerce platforms used over various industries. When it comes to online stores, Magento is a leading website development platform for small, middle and huge sized ecommerce websites as well as it helps you to start a new business or to make your business visible in the online world.

Till date, 443,764 websites have used Magento. And currently there are around 217,671 live websites which use this platform (source). You can manage the features of your website on your own from back end for more security and performance enhancement. Hence, you can get an ecommerce store according to your desire and requirements.

Build-Your-Ecommerce-Store-with-1000-Using-Magento-snap

When you look at the number of job openings, Magento is an overwhelming majority as well. There have been 5227 job openings in Magento, constituting 73.6% of the total job openings in ecommerce applications. (Source: Softbreaks)

You may also like: Things to Consider While Planning a Magento Store

With its many features including easily customizable element security protocols, Magento is a good choice for your ecommerce site. So, go ahead with your excellent plans and build an attractive Magento ecommerce store. This makes a hassle free journey between the service providers and website owner.

4 Popular Types of Magento Web Hosting

 

If you want the best solution for e-commerce, Magento would be the perfect fit. But Magento has higher server demands compared to other open source programming languages and platforms.

The up-side here is that this programming platform is quite flexible when it comes to hosting solutions. Thus, Magento developers find it easy to extend its use as well maintain the flexibility. You can easily trust this hosting solution for a fast working website any time.

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If you are keen on working with Magento, you have to invest on getting a web host for Magento. Here are few types of web hosting for Magento, which will help you understand the many options to choose from.

Read Also: How To Select A Hosting Solution For Magento

Shared Hosting

This is the cheapest option you can get from many of the hosting companies. They have nominal rates like $5-20/month range. Having this in your hand, you can simply host thousands of websites on the same server, with the other components required being CPU, disk drive and RAM. While hosting websites on a server, the performance of the server highly depends on the number of websites. This will also depend much on the bandwidth used by the resources and how much your neighbor is using it. Hence it should be done with care.

Hardware is just a part of it. You have other common operating systems and server environments which are shared by other users. This will set a limit on the rights to change the settings of the server. For instance, there are certain PHP libraries which are not given in the environment by default. Here you need to change the setting as per your requirements.

As said earlier, Magento has the capability to work well in this environment but practically you cannot expect many connections to run fast at the same time. One simple trick is that if you are hosting fewer sites and there are not much visitors at your website at a time, then you can go ahead with shared hosting. But if you are planning to host an e-commerce website then you will surely have plans to increase the traffic. At such times, try going for separate hosting.

Dedicated Server

Dedicated servers are anytime better and faster than shared ones. Here, it means that your site is the only site on the server. It is not being shared by any other websites. You have the freedom to set any operating system of your choice and customize all the settings as per your requirement and choice. There are numerous advantages of having a dedicated server, one of them being flexibility and performance.

Although you have to spend large bucks here, you can anytime see its worth. You will have to spend about $50/ month if you want only the basic configuration. For the others, sky is the limit. If you are hosting products which will have a large number of visitors on a daily basis, then a dedicated server is the best option for you. On the other hand, you can also plan to go for a shared one for now and then later on switch to a dedicated one in the near future.

Virtual Private Servers

This is another type of server which is also known as a Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS. This is a virtual server shared physically with other ones. For one server, you can have several VPS nodes, each having its own operating system. There are several discounts on this server which will help you to get them at cheaper rates instantly. If yours is a small business then this type of hosting is simply perfect for you. Likewise, they give a decent performance and flexibility in terms of settings.

Recommended Read: Magento Community Vs Magento Enterprise – What Are The Differences?

Cloud Hosting

This is one of the most popular and highly recommended hosting types used these days. Here you can increase or reduce the capacity as and when required. The cloud hosting can be either generalized or Magento-optimized. Many of famous companies such as Amazon make use of cloud hosting. This type of hosting is pre-configured and all you need is a system administrator to manage and configure it. Companies which are new in this market and are working towards success should surely make use of this hosting type.

Thus, choosing the type of hosting perfect for you and tour business is indeed a task. All you have to do is weigh the pros and cons of each of the Magento hosting types so that you don’t end up having an inappropriate one for your product.