We’re really pleased to announce that the Cube Websites store is now live.
It uses Magento, and the custom theme was created by ourselves to match the rest of our website.
You can now find our Magento themes on sale there. As an introductory offer, you can get 20% off any theme you want!
Just enter NEWSTORE20 at checkout to apply your discount - offer valid until 9 January February 2009.
We’ll shortly be adding a new range of Magento themes, so stay tuned!
Preview of Our New Theme Store - click for full-size
Just to let you know that the store section of our website is almost ready - and we’re really excited. At the start it will contain the 2 Magento themes that we’ve created, but we will be introducing new themes in the next few weeks so stay tuned.
Click the image for a full size view.
We’re hoping to add other things to the store too such as web scripts and possibly applications too.
A very good checklist of things you should do before making your Magento website live!
Many of you may be aware that HostGator did not support InnoDB, and therefore the newer versions of Magento did not install on their servers. As our hosting uses HostGators servers, we were unable to host Magento sites for you.
However, this morning we have received confirmation, that:
13 May 2009, InnoDB will be supported by HostGator
From that date Cube Websites will become an official Magento web host, and we will be introducing a new web hosting package simply for Magento!
The voting is finally over, in what appears to be a VERY close poll.
We asked our readers, and the Magento community to vote for their favourite design, from a selection of two, which would be released as a free theme.
The winner is design one:
We’ll start converting this design into a full Magento theme soon, and then release it as soon as it’s done!
Thank you to everyone who voted, and bloggers that gave us coverage on the internet!
It’s been a while since we announced our free Magento theme, Amplitude (back in October 2008), so we thought it’d be nice to let you know what’s going on with it.
Fortunately, we’ve had so much client work to do with Magento, our schedule has been full since about 2 weeks after the first Amplitude post. Obviously we give priority to client work, which in turn means that unfortunately we’ve not yet been able to dedicate the time to Amplitude that it deserves.
Recently we created a new design for it, and created a vote topic on the Magento forum:
View It Here
Click the thumbnail for full-size!
We’d love to hear your feedback on both designs, so leave your comments either on the forum, or as a comment on here. Once we’ve received sufficient feedback we’ll start building the winning theme.
To answer a question in the previous Amplitude topic by a commenter, the release date for Amplitude is not yet set. We’re looking for some feedback first. If all goes as expected, then we’re looking towards the end of February (but that’s not guarantee).
We’ve been busy designing our new Magento theme (template, skin, whatever you prefer to call it) for the past few days and finally got a design that we like - it uses a dark page background, and a white content background giving it a very classy look.
After some careful consideration, we’ve decided that this new theme is going to be released for free, yup, you heard right, FREE!!!
This decision is based on the fact that Magento is a free software, it’s probably the best of its kind and we’ve got some very happy clients from it. Releasing a theme completely free is our way of giving back to the Magento community and showing our appreciation for such an excellent product.
RELEASE INFORMATION
We’ve only just finalised the design - the theme should be coded, tested and documented within the next two weeks (we have client websites to work on too!) hopefully.
Look out here for any updates.
All suggestions are welcome!
Magento Discovered!
First of all, to get an idea of what this article is about, check out our Magento Demo Store. Done that? Let’s carry on…
E-Commerce has been a big part of the web industry for a long time now. We’ve been having request to build online shops and stores ever since we started building websites (when we were called Finless Fish).
At the time we used to make what now seems very primitive shopping carts and there wasn’t a lot of functionality to offer.
Later on OSCommerce entered the scene, which we built several sites using. OSCommerce was a shopping cart ’software’ which you can simply download and install on your hosting. Once installed, we’d do the configuration, and build a decent design for it.
Though this was the best product of it’s kind, we can hardly say it was easy to develop and design for.
Later, Zen Cart emerged, which was a heavily modified OSCommerce, but introduced plenty of new features - still, designing for it wasn’t the easiest task, and development was very slow.
Now, 2008, Magento is discovered!
When we first heard of Magento, we went straight to their site, clicked the Demo page and thought ‘WOW.
First impression was the looks, and as a free default design, it’s the best we’ve seen on any e-commerce software.
After that, we had a look around, looked at the technical features and were really impressed by it all.
It offers a great navigation, layered browsing (shop by price, brand etc), integrates with Royal Mail nicely and loads more besides.
Then the real test came when it was time to build our next E-Commerce website. We made a nice looking design and had a go at converting it into a Magento skin.
The process was so easy, it’s really quite unbelievable. The whole process took less than half the time it took is with OSCommerce and Zen Cart.
After everything, it’s safe to say that Magento is by far the best e-commerce product we’ve come across. We’ll be using that for future websites.
Customers should also remember, half the creation time means we can offer these kinds of websites at lower prices now.
Prices for a fully customised Magento store start at £100.
Once again, the link for the demo store is: Demo Store