Corporate Magento Site as Multisite
Our Magento specialists were tasked to build a corporate magento website for one of our clients.
Our first task, as with any project, began by creating a detailed proposal working from the brief supplied by our client.
Once the proposal was agreed, we proceeded to produce some initial mock-ups before more detailed art-boards we created.
The art-boards were very quickly approved and we moved on to the second key stage - setting up development environments...
Environments at the ready, our third task was to install our new Magento theme. In addition to this, this stage also required us to carry out the following;
set up a new website and store view within Magento
set up a new category structure
configure the new theme to display throughout the site
Moving on from the early initial stages, we then needed to become more focused on individual areas, therefore, stage four of the project meant we would be splitting those areas into individual tasks. Those tasks were split as such;
Header
Footer
Main navigation menu
Main Slideshow
Homepage left column
Catalogue left column
Product page left column
Right column
Splitting areas into tasks in this way may seem long winded, but in fact it makes debugging much easier when you work on one section at a time, avoiding a "scatter gun" approach. We find this structured approach actually saves us time in the long run.
Stage four completed, we move on to stage 5. This stage means that we now need to assign every product in every category into the newly created Corporate website and store view.... and there were A LOT of products! To do this task quickly and effeciently, we chose to carry out this task using some ninja like SQL magic.
So we now have our Magento environment complete with new theme and multi-store site and store view. Our next task is to concentrate on creeating a separate category structure that will only be used for the new corporate site. To fulfill this task, we needed to create a new root category called "corporate" and copy all of the sub categories into it from the pre-existing retail store. Half the battle won, we then had to ensure that the categories are correctly linked up to the images in the main navigation menu by moving them into the new "corporate" root category. Once this was complete, we could then remove them from the old "home" root category and complete this stage of the project.
Our final main task of the project was to delete any non-corporate products from any corporate categories and to ensure that all of the products we in the correct categories.
The last thing we always do with any project is take it through a "dry run", this is where we run through the whole site to make sure everything works as it should do and correct any snagging issues me we encounter which ensures no nasty surprises when we reach go live.
This project took us 3 days and 2 hours to complete.
If you feel you could benefit from talking to one of our Magento specialists, then please get in touch.
