Clients such as Heathcote & Ivory, Mikimoto, and Stephen Arnold utilise our blog services on a weekly basis – it’s a proven way of driving more traffic to their sites, publicising new products, and keeping the homepage looking fresh without needing a constant turnaround of new products.

Not only do we provide all of the copywriting services for a blog, but we’ll also brainstorm interesting article ideas and features to deliver compelling reading for customers. This could be anything from current news in the relevant eCommerce sector to consumer interest pieces that are designed to incentivize product ranges.

So, for example, earlier this year we ran an article for Stephen Arnold Swarovski Wholesale about a Giant Swarovski Easter Egg, which had been commissioned for the Fabergé Big Egg Hunt that’s currently underway in London. The news was current, relevant to Stephen Arnold’s customer-base, and provided us with leeway to insert product placement links within the copy of the blog post.

Alternatively, for clients where current news is less relevant to their customers, we tend to focus on consumer interest features as a way of driving readers to certain product ranges. As an example, we used a ‘Top Bath Relaxation Techniques’ blog post as a way of leveraging Heathcote & Ivory’s range of bathing products. The content was both helpful to readers, and directly related to the end products.

There are also technical issues to consider when writing a blog post, however, which will help the page to attain a high ranking on Google and convert written copy into high volumes of page hits. SEO optimisation is at the forefront of our approach for all blog writing, so that each post is filled with precisely targeted keywords, tags, and search terms to ensure maximum exposure.

For example, we vet each article by utilising Google’s Keyword Tool to find the most searched keywords in a given field, and then make sure that these words are placed at the front and centre of the relevant blog post. It’s practices like this that make the difference between a page one article on Google and an article that fails to garner any significant search engine traction.

To find out more about our blog writing and online marketing services, click here for a brief overview or simply click on the ‘Quick Contact’ tab at the top-right hand corner of this page and we’ll be more than happy to get back to you with more details.

Unlike the inaugural Imagine Conference last year, which was set in Los Angeles’ Hilton LAX Hotel, Magento has decided to move the 2012 location over to the more dazzling setting of Las Vegas, Nevada and the aptly named M Resort Spa & Casino. Despite the more lavish catering facilities, however, Magento still managed to sell out the conference back in February of this year.

Described as an event for the Magento Ecosystem – which is comprised of Magento developers, merchants, technology partners, and solution partners the world over – the Imagine Conference is a perfect opportunity for us to network and build our knowledge-base as a Magento Gold Solution Partner.

Over 650 people from 27 countries attended last year and this year’s event promises to be even bigger, providing plenty of opportunities for our programmers to hone their craft and share tips of the trade with other experts from the world of eCommerce and Magento.

Speakers at the conference come from as far afield as an Emmy Award nominated screenwriter and a Captain of the First American Women’s Everest Expedition. The former, Tim Kring, will be talking about ‘The Art of Storytelling & The New Monetization Models of Hollywood’, while the latter, Alison Levine will speak about ‘Success Strategies from the 7 Summits’.

It won’t be all business and no pleasure, however. In keeping with an unofficial tradition that started last year, Magento Community members have been invited to take part in the Las Vegas Labor of Love 10k run or, alternatively, a half marathon for the particularly well exercised (everyone else can presumably just take a walk down the Strip for some gambling leisure).

We’ve also built a couple of modules and extensions to the new Sportfish site that bring a lot of additional functionality. Firstly there’s our custom-built World Wide river guides , which use an interactive world map interface to display picturesque fishing spots from around the globe. We’ll be adding more locations to this resource as we continue to build-up the site over the coming weeks and months, so watch this space…

Our programmers have also been busy working on what we’re referring to as a ‘Landing Site’ module, which we’ve built-in to Magento’s CMS. Simply put, this module allows admin users at Sportfish to control and edit all of the banners on the homepage and category pages without any specific coding knowledge or expertise. Everything from text to new images and products can now be edited across each page’s array of banners at the touch of a few buttons or drop-down lists.

Stay tuned to our Twitter account @thePixelDesign for more updates on our work as they happen…

Obviously, the thinking behind our decision is to improve our overall appearance to potential new clients and drive more traffic to our site from the Magento Solution Partners UK directory. What we’re interested to find out from you, our potential and existing clients, is whether the Gold status will make any significant impact on your perception of the company or improve the likelihood of you pursuing our services for Magento development in future.

We pride ourselves on being able to serve any potential client – regardless of whether they’re a global brand, small company, or web start-up – and it goes without saying that your feedback is invaluable to us, so please do let us know your thoughts in the comments below or get hold of us via Twitter @thePixelDesign.

We’ll be building a new Wholesale Boutique site around a Magento framework, while our programmers will utilise their extensive knowledge of Ajax and JSON coding to bring Wholesale Boutique’s extensive catalogue of personalised products under a streamlined back-end.

One particularly advantageous piece of business comes from the current exchange rate between the US dollar and Great British pound, which allows us to offer an hourly rate that works out as much as 25% cheaper than some of the US-based Magento development companies Wholesale Boutique had been in discussions with.

Utilising a variety of specialised personalising techniques – from embroidery to laser and mechanical engraving – Wholesale Boutique’s product range focuses on bags (totes, carry alls, backpacks, and more…) but also features headbands, an array of jewellery options such as earrings or bracelets, and even a range targeted exclusively at the lucrative ‘Tween’ market.

Link: Wholesale Boutique

Operating out of a flagship store in Pall Mall, London, Farlows is a seller of advanced fishing and hunting accessories as well as high-end clothing and attire for the followers of each sport. It’s sister company, Sportfish specialises in fly fishing and its vendors can be found across the UK’s most popular fishing destinations.

As well as Magento integration to the current Farlows and Sportfish websites, The Pixel will also be responsible for ongoing content management of product catalogues and ERP integration to streamline the distribution chains of each website.

We’ll also be spearheading a new World Map hub within both sites, which will operate as a valuable resource for customers by documenting world-renowned fishing and hunting destinations. With an interface that can zoom from an atlas to continent view with the click of a mouse, and information libraries for each point of interest, this World Map feature is sure to be a key feature of The Pixel’s design imprint on each new web location.

Starting with a WordPress site as the centralised hub for all things ‘A Lidl Bit of Magic’, security was of the utmost concern. Our programmers set about the task of creating an ultra secure hosting platform for the website to account for the huge influx of traffic it would inevitably receive, and to assuage the understandable security concerns of a multinational company.

Moving on from that, aesthetic design formed the second pillar of focus on the website. For what was essentially advertising space and promotion, we needed to provide incentives for users to continue browsing the site once they’d landed there from the original lures of the competition and special offers.

An online brochure was presented using Flash animation, while a recipe book utilised jQuery, both in an eMagazine-style format. We took the decision to avoid the static appearance of a webpage and, instead, opted for something that had more in common with a printed, hard copy. This provided scope for more lavish, appealing photo work and a freer style of design, thereby presenting a format that was more appealing to the customer.

Also embedded within the site was a film reel of celeb chef, Lesley Walters cooking Christmas recipes from the site’s Flash book. We were responsible for both the management and organisation of Generator Digital’s shoot, before compressing the footage down for web-based media and streaming it through the ‘A Lidl Bit of Magic’ site without compromising its original quality.

Another key feature of the campaign’s three-pronged promotional strategy was a smartphone app, developed in-house by our experienced team of app developers. As well as holding the competitions and recipes found on the main website hub, our Android and iOS app also boasted exclusive features such as a turkey timer (which calculated estimated cooking times based on size and weight), a cooking time guide for Christmas vegetables, and a handy shopping list that customers could use to tick off purchases for ‘A Lidl Bit of Magic’s’ featured recipes while they were shopping. Although we’re not at liberty to reveal precise download figures for the app, we can tell you that it was more successful than even our most optimistic predictions during development.

2011 was another great year for The Pixel. We welcomed new clients and enjoyed continued growth alongside the Magento platform that’s been so good to us since we started developing for it upon its launch in 2007. As one of Magento’s Silver Solution Partners, we’ll strive to continue raising the bar on our bespoke range of services so that our existing clients and potential new customers can enjoy further growth in their respective lines of business.

So if you’re new to The Pixel, or perhaps have been following our progress through this site, then please don’t hesitate to get in contact through the link or handy tab in the top right-hand corner of this page. Alternatively, for a briefer query or just to keep up with us day-to-day, please feel free to follow us on Twitter @thePixelDesign and shoot through your thoughts.

Here’s to a bountiful 2012!

All the best,
The Pixel team

The Problem
There are several Magento modules out there that deal with the pricing of configurable and bundle product should you wish to calculate the display price using the combined price of the associated products. By using one of these modules your frontend is sorted but what happens to your google feed? Obviously you want to display the same prices within google search results as you do on your website. By customising the Simple Google Shopping module the result is easily achieved.
One of our client’s site is set up so that every product has a regular and a special price the latter being the one they sell the products at. This does not cause any issue when adding the price to the XML feed for simple products but because both the bundle and configurable products are built out of simple products when we try to get the price using either the default attributes that come with the feed module or the conventional getPrice() function we get either 0 or the sum of the regular price of the simple products as value for the price attribute.

A Workaround
Without going into too much detail (an excellent documentation can be found on the feed module’s website) I will show you a quick workaround to solve the problem by modifying the XML product pattern under Google Shopping in the Admin section of the site (one more time, you will need the Simple Google Shopping (by Wyomind) module installed and there is a chance that you are already using one of the modules out there for the configurable product pricing, we took advantage of the one called Simple Configurable Product (by Organic Internet & Mobile) which allows you to build up configurable products out of simple ones):

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<g:price>
<? 
if($product->getTypeId() == "configurable"){
  	$_price = 0;
	$_config_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($product->getId());
	$_helper = new OrganicInternet_SimpleConfigurableProducts_Catalog_Model_Product_Type_Configurable_Price;
	$_price = (float)$_helper->getFinalPrice(1,$_config_product);
	$_price *= 1.2;
	$_price = number_format($_price,2,'.',' ');
	return $_price;
} else if($product->getTypeId() == 'bundle'){
	$bundled_product = new Mage_Catalog_Model_Product();
    	$bundled_product->load($product->getId());
 
    	$selectionCollection = $bundled_product->getTypeInstance(true)->getSelectionsCollection(
        	$bundled_product->getTypeInstance(true)->getOptionsIds($bundled_product), $bundled_product
    	);
 
   	$_prices = array();
if($product->getTypeId() == "configurable"){
  	$_price = 0;
	$_config_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($product->getId());
	$_helper = new OrganicInternet_SimpleConfigurableProducts_Catalog_Model_Product_Type_Configurable_Price;
	$_price = (float)$_helper->getFinalPrice(1,$_config_product);
	$_price *= 1.2;
	$_price = number_format($_price,2,'.',' ');
	return $_price;
} else if($product->getTypeId() == 'bundle'){
	$bundled_product = new Mage_Catalog_Model_Product();
    	$bundled_product->load($product->getId());
 
    	$selectionCollection = $bundled_product->getTypeInstance(true)->getSelectionsCollection(
        		$bundled_product->getTypeInstance(true)->getOptionsIds($bundled_product), $bundled_product
    	);
 
	$_prices = array();
    	$_price = 0;
 
    	foreach($selectionCollection as $option)  	{
		$_thisPrice = Mage::getModel('bundle/product_price')->getSelectionPrice($bundled_product, $option);
		$_thisOptionId = $option->getData('option_id');
 
		if($_prices[$_thisOptionId]){
			if($_thisPrice < $_prices[$_thisOptionId]) {
				$_prices[$_thisOptionId] = $_thisPrice;
			}
		} else {
			$_prices[$_thisOptionId] = $_thisPrice;
		}
	}
 
	foreach($_prices as $_aPrice){
			$_price += $_aPrice;
	}
 
    	return $_price*1.2;
} else {
return "{special_price}";
}?>
GBP</g:price>

The above is an excerpt from the shopping feed more precisely the part where we tell Google about the price of the product. The code is divided into three cases:
- configurable product
- bundle product
- other (in our case it means simple product)
The feed module allows us to use php code when setting the value for a tag as long as the code is placed between the php opening and closing (shorthand)tags. Also we are offered a $product object by default which is suitable for getting basic product related attributes but not detailed enough to calculate the price based on the related products’ special prices. Hence, we need to load a full product instance first then we loop through the related products, get the lowest prices per categories and add them together to get the lowest price our product can be sold at. This algorithm is valid for both configurable and bundle product types. (For simple product we simply use the {special_price} special attribute supplied by the feed module itself.) However, you may have noticed that for configurable products we don’t loop through the associated products. It is because the module we use for building configurable products out of simple products gives us the modified version (the original is available from the core) of the getFinalPrice() funtion so to keep our code as simple as possible we use that instead of searching for related products and finding the lowest price. The function does just the same for us. For bundle products we are not in luck, just have to take the longer route to find out the prices.
Before we return the price we multiply it by 1.2 to get a VAT included price. This is hardcoded for the time being but you could get the amount of VAT the same way as Magento does it when displaying VAT included prices.
Simple as that.

During my recent development on a client’s website I bumped into a problem where some of the javascript code i wrote was not processed at all in Firefox when I had the Firebug developer tool open. It left me baffled for a few minutes and in this special case my way of debugging was actually making things worse because it turned out that the script was not executed with the debug lines in the code (do you see the irony in here?). As soon as I commented out the debug lines the code was doing its magic again. After all that I had a quick google on the topic and here’s what I’ve found:
I use console.log() for debugging quite a lot especially if I work on a live site because it does not cause the same distraction as an alert popup does. However, without Firebug enabled in Firefox console.log() will consider the rest of the code following this line as broken because it will be looking for Firebug that is closed. If one opens Firebug and refreshes the page the script will start working again. A suggested workaround for this is to wrap the debug line in an if statement as the following:

if(window.console && window.console.firebug):
    console.log('Debug information goes here');
endif;

If you plan on using console.log() on multiple occasions during development you might want to consider writing a function for it.

HTML element identifiers: classes and ids

When they (w3c) say that id must be a unique identifier they are not kidding, you know. As obvious as it sounds it is an easy mistake to make to end up with multiple html elements sharing the exact same id when you have dynamically generated content (common case when using any of the cms platforms out there).
As a recent experience I ended up with a category page where the container elements had different ids (as they should) but the nested elements had the same ids as other children elements of a different container element as illustrated in the simplified example below:

Most of the time you would not even notice it because browsers nowadays are clever enough to cope with the issues this type of invalid markup can cause but as soon as it gets to testing the site in Internet Explorer ( especially version 7 and 8 ) you will notice a similar expression on your face to the one you would expect to see on a tourist’s who is about to be eaten by a goonch catfish on the bank of Kali River. Should you encounter similar behaviour first make sure that your website has a valid markup and replace duplicated ids with classes.
If you use jQuery for achieving better user experience you will find that .parent(), .parents(), the child selector (parent > child), descendant selector (“ancestor descendant”), :first, :first-child and other selectors of the kind will soon become your best friends.