At one of our previous meetups, we were asked by an attendee if there was a place where he could take Magento courses. Well, look no further for anyone who’s interested… Magento’s own website has apage on Magento trainingwhich explains what some of the options are for furthering your Magento education.
Magento Classes at the U
Magento U provides relevant training courses to help you maximize your Magento implementation. Courses are created and delivered by Magento experts, and include practical, hands-on exercises so you can immediately put into practice what you have learned.
Instructor-Led Classroom
Take advantage of focused, uninterrupted time learning Magento in a classroom setting at one of our training locations near you. Engage with other students and learn from their experiences. Receive a copy of all course materials.
Instructor-Led Online
Remain productive at the office while enhancing your Magento skills. Delivered through an easy to use online training web-conferencing tool, our Instructor-Led Online courses enable students to interact real-time with the instructor.
On-Demand Online
Learn anywhere, anytime with our OnDemand video courses. Our best courses delivered to you whenever you want them.
Courses
Some of the courses include Quick Start to Magento Customization, Fundamentals of Magento Development, and Magento Checkout series. You can view all of them in the catalog.
Magento U Training Units
Magento U Training Units offer you a simple way to purchase Magento U training for your team at a discounted rate. Magento U Training Units are pre-paid credits that give you the flexibility to purchase training in advance and apply it throughout the year.
Magento Certification
Experienced Magento professionals can validate their real-world skills by earning a Magento Certification. Magento Certification Exams are geared toward professionals who want to differentiate themselves from the competition with the ultimate Magento credential. You can learn about getting your Magento certification on this page.
Nextopia is one of the largest eCommerce employers in Toronto, situated in the heart of the downtown core in a new 10,000 square foot HQ. The company prides themselves in fostering an environment where success flourishes. Nextopia is always hiring and looking for new talent.
“We’re in the business of helping retailers sell smarter. We do this by supplying our customers with the tools and control they need to convert browsers into buyers. With over 1,600 customers, we’re the #1 global provider of eCommerce site search and navigation solutions. Our powerful technology streamlines and supercharges your sales and merchandising efforts, provides vital customer data through our back-end analytics, and improves your customers’ shopping experience.”
Who Uses Nextopia
What kind of companies use our site search, navigation, merchandizing and personalization technology?
The companies you meet at trade shows
The companies you read about in the general and online retailing media
The companies whose stores you visit at the local mall
The companies whose websites you visit to buy the products or services you don’t sell
The companies that appear annually on the Internet Retailer Top 500 list
The companies aspiring to become all of the above
The range is pretty vast, but with more than 1,600 customers, answering the question, “who is the typical Nextopia customer?” is pretty challenging.
You’ll find all sorts of Nextopia customers selling products and services across a huge variety of industries and categories. They’re publicly listed. Others are privately funded. Some have large internal IT departments. At others, the same person answers the support line, fills the boxes and cuts the checks to suppliers, all while trying to improve their PHP coding skills. They are a varied lot. You probably get the picture.
Nextopia’s Partners
Nextopia’s partners are a varied group — from web designers and developers, to eCommerce platform providers, shopping carts, and application providers. What we all share is the common goal of providing our customers with the best technology possible — and in our case, the ability to provide retailers with cutting-edge site search, navigation, merchandizing, and personalization technology.
Magento is one of the most popular open source e-commerce CMS platformers on the market, with some of the major benefts including mobile visibility, all browser compatability, responsive and robust design and way more.
Magento also has tons of amazing themes for you to install, with templates related to cafes, restaurants, and hotels.
Here are the 10 best Magento themes we’ve gathered for your hotel, cafe and restaurant business sites.
Coffee Store – Creative Premium Magento Theme
Coffee store Magento theme could be theideal one for your cafe website. This theme provides you with a lot of maintenance features, among which site management, marketing and promotions, payment, checkout and shipping management features are the most important.
Thecreativeand the unique design of the theme helps you get themost attention from the traffic. The simple yet stylish design of the template makes it one of its kinds. The theme supports English, French, Spanish and Russian language. The theme installation and the set up instructions come along with the theme.
Japanese Cuisine – Magento Theme for cafes and restaurant websites
Japanese cuisine Magento theme is an ideal cafe and restaurant websites that has a unique design which effectively attract the eyeballs of your target customers. However this design of the template can be easily customized.
With facilities such as useful shop maintenance features, marketing and promotion tools,responsive slider, customer service features and a lot more. The browser compatibility feature of this theme ensures that your website looks equally appealing, no matter which browser is used to open the site.
Coffee store – Premium Magento Theme for Cafe and Restaurant Websites
This theme could also be the right option for your cafe website. With the fluid layout, drag and drop facility the template has gained quite a lot of importance. However this template has so other features as well. This theme supports several language as well including English, French, Spanish and Russian.
With cloud zoom, HTML 5 facilities this theme has gained prominence. The responsive retina displayis however, another facility that helps you gain greater number of traffic in your website.
Tea Time – Fully Responsive Premium Magento Cafe Theme
Tea Cafe’s are quite cool and extremely trendy these days. More the demand of the tea cafe’s are increasing, several Magento themes are also coming forward. However, among the Tea cafe Magento themes, this theme deserves special mention. The refreshing images with the appropriate colour themes create an elegant look.
You can also add the subsidiary menu and newsletter subscription form at the bottom. CSS3, HTML5, JQuery, Semantic code, Valid coding options are available with the template. Alongside, you also get cloud zoom and social icons which adds an extra plus to this theme.
Coffee Cafe – Best Magento Theme suitable for Cafe websites
For coffee cafes this template could be just appropriate. The warm brown colour and the uncommon yet stylish fonts give it a glamorous look altogether. This design can be successively used for coffee, tea and other beverages websites.
To make the navigation visual, drop down menu is supplied with images which further enhance the look of the website. The smart slider and three promo banners speak about your quality products louder than any words.
The Coffee Store – Premium Magento Cafe Theme
With the elegant and simple design of this theme, you can easily take your online cafe business to the peak. The easy payment options, customer support, marketing and online promotion tools give you a reason to choose this template for your website.
My Coffee Store – Great Magento Cafe Commerce Theme for Coffee Store websites
With a great look and design this theme will make your online restaurant website unique in the thousands of the websites running over the internet.
With the powerful admin panel you can easily customize what ever section you want with out having much technical skills. By seeing the home page of this theme the visitors will feel the richness of your restaurant.
Balosa – innovative Magento commerce theme for restaurant websites
This theme is one of the most scrumptious, delicious web templates built for Magento e-commerce. This theme is supported by MT slideshow so you can show most attractive photos of the food items.
This theme is also comes with attractive features like mega menu, Thumbnail scroller, and some product sliders.With this theme you can make your online restaurant website very innovative and can gain more traffic to your website.
EM 24/7 – Premium Magento Cafe Theme for Hotels and Restaurants
This is one of the best Magento theme which is available for the hotel and restaurant business websites. It is having a nice slider on the home page on which you can show your delicious food item photos. This theme is built on top of the 960 grid system, so your website will be compatible with the most of the web browsers.
Also HTML5 and CSS3 has been used to develop this theme. Its having a nice feature of placing the sliders where ever you want to place from the available types of sliders. This theme is also compatible with the most of the extensions available on the web.
EM Royal Hotel – Magento Theme for hotel and Lodge websites
EM Royal hotel Magento Theme comes with three sub themes included with 20+ transitions slideshow. All blocks are customized including product catalogue pages, checkout progress.
This template has cross browser support and can be opened by using any browser. In addition, this template is SEO orient in design and development. Well structured and commented HTML and CSS for easy customization. The user also gets a full user guide documentation to help you install and utilize the theme.
We’ve scoured the Web for the best of the best e-commerce websites in terms of design, and found these sites to have the most stunning and inspirational designs of everything we’ve seen.
Here’s a list of all the sites, with screenshots and a brief overview of the company.
1)Reebok E-Commerce
Reebok’s site was redesigned by Voltage in 2012 with a handful of new features, graphics, and improved usability that provides for a more effective shopping experience.
VOLTAGE also redesigned the YOUR Reebok pages for better usability and conversion.
About Reebok: Reebok is an American-inspired, global brand that creates and markets sports and lifestyle products built upon a strong heritage and authenticity in sports, fitness and women’s categories. The brand is committed to designing products and marketing programs that reflect creativity and the desire to constantly challenge the status quo.
2) My Own Bike
My Own Bike’s website allows you to design your own bicycle, which is then custom-built and assembled by their team in Dusseldorf, and delivered to you personally.
Taken from their website (which we translated from its original German tongue)….
“myownbike is no ordinary bike shop . myownbike only offers single speed bicycles. myownbike Single Speeds have only one gear (input bike), the (Fixie Fixed Gear /) can be driven from day to day with free wheel or rigid gear.
myownbike dispensed with maintenance-prone and not absolutely necessary components on urban single speed bike and just focus on the essentials. Back to the original form of cycling. Your myownbike Single Speed is your perfect city bike – simple, minimalist but still exquisitely and individually.”
3) Spyder E-Commerce
Spyder Trap is an Online Marketing agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota that builds customized marketing solutions to meet your specific business needs.
Hunter’s Wine Shop’s website features an old-fashioned design which recalls old print adverts that the guys from Mad Men might have been producing. Pictures of the Hunter’s Wine Shop team can be seen throughout the website, which shows that the company is very open about being a very close-knit, family-owned business.
We give this design credit for being humble, alluring, and refreshingly unique.
5) Soho Fixed Bikes
Like My Own Bike, Soho Fixed Bikes also sells custom-made bike.
“SohoFixed bikes are hand-built using a selection of new and unique retro parts then custom-painted using the latest powder-coating techniques.”
The bikes appear to be in good condition, and are presented in an American Apparel-sameness which strangely doesn’t graze on us. We like this design.
6) The Hungarian Wine
Unlike Hunter’s Wine Shop, the website here is slightly more modern, and has that exquisite display that you would expect from a standard wide menu.
The wines are presented with a UK currency, and seem geared toward people with good taste—which certainly matches the rest of the website.
7) AYR
“Good design is always in season,” says the AYR website. And what a season it is… The girl on the front page certainly seems to be enjoying it.
Aside from the sexy girl on the front page of the site, we also have a great display for the shop, with real-live models who don’t just look like they’re being forced into a photoshoot.
Well, she’s certainly dressed to succeed. And if you want to look at all the other girls on the website, I’m sure that you can have hours of fun…
8) A Modern Eden
A Modern Eden is brand targeting young hip parents looking for modern designs and products for their children. The website is very kid-friendly and features a lot of happy animals. And if the lyrics to “Old McDonald Has a Farm” doesn’t enter your head when you’re browsing the site, then you certainly have less of a weird mind than we do…
9) Blubolt
bluCommerce is the powerful eCommerce platform built by blubolt that drives high-volume eCommerce operations across the world. The website has a very placid, corporate design, but you surely don’t have to be a genius to know that the simple, blue design is a perfect fit for the name, ‘bluCommerce.’
10) Hard Graft
Saving one of the best for last, Hard Graft features a very straightforward design, with the products out in front, stunning you with their impressive size.
Whether you need a case for your phone, or a new wallet, it seems that Hard Graft can certainly hook you up with either, and more.
In today’s competitive global market, businesses definitely need the tools to increase productivity and provide a professional appearance. Hosted Exchange provides ready access to email, calendars, calendars, and tasks. You can also share and schedule meetings with your colleagues, and secure your email with free virus and spam protection.
And if that’s not enough, you can even enjoy the benefits of Hosted Exchange on your phone.
We offer a free setup, free Exchange server upgrades and security patches, and a fast, reliable connection with 99% uptime. You can email anywhere, from anywhere, at a great rate. What are you waiting for?
Hosted Exchange improves your productivity with powerful email, calendar and online collaboration tools including a SharePoint® intranet portal (Group plan).
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A while back, we posted an article aboutMagento slowdown. Did you want to hear more tips about how you can speed up your Magento store? Well, we have them below.
There are several methods that can be applied by one to enhance Magento performace and other PHP-based CMS systems.
These methods start from settings within Magento and goes all the way to server/hosting settings.
Speed Up Magento Stores: A Quick Guide
Reduce the size of file transfer between browser & web server
A useful approach to escalating Magento-store performance significantly is by lessening the size of the file transfer between browser and web server.
Minify Javascript and CSS:
Compressing the JavaScript and CSS can set aside many bytes of data and reduces downloading, parsing and execution time.
There are many online tools are available to minify JavaScript and CSS such as jscompress.com, minifyjavascript.com csscompressor.com, minifycss.com.
Optimize images by resizing them:
Select a suitable image file format and compress the images using image compressor to lessen the bandwidth between browser and web server.
These are several image compression tools offered online, such as imageoptimizer.net, hjpeg-optimizer.com, JPEGMini.com, etc.
Enablze GZIP compression
You can curb the number of bytes sent over the entwork considerably using GZIP compression that cut down the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files sent over the network by up to 70% and reduces download time terrifically.
Combine images using CSS sprites
With the help of CSS sprites, number of images can be brought down by combining them into as few files as possible. It will be reduce the server requests and will bring down the number of bytes downloaded by a webpage.
Expires Headers or Cache control headers
By using the expire headers or cache control ehaders, the number of HTTP requests and its size can be reduced to faster page load.
Enable Apache KeepAlives
While using shared hosting web servers and browsers may close connections so it is significant to enable the Apache KeepAlives to enhance the communication between server and browser.
Imagine Commerce 2015 Early Rate Discounts Ending December 31
Imagine is the world’s premier eCommerce conference, and will bring together more than 2,000 Magento merchants, partners and developers from over 40 countries at the Wynn Las Vegas from April 20-22 for three days of networking, collaboration, cutting-edge sessions and, of course, imagination.
The conference’s early rate of $1,095 ends on December 31, 2014. Don’t miss out—register now! (On January 1, 2015, registration rates increase to $1,295).
Sponsorship for Imagine Commerce 2015 are available at a 10% discount until December 31, 2014. Please explore our many sponsorship opportunities now to take advantage of the discounted rates.
SalesTax.com, by CCH, is the world class, cloud-based Sales Tax & Rules Engine which makes all your sales tax calculations in real time. SalesTax.com integrates into your existing accounting software or ERP using the available Software Development Kit, or can be added directly into your Microsoft Dynamics AX or GP ERP system for even more complete synchrony.
SalesTax.com by CCH is your ticket to worry-free financials, the plus and pro versions even come with automatic form generation, and since it’s based off of the same cutting edge tax technology CCH, the largest tax research and solution firm in the world, supplies to the IRS and all BIG-4 accounting firms, compliance is guaranteed.
Advanced Features:
Taxability Mapping
This uniquely straightforward solution permits drag-and-drop mapping by product, automatically correlating to a comprehensive list of nationwide product codes for every industry. This free service automatically invokes the proper rules at point of sale, minimizing compliance management resources.
Nexus Management
Precisely define states and local jurisdictions, adding and deleting regions at your convenience. Advanced functionality allows you to schedule discrete periods ahead of time with designated beginning and ending dates.
Jurisdiction Mapping
Make invalid addresses a thing of the past. State-of-the-art rooftop mapping targets even specific street addresses–there is no more precise or detailed mapping service available.
SalesTax.com Services
Benefit from enhanced Magento sales tax functionality in a cost-effective, cloud-based solution.
Sales Tax CORE
ERP and Magento Shopping Cart Integration
Real-time Jurisdiction Mapping
Comprehensive Taxability Mapping
Flexible Nexus Management
Management Reporting: Reports are accessible in real-time to assist with supervision, tracking, treasury management, and audit defense
Sales Tax PLUS
SalesTax.com SaaS PLUS provides powerful enhancements to your management of your Magento tax return(s) filing process.
Automated Forms Generation
Automated Filing
Calendar Alert System
Completely Accessible History of Filed Returns
Stand-Alone Filing Option: Sales Tax SaaS PLUS can be used as a stand-alone filing service. You provide the data and Sales Tax SaaS PLUS auto-generates returns and handles filing and remittance.
To read more about our Sales Tax and and Tax Use module, check out our solutions page on it, and then give us a callif you don’t mind.
Magento Bill Me Later is a PayPal service that gives your customers quick access to financing—at no credit risk to you.
As a PayPal merchant, your customers may already have access to Bill Me Later financing, but they may not know it.
By promoting Bill Me Later on your site with payPal-hosted banners, you’ll remind customers that they have more buying power while they’re shopping.
Advantages of Magento Bill Me Later
Boost sales and increase average orders.
Up to 43% of Bill me Later sales are incremental, and you can increase average order sizes by up to 75% or more.
You get paid right away. Your customers get 6 months financing.
Payments show up in your PayPal account within minutes, regardless of when your customers pay.
No additional costs for Bill Me Later
You won’t get charged extra for Bill Me Later. You’ll only pay PayPal’s standard transaction fee.
Encourage larger purchases
PayPal’s hosted banners tell your customers about their extra buying power before checkout. More buying power can motivate them to make larger purchases at your store.
Turn first-time customers into repeat customers
Unlike other short-term discounts, Bill Me Later financing is available on eligible purchases whenever customers pay with PayPal. Your US consumers can keep coming back to spend more.
Gain a competitive edge
Does your competition offer financing? Giving your customers financing means you can become their store of choice. Everyone likes flexibility.
It’s all taken care of for you
You don’t have to worry about credit risk, handling customer billing or payment collection.
More on PayPal Bill Me Later
Bill Me Later is a PayPal service that allows customers to buy an item and pay for it at a later time. Usage of the Bill Me Later service is subject to credit approval, which is done at signup.
PayPal claims that the service is a faster method to get through checkout and is accepted by thousands of online stores. PayPal also offers perks like free shipping to those that sign up. You will need a PayPal account and a social security number in order to be considered eligible for the service.
On the Magento website, you’ll find a section that discusses licensing for different editions of Magento. If you’re interested in some of the copyright issues involved for licensing the system, you might want to read up on it.
We’ve listed some a few of the questions below:
What are the terms of use for Magento Enterprise Edition?
What open source Magento license do we use for Magento Community Edition?
Magento Community Edition is distributed under the Open Software License (OSL 3.0), and is thus open source software.
I’m a merchant. What does “open source” mean to me?
You may download, modify, use, and distribute the open source Software. You can be assured that Magento will continue to thrive because all contributions made to the software by you and others must be made available under the same OSL 3.0 license.
I’m a developer. What does the OSL 3.0 license mean to me?
OSL 3.0 allows developers access to the Magento Community Edition source code. Developers can modify and customize the software and distribute their own derivative works under the OSL 3.0 license. This will lead to a larger community of developers enhancing Magento in ways that are available to all.
Can I use Magento trademarks, service marks, and logos?
You may use the Magento trademarks, service marks, and logos in the manner in which you are licensed to do so, and in accordance with our trademark rules or any guidance that we provide to you. See more on trademark rules below.
Can I use the Magento trademark in one of my domain names or URLs?
No. You may not use the Magento trademark or any other mark associated with the Magento offering from our company in your domain name or URL. (For example, “www.magentohosting.com” is not allowed). See more on this topic below.
