At Digital Peabody, we’ve developed e-commerce websites for all sorts of different businesses, and we’re often asked what goes into a successful one. Though the answer has lots of different facets, at its most basic level, it boils down to two requirements: an idea and a platform with which you can realize that idea to its fullest potential.

Planning

The site planning phase will be different for every business. It depends on your business, your existing model and how e-commerce will fit in. When we built a site for Scribbles, a stationery and invitation shop in Denver, we recognized that the company already operated a successful physical store. Scribbles’ online storefront, then, needed to offer the full functionality of the store for their online storefront — specifically, product customization. So we built them a site that offers just that: nearly all of the stationery and invitations can be tailored to a customer’s needs. Custom font faces, ink colors, monograms and names are all at users’ fingertips on Scribbles’ site.

The extreme ski movie producers at Matchstick Productions, on the other hand, have a completely different model. Matchstick sells extreme skiing DVDs and ski merchandise worldwide, both through various vendors and directly through its website. For this site, we needed a whole different set of capabilities, so we integrated a state-of-the-art ExpressionEngine content management system to stream high-definition video and display photo galleries, among other things, in order to showcase their products and athletes.

Execution

Coming up with a great idea for a website is one thing, but it is meaningless if your web design company can’t fully execute it. At Digital Peabody, we specialize in the Magento e-commerce platform, which has the unprecedented flexibility you need in order to realize your web goals.

To begin with, Magento has every feature you would want and more — the average e-commerce site doesn’t need half of the functionality it offers. We’ll run through a more complete list of features in an upcoming article, but here are a few of the most popular ones:

• offer coupons and gift cards
• allow users to compare products and create wish lists
• ability to ship to multiple addresses for one transaction
• create product bundles
• display related products
• product personalization
• much, much more

In addition to its out-of-the-box features, developers worldwide have created, and continue to create, every sort of extension imaginable to expand Magento’s functionality. Chances are, if you want a certain feature for your site, it either comes standard with Magento or there is a tested, proven extension that does exactly what you want. Magento is also easily integrated with other inventory and accounting systems through its highly flexible application programing interface (API). This means that our developers can seamlessly integrate Magento into whatever software you are already using to keep track of everything.

Another key benefit of Magento is its excellent SEO (search engine optimization) performance right out of the box due to its support for customizable URLs, an auto-generated site map, meta information for products and more. In an increasingly competitive e-commerce world, Magento’s SEO advantage makes it that much easier for potential customers to find your site — and potentially buy from you.

Digital Peabody can give you the expert help you need with both the planning and execution phases of building a successful e-commerce site. Our specialty, and our passion, is helping clients dream up their websites — and then making those dreams a reality.

Want to learn more about building an e-commerce site with Magento? Contact Digital Peabody at 303-468-5707, and take a look at our featured sites for more examples.

A content management system, or CMS, is a web-based interface through which site administrators can control what appears on their site — without needing any technical experience. Rather than having to code and upload a new static page for every additional page on a site, creating new pages with a content management system requires just a few clicks. At Digital Peabody, we’re often asked by customers about the benefits of having a CMS on their site, and we’ll run through a few below.

1. Ease of customization. With a CMS, quickly and efficiently changing content on your site is as easy as composing an e-mail. You don’t want your site to always look the same, nor do you want to have to call your developer every time you need to change a paragraph somewhere on your site.
2. Consistency. Pages created with a CMS automatically have a consistent aesthetic feel — you won’t have to keep tweaking minute HTML tags to get your pages to look the same. In addition, CMS-generated pages have the same meta structures, making the site more search-engine friendly as well as more navigable for users.
3. What you see is what you get. WordPress and ExpressionEngine, the two content management systems with which Digital Peabody works most often, both feature “what you see is what you get” (or WYSIWYG) editors, meaning what you see on the screen is what will appear on the page. Content creators don’t have to be HTML gurus to post through a CMS.
4. Separation of design and content. If your CMS-based site needs a design upgrade, it won’t mean you’ll lose the content you spent so much time working on, or have to copy-paste it into new pages. Instead, it’ll appear in the newly-redesigned pages, saving you a lot of time and effort.
5. Search engine optimization. Search engines value new content — easily posted through a CMS — as well as consistent site architecture, including metadata, URL structure, headings and more.
6. Multiple content creators. Since a site’s CMS is accessible over the web, anyone with the proper credentials can log in and post from anywhere with an internet connection.
7. Workflow management. WordPress and ExpressionEngine, as well as most other content management systems, can be configured so that users have different levels of access to the in order to ensure all posts go through adequate quality control before they are published to the web.
8. Multimedia posts. WordPress and ExpressionEngine make sharing photos and videos easy. There’s no need to go through all sorts of trouble with external photo and video hosting — just select and upload.
9. E-commerce. Digital Peabody also specializes in the industry-leading Magento e-commerce platform, which allows unprecedented flexibility for business owners looking to sell online. Magento has a variety of advanced features, including the ability to ship to multiple addresses for one transaction, create product bundles, offer coupons and more. Check out the business and e-commerce section of our portfolio here for some examples.

Want to learn more about content management systems and how they work? Contact Digital Peabody at 312-933-3430. Ready to begin? Get a free quote today, and take a look at our featured sites for examples of what a CMS can do for your website.