How to get started with magento?

Magento ‘s the best ecommerce solution until now for our team and our customers. It keep growing and more perfect day by day. It ‘s quite easy to understand that a perfect system what must require a lot of specifications in system requirements and basic techniques but when you get it work you will be happy more than ever. In this post I will show you how to get started with magento in the easiest way with very simple steps.

1. Magento platform understanding

Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008 under the name Bento. It was developed by Varien (now Magento, a division of eBay) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is now owned solely by eBay Inc.

Magento was built using parts of the Zend Framework. It uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data.

Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by Varien’s support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

2. Does magento match with your need?

It ‘s good question for any webmaster who are on way to choose magento as their ecommerce platform. Because Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform so that it should match with almost online ecommerce requirements. If you need a shop, I am sure you will get something interesting with magento. Maybe you will see it take you a little bit more time in beginning but for long term, magento is a perfect online shop solution.

To make sure magento is matched with what you need, you can check the detail feature list of magento here magento-feature-list

3. Where to get started with magento?

After a long time working with magento, I think the fast way for you to get started with magento is buying a hosting/server with magento ready installation or one-click magento installation. Instead of spending a lot of time to install and configure server and then optimize it to work with magento, you can simply buy a quality hosting with good price what is ready for you to work in 5 minutes. This way can save you a ton of time and make you more interesting in magento main stuffs.

Even though the start point with hosting company is a easiest way, it ‘s still not too easy :). You must choose the right magento hosting or it will not work. As you know, magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform so that it ‘s heavy and require a lot of system hardware and software. That ‘s mean if you choose a general hosting or wrong hosting company, it will work very slow. Other than that, you will need some features like security, quick magento support, native english support, 24/7 support time, quick response time by ticket, phone call support, magento optimization set up, SSL … Let ‘s choose the right magento hosting company to work with in this point, it ‘s very important.

4. Magento Installation and Configuration

This is not too simple stuffs if you are not a programmer and you want to do it yourself. Luckily, if you choose SiteGround Magento Hosting it will have ready one-click magento installation with good magento support. But if you are a programmer and want to know how to install it manually then let ‘s get started with this instruction about Magento Installation and Configuration

5. Magento Development and Management

– Magento Development: the magento development is a long time learning, I suggest you join the magento official forum or Magento Expert Forum to improve you magento programming skills and management skills too.

– Magento User Guide Management: you can download the ebook from magento official site http://www.magentocommerce.com/resources/user-guide-download

6. Magento Marketing & SEO

One of the big field in magento, maybe our team will have a serials of articles about this soon. But for now, it ‘s very good to join to a magento SEO technique discussion.

7. Magento Technical Maintenance

I highly recommend you use a third party service if you have no any developer guy ready. For a long term with not too much changes, almost problem come from server so that you can send ticket to hosting company, they should support you for free. Or more advance service you can contact us, we are always ready to help!!!

Thanks and Good luck! Feel free to leave us your comment.