Wordpress or Magento: The Fringe Benefits of Working as a Web Designer

April 17th, 2009

Today has been a really long day at the office.

We have had interviews with three new candidates for SEO positions in the company. We've talked SEO strategy. We've gotten a couple of video promotion companies underway. We've created a new reporting system for life insurance quotes. We've fixed our SEO Images plugin. We've done a detailed quote for a new e-commerce site. We've tested two potential CRM-lite solutions. We've unsuccessfully tried to invoice again (too much work to have time to invoice!).

Life is not easy at the front lines of the web wars.

But sometimes working on the web can be great.

Peter and I had to spend a half an hour going over the intricate workings of a good sample Magento site to decide if we wanted to build that shopping site in Magento or build a custom cart of our own in Wordpress. Here's the model Magento site:

Sexy ecommerce: Wordpress or Magento - definitely Magento

Splendid implementation.
Perfect design.
Wonderful proportions.
Incredible attention to detail.
Flexibility.

And I am talking about the code not the excellent photographs. It was easy to see all the different variations available of the items. Easy to navigage from item to item.

But digging deeper there's a lot of fragile and browser dependent code here to troubleshoot. Keeping this site looking perfect and running right in five or six browsers is a serious undertaking.

PS. In the end we came down on the side of a preference for Wordpress, as that's what we can SEO and build in our sleep. If the client would prefer a dedicated Magento site it may happen.

By Alec

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7 comments on “Wordpress or Magento: The Fringe Benefits of Working as a Web Designer”

01

Y’all have any experience with this WordPress e-commerce solution?

instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

Jon Leland at May 17th, 2009 around 2:02 pm
02

We do not recommend Wordpress e-commerce. It’s beginnings were promising, but the code has become complicated and buggy. WP e-commerce often loads very slowly. The pricing structure is annoying (modular). And the support/PR from Dan is intimidating and focused on blaming the user.

We will be coming up with some other recommendations soon.

In the meantime, we did write about WP e-commerce before it went off the rails.

alec at May 18th, 2009 around 12:24 am
03

I ran across your post on Magento and Wordpress. I was close to the final stages of developing a website and store with Wordpress and wp- ecommerce. I have been brought to a quick hault do to its issues and the fact that I need taxation by zip-code as NC has new tax laws. I have not found another Wordpress ecommerce plugin that can tackle this out of the box. I tried eShop first but I ended up ditching it due to the taxing issues as well.

I got excited when I saw the Magento Wordpress bridge until I realized it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

Have you guys been successful with anything else integrating a store in Word Press that has comparable feature to wp-ecommerce?

Chad at December 18th, 2009 around 12:40 pm
04

Hi Chad,

We ended up developing a custom solution based on Market Theme which is a very reasonable $55. There was a lot to change and add in the code but in difference from WP Ecommerce it was good code to start.

You can see the working Toronto furniture rental site for an example of our finished work.

If you have a budget and would like a hand with the project, let us know. We could sort your tax issue. We’ve done some work with zipcode dependent pricing.

alec at December 18th, 2009 around 4:37 pm
05

My first ecommerce experience has been with Magento and it has one big bad issue that won’t go away.
It is absurdly slow. REALLY slow. I read that this was due to excessive database queries.

It doesn’t matter how good it looks if people get bored waiting for pages to load.

I might try out WP eshop instead…

Tai Travis at January 2nd, 2010 around 2:19 pm
06

Tai,

Magento doesn’t actually peform that many database queries – a huge portion are cached, the bigger issue is the CPU actually running apache/lighttpd.

Trust me, it can be made plenty fast.

And for the person who asked above, you can intergrate the two, we knocked up a guide.

Its pretty simple, but works very well.

Sonassi at January 27th, 2010 around 2:20 am
07

Sonassi, that’s a lot of work for what can be done in Market Theme saving you running just a single CMS instead of two.

Thanks for the guide for those who need it.

alec at February 7th, 2010 around 8:05 pm