If you are reading this article you are either a website owner or a web designer training yourself to be an expert magento designer. There are two perspective mentioned in this article in regards to magento design
1. Tips for Magento designer
2. Tips for Website Owner’s on how to searching for a professional magento website designer.
For Web designers aspiring to be Expert Magento designers
There are a lot of Magento designers out there how can you outshine them?
Magento Design and Magento theming tips:
* Read the Design Guide. Each chapter acts as a prelude to the next, so it necessary not to skip pages in between and follow along with the documentation in the order it is written.
* Look at the recently launched Screen casts Inorder to get a more graphic visual of the Design guide.
* To figure out which template file to edit: turn on “Template Path Hints” through System > Configuration > Advanced > Developer > Debug > Template Path Hints = ON.
This option is only visible if you change the “Current Configuration Scope” dropdown to a website (like “Main Website”) rather than “Default Config”.
* To switch to a theme (such as “Modern”), after downloading it in Magento Connect Manager, go to System > Design and then click “Add Design Change”.
* There are nine cascading style sheets, 25 XML files, and more than 40 PHTML templates. Inorder to find the tool, you'll need to log in to the Magento administration panel.
o Then navigate to System > Configuration. Look at drop-down menu at the top of the left navigation on the configurations page.
o It should read "Current Configuration Scope." Incase of one or more one store operating from the Magento back-end, you'll need to select the store from the drop-down menu.
o The nest step would be at the bottom of left-hand navigation, select "Developer." Now Under the "Debug" section of the developer s page you should see an option for "Template Path Hints."
o Change this option to "Yes" next save by clicking the "Save Config" button in the upper-right hand side of the page. On reloading the home page of your Magento store you will get several red tags and boxes these tags show which PHTML template is being used for each section of the page.
o Now that you’ve located the template and XML files that underlie the page, we can make many changes or even copy code from one page and apply it to another.
* Don’t desert your 404 page spice it up with some surprise , use a category listing page or a tag line to distract customer from 404 page.
1. Tips for Magento designer
2. Tips for Website Owner’s on how to searching for a professional magento website designer.
For Web designers aspiring to be Expert Magento designers
There are a lot of Magento designers out there how can you outshine them?
Magento Design and Magento theming tips:
* Read the Design Guide. Each chapter acts as a prelude to the next, so it necessary not to skip pages in between and follow along with the documentation in the order it is written.
* Look at the recently launched Screen casts Inorder to get a more graphic visual of the Design guide.
* To figure out which template file to edit: turn on “Template Path Hints” through System > Configuration > Advanced > Developer > Debug > Template Path Hints = ON.
This option is only visible if you change the “Current Configuration Scope” dropdown to a website (like “Main Website”) rather than “Default Config”.
* To switch to a theme (such as “Modern”), after downloading it in Magento Connect Manager, go to System > Design and then click “Add Design Change”.
* There are nine cascading style sheets, 25 XML files, and more than 40 PHTML templates. Inorder to find the tool, you'll need to log in to the Magento administration panel.
o Then navigate to System > Configuration. Look at drop-down menu at the top of the left navigation on the configurations page.
o It should read "Current Configuration Scope." Incase of one or more one store operating from the Magento back-end, you'll need to select the store from the drop-down menu.
o The nest step would be at the bottom of left-hand navigation, select "Developer." Now Under the "Debug" section of the developer s page you should see an option for "Template Path Hints."
o Change this option to "Yes" next save by clicking the "Save Config" button in the upper-right hand side of the page. On reloading the home page of your Magento store you will get several red tags and boxes these tags show which PHTML template is being used for each section of the page.
o Now that you’ve located the template and XML files that underlie the page, we can make many changes or even copy code from one page and apply it to another.
* Don’t desert your 404 page spice it up with some surprise , use a category listing page or a tag line to distract customer from 404 page.