Working with Magento Themes: Tips for Work-Flow Efficiency

Anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with web design probably knows how important a theme is for their website. A theme has largely two types of users: the audience-type user who sees the theme from the aesthetical and usability perspective; and the creator-type who goes through an additional layer of the theme experience by taking part in building the Magento themes.

For the audience-type user, a store experienced is defined by the store’s capability to fulfill his or her tactical and emotional demands. But the second user who must fill the creator role might be looking more for efficiency—i.e., the ability to complete a set of developmental tasks which will determine the store experience.

Since designers already have the graphical end of things covered, we’ve compiled a list of tips that will help you with maximizing your work-flow efficiency in Magento.

1. Maximum Customization Power

Magento allows you to update the look and feel of your store in the category and product level, which gives you more power to market and promote the product (in addition to granting you a store with endlessly unique design).

Have you ever imagined presenting each product in its own customized product info page? Magento lets you do just that, by providing you a qucik way to customize your product presentation in a per-product and per-category basis

2. Multiple Magento Themes

Magento allows you to load multiple themes at once, allowing you to swap between a default store design and temporary event/season-specific ones—all at the command of a few key strokes.

3. Uninterrupted Workflow

Thanks to the help of Magento’s fully object-oriented programming, all modules are immediately accessible via template tags from any template files. And because Magento comes feature-rich straight out of the box, you’ll never again have to be dependent on a programmer to finish all the simplest tasks for you.

Magento also thrives on an extensive network of knowledgeable community members that include the official Magento team, so you’ll never have to think twice about where to go for guidance once you need it.

4. Minimize Debugging Time

Have you ever wasted precious hours looking for the unclosed markup scrutinized by your validator?

The validator may tell you what’s wrong, but it never seems to be able to tell you what’s happening.

Magento’s modular backend brings with it a modular template system that minimizes the amount of (X)HTML you need to handle at once. That means less fuss for you so that you could focus on the truly important things in life.