Abandoned Magento Site Design –  True Stories

• In September 2011 a client from Chicago made an initial contact to InteractOne (more of a plea for help) because their Magento site would not interface with their internal networks and would not process payments correctly. An Abandoned Magento Site Design.

• Not long after that, another company from Columbus (Ohio) made a similar contact.  They had paid well over 5-figures for a design to their site (which was a Magento Community Edition deployment) that they had spent close to a year on.  The designer they hired published what seemed to be a nice looking page for them; the problem being they compromised the core code of the CE installation which would hinder future projects and prevent them from upgrading to newer releases all together.

• There was another instance of a company using a non-Magento certified developer that made a nice design, but clearly didn’t understand that a custom wire frame design is possible within Magento- BUT, if it isn’t designed properly that customization would become cost-prohibitive quickly.  The site, as it turned did not get developed and the client spent money that they should not have spent.

Unfortunately there are some (very talented) designers out there that, since they know HTML and have done some eCommerce sites before, feel that they are experienced enough to tackle a Magento installation.  Designing Magento sites is not something a designer can do while training themselves during a project, and what usually happens is 5-figures into the project the designer may concede that they are in over their heads and the client is left shuffling on how to make the best of a bad situation.

Yes, the development costs may be more initially, but in the long run- the rate you would pay a Certified Magento Partner to design your site is invariably the amount of training that is invested in the programmers.  Don’t get caught in the trap of surfing the internet for a cheap or flashy design from a company that hasn’t been properly trained.  Things “may” turn out OK- but our experience tells us that there is a good possibility you’ll end up paying for the site twice. Don’t let your site be abandoned in design