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The Magento Strikes Back

After walking you through adding CMS pages in my first post – Magento: First Class – I thought I’d walk you through importing attributes into Magento.

Recently, we’ve been working on a few Magento sites where the client already has an existing e-commerce site. Rather than making the client spend time setting up all the attributes that are required for the products, we can build an import script to easily import the attributes from the existing site.

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A .NET CMS comparison and review

Our .NET development team have worked with quite a few CMS platforms over the past years and it seems like a new one is released each month, but recently there seems to be a few that are stealing the limelight and offering that little bit more than the others.

In this article I’m going to take a look at some of the top CMS platforms we’re working with, and the pros and cons they all bring.

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Magento: Origins

We’ve worked with Magento quite a bit in the past and created some top-notch websites for our clients. The developments we’ve done have mainly been new site builds, meaning we can start from a fresh install and give the admin backend straight to the client, and familiarise them with it really quickly.

Recently, we’ve been working with a couple of existing e-commerce sites that need to be migrated to Magento, so we’ve started putting together some scripts to automate importing categories, product information, attributes, options, cms page etc. I thought I’d put together a series of posts that go into a bit more detail about each of these scripts.

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Applying the Pareto principle to software testing

It’s interesting to look at how much we copy learn from nature, duplicate implement others work, and sometimes overlook and ignore fantastic findings. Whilst producing software, we come across the classic dilemma of how much and how long to design, create and test the functionalities.

The solution is found in a completely different world -  the world of economics – in the principle of 80-20 by Italian economist Vilfrodo Pareto.

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Grabbing SEOmoz Metrics with F#

I’m regularly tasked with quickly getting some statistics about a website, and being the geeky developer I am – I tend to use my F# scripts to gather this data. This time, I’m going to show you how you can use a similar method to my previous post ‘Grabbing Page Titles with F#‘ to grab metrics from SEOmoz.

To try out this code, you should already have an idea what F# is and how it works. If not, check out the F# Developer Center on MSDN.

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The only way forward for web development and SEO

The approach of many companies is to separate web development and SEO between two specialised agencies, sometimes even going somewhere different for the design; but what we’ve found here at Branded3, is that this method is deeply ineffective.

We’ve pioneered an approach here which integrates all aspects of web development; and its results speak for themselves. In this post I’m going to explain why the traditional method of so many is flawed, and why an integrated agency can produce seamless, effective results.

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C# Windows Services – Creating an MSI Installer

I’ve been working on a Windows Service for one of our projects recently and came to what I’m sure others have encountered and that is creating the installer without the need for command prompt.

I’ve been using Visual Studio 2008 to develop the project and as you may or may not know you need to install a windows service in order to test it, you cannot debug and test direct from VS. Microsoft have nicely packaged InstallUtil.exe which can be used from the VS command prompt to install your service and get it up and running.

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