Getting Started with Magento

Before we get started there is some housekeeping we need to cover with you.This will help you understand how the following guides are structured. When to take action, additional notes & the “important” box that we use as sparingly as possible.

To be able to run our website on the internet, we need a domain name. You might already have a spare one that you can use, but if you've never heard of, let alone bought a domain before, we’ll bring you up to speed in this guide. We don’t let you get stuck on choosing a domain name, in this guide we’ll share with you a super-simple tip to get you going easily.

Magento is not a normal website, it’s resource hungry and you’ll need specialised Magento web hosting.In this guide you’ll hear how Matt found SimpleServers by accident and how you can get started with a free month of web-hosting.

In this guide we’ll show you how to join SimpleServers. It’s straight forwards and you can be up & running in a few minutes with your first month free.

After joining SimpleServers you’ll receive a couple of emails from them. We’ll show you which one you need to look out for.Then we’ll show you how to login and do what is supposed to be the hardest thing, install Magento. You’ll have Magento installed within a few clicks and it takes about 2 minutes. It’s really that easy.

It's getting exciting now and in this guide we are going to look at Magento for the first time. Magento can be broken down into three main areas that you will be getting really familiar with and using on a daily basis. We take a look at these in this video.

In this guide we run through the basic settings you need to set in Magento for your business. This is a bit boring but 100% critical that you complete. They are one time only settings so once you have done this you wont have to do them again.

Stepping things up a gear we'll show you us running before we have learnt to walk. In this guide we are running on purpose! We want to show you the cool stuff in Magento especially after that last guide.

In this guide we show you how to set up an FTP account in your Simple Servers admin section. Then we show you how you can use a free programme called FileZilla to transfer files from your desktop into your website in a really easy way which means a 'Degree in Nerd' is not required.

In this guide we show you how you can set up professional looking email addresses. Using your domain name to make your email addresses appear more professional and business like.

We both wanted to say Well Done. You have come really far already and in this short space of time you have actually covered some of the more complicated or 'sticky' points regarding getting started using Magento.

You'll learn how to create your first product within Magento in this guide. And we'l be taking you through the different steps ensuring you know exactly how to create a product manually.

In this guide we show you how you can quickly add Customer Groups into your Magento account to make tracking and managing customer data a whole lot easier. In Magento we can create Customer Groups where we can assign the orders from the different marketplaces.

Magento was designed to power multiple complex websites and out of the box it comes with the ability to create multiple category structures. Which together we can use to our advantage as you will see in this guide.

In this guide we introduce you to Magento Attributes & Attribute Sets and how powerful they are for what we are going to be doing in Magento and the marketplaces.

What you’ll see us suggesting over the next two guides is the combination of all the best practices being used by the largest marketplaces businesses out there today. You’ll be able to structure not only your Magento website to take advantage of these efficiencies, but also prepare your site so that later on when we show you how to import your products in to Magento in bulk, you’ll know which fields you need to be adding & updating.

We’re really starting to add in more features to Magento to help mould Magento into becoming your very own multi-channel system.Now that we've learned what these “Best Practice” attributes are, we’ll show you how to add them to your system and organise them in a fashion that will allow you to quickly create & update products in Magento.

Now we are getting on to the cool stuff! In this guide we are introducing variation products and we are going to look at how we set these up in Magento. Then in the next guide we are going to show you exactly how to do this in our system.

That was enough of the theory, let’s go and see what this looks like in Magento.Feel free to follow us along on this one while we take you through creating variation products in Magento and we'll show you exactly how to do this step by step

In this guide we take you through the theory of creating multi variation products in your Magento system. We have just been through a single variation product and now we are going to go through the theory of multi variation products.

In this guide we show you how to create multi variation products in our system. This guide is really similar to the variation guide, just with an added special attribute. In the previous video we took you through the theory and now in this video above we are going to show you exactly how to set these up in our system.

In it's simplest term Magento Connect is the online catalog for both free and paid for Magento extensions. So in the video above we introduce to you what an extension is and show you the sheer variety of extensions that are available in Magento Connect.

In this guide we show you how to install your first extension into Magento. The extension we are adding we refer to as the 'Grids extension' This is a free extension which adds some fantastic functionality to your product grids and gives you the freedom to do some really cool things.

Congratulations you have completed the Magento Setup course have a pat on the back!