Archive

Leadership in Commerce

Welcome to Leadership in Commerce! I will be focusing on three areas in this space: 1. Ecommerce Optimization for Scalability and Stability: Strategies to strengthen your ecommerce infrastructure, ensuring your platform remains robust during high-demand periods and integrates smoothly with evolving tech. 2. Leadership in Ecommerce: The intersection of leadership

'Senseless Violence'

This morning I woke to the sad, heartbreaking news that another American police officer had been shot and killed. When I heard it was a Richardson police officer, it hit closer to home - I work in Richardson. Then, I dug into the story a bit further and learned it

Triaging Magento 2 GitHub Issues

In my post "Magento 2 in 2017 - How's Things?", I brought up the point that the Magento 2 GitHub repo has averaged 11+ new issues per day in the past 30 days (and that includes a relatively slow period, between Christmas and New Year'

Magento 2 in 2017 - How's Things?

This is a quick, personal post inspired by Karen's recent post, "What Magento Should spend some of that 250M on". Karen's post inspired me to break my entirely-too-long hiatus from blog posting to provide my personal viewpoint on Magento 2 and Magento Inc as

Creatuity Reviews

Building and growing an eCommerce agency has taught me more than I ever imagined it would've. I'm going to be writing more about these lessons and other interesting things I've learned over the years. First up - reviews, testimonials and references. Vetting a potential

Another Example of Great Changes at Magento

So, in the past few months, Magento has moved out of the eBay family and has returned to being a private company. There's been some shakeups internally with some key new hires and the org chart has been shuffled around some. Some people seem to be a bit

Josh Warren vs Joshua Warren

I'm often asked - Josh or Joshua, which do I prefer to be called? And, well, the answer is more complicated than you would think. In casual, in-person conversation - say, we run into each other at a conference - feel free to call me Josh or Joshua,

What I Wish Someone Told Me Before My First Trip To Magento Imagine - 2015 Edition

Are you headed to the Magento Imagine conference in April? If so, you might want to check out what ended up being my most popular article of 2014 - What I Wish Someone Told Me Before My First Trip to Magento Imagine. A majority of that article is still relevant

This Matters: Support Brent's Run For Research

I wanted to take a moment out from my usual banter to call attention to a really amazing member of the Magento community and a charity event they're involved in right now. Brent Peterson is running the Boston Marathon this year as part of Run for Research, an

Choose Your Own Adventure: Freelancer or Founder - Out Now in php[architect] magazine

I'm excited to announce that my article, Choose Your Own Adventure: Freelancer or Founder, appears in the January 2015 issue of php[architect] magazine, which is available online and in print now. I drew on my experiences as a freelancer who found himself rather unexpectedly growing into the

A quick thank you to the Magento community and MageHero.com

I just wanted to take a second to say thanks to everyone out there on Twitter, on MageHero.com and to the Magento community as a whole. I've grown Creatuity very slowly over the years - we don't really have a marketing budget, or marketing department

The Magento 2 Certification Problem

With all the discussion around the technology behind Magento 2, the release schedule and the excitement of how Magento 2 will help transform eCommerce, I have to admit, I hadn't thought at all about certifications for Magento 2 until someone at Magento asked my opinion about it. So

Making Magento go fast by Thijs Feryn @ThijsFeryn at #phpworld

Making Magento go fast by Thijs Feryn @ThijsFeryn at #phpworld Magento can be a little slow, but it's tremendously flexible. Presenting today from the perspective of a hosting company employee who knows a lot about PHP but not a lot about Magento and approached it from a hosting/

What is new in Magento 2 with Tobias Zander @airbone42 at #phpworld

What is new in Magento 2 with Tobias Zander @airbone42 at #phpworld Ever since October 4th of 2013, the Magento 2 team has been pushing weekly updates to GitHub. Magento2 is built on HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, LESS, requirejs. This means that Magento 2 won't support IE8. Layout configuration

phpworld keynote: Turning Your Code into a Company: The Parts They Don't Tell You by Luke Stokes

Turning Your Code into a Company: The Parts They Don't Tell You by Luke Stokes - @lukestokes. Founder, CTO of Foxycart. Founded in 2007. Goal was to provide income for his growing family. Starting a company is hard - it took 4 years of working full-time and then

php[world] opening remarks

Eli is opening up php[world] with the opening remarks. Welcome to the first PHP[WORLD]! The goal is to bring the entire PHP community together. Get out there and talk to people from other platforms/communities that are here today. Twitter hashtag is #phpworld WiFi is Sheraton_Conference, user:

Seeking the Magento Community's Center of Gravity Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk

This Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk is "Seeking the Magento Community's Center of Gravity" with Kurt Theobald. Community events help us maintain a voice as a community driven ecosystem, so events like Meet Magento are important. Magento really took off with the small and medium

Saving time and money with Vagrant - Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk

This is the Meet Magento New York 2014 talk "Saving time and money with Vagrant" with Tim Broder. Vagrant lets you QA server configurations for your Magento site just like you do your code. Vagrant lets you setup a dev environment for a new project in 5-6 commands

Magento Security and Us Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk

This Meet Magento New York 2014 tech track presentation is Magento Security and Us by Lee Saferite. Limit your attack surface - don't open unnecessary ports, and ideally use a server in a different subnet from your web server to provide SSH access into your site. External log

Beyond the Blinders: Unseen Opportunities in SEO Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk

This Meet Magento New York 2014 talk is "Beyond the Blinders: Unseen Opportunities in SEO" by Seth Dotterer. Search has fundamentally changed how consumers consume and how marketers market. The average US adult now spends half their time online. Online is pulling attention span from TV, radio and

Persuasive E-Commerce Meet Magento New York Keynote

This keynote from Meet Magento New York 2014 is "Persuasive E-Commerce" by Guido Jansen. Online merchants have a big problem because online conversion rates are very low versus offline. Offline - 20-25% conversion rate; online is 2-10% conversion rate. Online sales don't have the same level

Ben Marks Update at Meet Magento New York 2014

This keynote from Meet Magento New York 2014 about the state of Ben's role as Magento evangelist after 6 months on the job, and discussing the Magento community as a whole. Ben is discussing Intent vs Reality of his first 6 months on the job at Magento. Advisory

Magento: A Journey Down the Open Road Meet Magento New York 14 Talk

This talk is "Magento: A Journey Down the Open Road", a Meet Magento New York 14 Talk by Yoav Kutner. It was surprising to see how many people were using Magento for non-eCommerce purposes. Based on this experience, OroCRM was written with a layer between the app and

Working with Magento Extension Providers at Meet Magento New York 14

This talk is from Karen Baker from Web Shop Apps, entitled "Working with Magento Extension Providers". Badly written extensions have literally caused eCommerce businesses to fail. The Magento ecosystem consists of Magento itself, design agencies, individual developers, technology partners. There are several types of extension providers: 1. Domain

Hacking Magento: Creating an HTML5 Canvas Customizer on Magento Bundles - Meet Magento New York 14 Talk

This Meet Magento New York 2014 talk is Hacking Magento: Creating an HTML5 Canvas Customizer on Magento Bundles by Philip Jackson. When consumers control the features of a product, they have control over the process. Customization vs personalization: customization is unique, has unlimited choice, is made to order. Longer turnaround,

Varnish Cache and its usage in the real world Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk

This talk at Meet Magento New York 2014 is Varnish Cache and its usage in the real world by Ivan Chepurnyi. Varnish is a way to accelerate sites such as Magento websites by caching as much content as possible. Varnish is controlled by VCL - the Varnish configuration language. vcl_

Two Approaches to Responsive Web Design: Pure and Hybrid - Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk

This Meet Magento New York 2014 talk is Brendan Falkowski's "Two Approaches to Responsive Design" presentation. Adaptive vs responsive - adaptive design serves a specific size; you basically have 2 sizes - small screen and large screen. It doesn't support both tablet and mobile

IRCE Workshop: Two Approaches to Responsive Web Design: Pure and Hybrid

This is IRCE workshop Two Approaches to Responsive Web Design: Pure and Hybrid, presented by Brendan Falkowski, Founder - Gravity Department. You can find Brendan on Twitter as @Falkowski. There's a lot of ways to talk about responsive design, but from a frontend aspect, responsive web design is:

IRCE Workshop: Smarter Bidding Boosts an E-Retailer's Returns from a New Google Ad Format

This is IRCE workshop Smarter Bidding Boosts an E-Retailer's Returns from a New Google Ad Format, presented by Tom Novellino, CEO - Metaverse Corp. and Dave Schwartz, General Manager, Product Ads - DataPop This session is about Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs), which are being converted from PLAs

IRCE Workshop: Rounding up the Whole Story: Google's Search Tweaks

This IRCE workshop is Rounding up the Whole Story: Google's Search Tweaks presented by Jeff MacGurn, Senior Vice President, Earned Media Services - Covario and Seth Dotterer, Vice President, Marketing & Product - Conductor Inc. If you're out of the search marketing world for a year,

IRCE Workshop: Growing a Paid Search Program Year after Year

This IRCE workshop is Growing a Paid Search Program Year after Year, presented by Jim O'Brien, Chief Marketing Officer, ThinkGeek and George Michie, Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Scientist - RKG. A personal aside - I'm a huge Thinkgeek fan, and even have a sticker of their

IRCE Workshop: Boost Conversion without a Social Cast of Thousands

This is the IRCE workshop Boost Conversion without a Social Cast of Thousands, presented by Michael Lee, Senior Vice President, General Manager - Epsilon, Susan Kim, Chief Executive Officer, Plum District and Jai Rawat, Chief Executive Officer, Founder - ShopSocially. Leveraging social media can be challenging, and measuring ROI can

IRCE Workshop: 10 Most Important Components your Social Presence Needs

This IRCE workshop is 10 Most Important Components your Social Presence Needs, presented by Sarah Evans, Owner - Sevans Strategy. Great content makes people want to share, care or swear. What does great content look like? Your readers will tell you. 80% of people will read your headlines, but only

IRCE Workshop: A Year Later: The Impact of Enhanced Campaigns

This is the IRCE workshop A Year Later: The Impact of Enhanced Campaigns, presented by Adam Garcia, Director, E-Commerce Marketing - The Walgreen Co. and Aaron Goldman, Chief Marketing Officer - Kenshoo. This session is basically about the change Google made last year that no longer allows you to exclude

IRCE Session: Neuromarketing: Where Science Meets the Visuals of Web Design

This IRCE session is Neuromarketing: Where Science Meets the Visuals of Web Design, presented by Kurtis Morrison, Vice President, Client Services - EyeQuant and Jered Goodyear, Manager, E-Commerce & Digital Marketing - Epson. You have more that one brain - sort of. Many things become effortless and automatic - system

IRCE Session: Conversion Drivers: Go Beyond the Like to Make Social Work for Retail

This is IRCE session Conversion Drivers: Go Beyond the Like to Make Social Work for Retail, presented by Nicolas Franchet, Head of Retail, E-Commerce, Global Vertical Marketing - Facebook and David Atchinson, Senior Vice President, Marketing - Zulily. Facebook is building systems to help brands drive discovery, personalization and ROI

IRCE Session: Beat the Competition by Personalizing Content and Communication

This IRCE session is Beat the Competition by Personalizing Content and Communication, presented by Amy Larson, Vice President, Digital - The Children's Place and Rama Ramakrishnan, Founder & CEO - CQuotient. Children's Place goal is to provide a great product at a great value with great

IRCE Session: Make the Most of Your Traffic: Maximizing Conversion

This is the IRCE session Make the Most of Your Traffic: Maximizing Conversion, presented by Karen Van Ert, Director, E-Business Consulting - Zeon Solutions and Lauren Wright, Marketing and Merchandising Manager - Cooper Safety Supply. Research your current data - Google Analytics, etc., then develop some ideas of what you

IRCE Session: How the Video Experience is Transforming the Way People Shop

This is the IRCE Featured Address, How the Video Experience is Transforming the Way People Shop, presented by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Chairman & Founder - Joyus.Joyus made their default experience shop by video instead of shop by product. 78% of consumers watch at least one online video per a

IRCE Keynote: Connecting with Consumers by Giving Them What They Want

This is the IRCE keynote, Connecting with Consumers by Giving Them What They Want, presented by Niraj Shah, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder - Wayfair.com. Wayfair is #45 in the Internet Retailer Top 500. Listen to shoppers to decide what to do next. Be customer-service focused. Enable customers to

IRCE Session: Building on Strengths: Why Data Should Change Your Marketing Plan Every Quarter

This IRCE session is Building on Strengths: Why Data Should Change Your Marketing Plan Every Quarter, presented by Ryan Bonifacino, Vice President, Digital Strategy - Alex and Ani. Foundation for success - centralize digital under one department. eCommerce + Analytics tie into digital marketing and social media, and all three should

IRCE Session Recruiting Bloggers as Affiliates: Why—and How

This is IRCE session Recruiting Bloggers as Affiliates: Why—and How, presented by Carolyn Kmet, Chief Marketing Officer - All Inclusive Marketing and Carrie Rocha, Blogger - Pocketyourdollars.com. Bloggers have an established, third-party credibility with loyal, engaged audiences with creative positioning extending brand reach. Keep in mind FTC rules

IRCE Session: Lessons from the Internet Retailer Second 500

This IRCE session is Lessons from the Internet Retailer Second 500, presented by Stefany Zaroban, Associate Director, Research - Internet Retailer. There's lots of lessons we can learn from the Internet Retailer Second 500 - the 500-1000 largest eCommerce sites. The Internet Retailer Second 500 includes retailers from

How to Compete as a Niche in Today's Mass Market

This is IRCE session How to Compete as a Niche in Today's Mass Market, presented by Shelley Nandkeoylar, Chief Executive Officer, President, Founder - The Ivory Company.Niche brands should view their role as curators - you won't be the cheapest, you won't have

IRCE Session: Five Hot New Technology Developments

This is the IRCE Session: Five Hot New Technology Developments from the technology workshop. Presented by Aaron Mandelbaum, Howard Blumenthal, Marta Dalton, Ross Higgins and Ryan West. Please forgive any typos - my Macbook battery is drained and my external battery pack for it apparently has failed, so I'

IRCE Session: Harnessing Video to Boost SEO

This IRCE session is from the Video workshops, and is entitled Harnessing Video to Boost SEO, presented by Stephan Spencer, Co-Author - The Art of SEO and Jamie Salvatori, Owner - Vat19. SEO requires good content. Your videos need to be good, first and foremost. Make them interesting and engaging

IRCE Session: Video Without Breaking the Bank: Creating Professional Videos on an Amateur's Budget

This session is from IRCE's Video workshops. It's entitled Video Without Breaking the Bank: Creating Professional Videos on an Amateur's Budget. Presented by Angie Seaman, E-Commerce Manager - Marbles: The Brain Store. Marbles has a lot of products that are unique but hard to

IRCE Session: Navigating Choice: Platform Selection & Implementation

This session is Navigating Choice: Platform Selection & Implementation, a session of the IRCE tech workshop. The presenters are  Kim Hansen, Senior Vice President, Marketing, E-Commerce - Winston Brands, Nicole Tolbert, E-Commerce Manager - HUE.com, Kerry Martin, Vice President, Senior Consultant - FitForCommerce and Joe Warfield, Technology Director -

IRCE Session: Conquer the Pain Points and Capture the ROI of Product Information Management Systems

This IRCE session is Conquer the Pain Points and Capture the ROI of Product Information Management Systems, presented by Cynthia Rodgers Maignan, Director, E-Commerce Content Strategy, Management - Office Depot and Ryan Lee, Manager, Technology - Gorjana Griffin. Companies that aren't using a product information management system will

IRCE Session: Get Smart: A Roadmap for Sound Technology Investments

Welcome to my first live blog of IRCE. Today is a workshop day, and I'll be covering some of the eCommerce technology workshop and the video workshop. This session is the first session of the technology workshop track: Get Smart: A Roadmap for Sound Technology Investments, presented by

Magento Imagine Slides, Sessions and Reactions

I plan to post all of the slides, sessions and reactions to Magento Imagine that I come across in this article - I'll update this article as I find more. If you presented at Magento Imagine, please tweet a link to your slides with the #MagentoImagine hashtag and

Wednesday Afternoon General Session Magento Imagine 2014

Well, it's that time again - time to say goodbye to Magento Imagine. With a lot of excitement in the air, the attendees of Imagine have gathered again in The Joint at the Hard Rock for the final general session of Magento Imagine. Announcing winners of the giveaways,

Inbound Marketing for eCommerce - Magento Imagine 2014 Breakout session

This session is Inbound Marketing for eCommerce: Double Down on Content to Create a Scalable Customer Acquisition Strategy with Ethan Giffin, Founder & CEO, Groove and Michael Sapera, CFO & Director of IT, Perlis Inc. Why focus on content? Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram - 79% of online shoppers spend

Magento 2 Service Layer Breakout Session Magento Imagine 2014

This session is Magento 2 Service Layer: A Deep Dive into Customer Service presented by Chris O’Toole a Software Engineer at Magento. Chuck Choukalos, a product manager at Magento responsible for the service layer, is introducing the overall idea of the service layer. The service layer streamlines customizations to

Wednesday Morning Keynote/General Session Magento Imagine 2014

With a lot of groggy faces in the room after last night's legendary Imagine party, the general session started off with a bang - literally! A Native American dance group, complete with pounding drums snapping everyone awake. Jamie Clarke joined the stage, and shot Magento t-shirts containing free

How Behavioral Economics of Gifting Impacts Commerce Magento Imagine 2014 Session

This session is titled The Gifter’s Dilemma: How Behavioral Economics of Gifting Impacts Commerce and is presented by Kristen Berman, Co-Founder, Irrational Labs and Roy Erez, Co-Founder & CEO, Loop Commerce. Buying gifts is challenging - is it the right style? Size? Will they like it? Is it the

Responsive Evolution Breakout Session Magento Imagine 2014

This session is Brendan Falkowski's Responsive Evolution: Refining Priorities in Multi-Device Frontend Strategy presentation. Brendan will post slides for the presentation soon, and he moves fast, so I won't cover everything here. Multi-device commerce keeps changing and becoming more important. Users are switching from device to

Engaging Customers & Sustaining Success Magento Imagine 2014 Session

This breakout session is titled Standing Out From the Crowd: Innovative Approaches to Engaging Customers & Sustaining Success and features: * Jonathan Hiltser, Head of IT, Frank & Oak * Paul Johnson, Sr. Product Manager, Peet’s Coffee * Paul Kasinski, CIO, Brighton Collectibles * Gorden Nugent, VP of eCommerce, Harvey Norman * Matthew Plant,

What Happens in the Lab, Stays in the Lab User Research Imagine 2014 Session

This session is titled What Happens in the Lab, Stays in the Lab: 10 Secrets to User Research, presented by 2 user research leads from eBay Enterprise: Elizabeth Zietlow and Palak Desai. eBay Enterprise has two eye-tracking labs and one mobile/tablet testing lab for user research. Will discuss why

Tuesday Morning Keynote Magento Imagine 2014

This year's theme at Imagine is Transform - transformation in commerce. Powering brands of all sizes - not just large brands - to connect to their customers and compete on a level playing field. Roy Rubin's keynote is covering 4 types of transformation - industry, business,

eBay Inc. Merchant Solutions Forum at Imagine 2014

Responding to requests at Imagine 2013 for eBay to give solution partners better tools to provide to our clients, eBay held a forum this morning at Magento Imagine to introduce a number of eBay and PayPal leaders to the solution partner community and outline new tools, techniques and support offerings

My path as an eCommerce merchant-support monkey-developer-executive-partner

This article was inspired by this response from Piotr: https://twitter.com/piotrekkaminski/status/461551105554386944 For some reason, the 'what about regular [...] devs' part struck a nerve and made me realize that many people aren't aware of my varied background in eCommerce and even with Magento.

What I Wish Someone Told Me Before My First Trip to Magento Imagine

Twitter is filled with people posting Magento Imagine 'survival guides' that read more like 'How to Survive Spring Break in Cozumel' than a guide to attending a professional conference. So, since those guides cover the basics of how to avoid passing out (get lots of rest

Suggestions for an Unofficial Magento Discussion Site?

Last week, Brendan Falkowski, Piotr Kaminski and I engaged in a high-speed friendly discussion on Twitter about the recent Magento Connect purge of extensions and how the metrics used by Magento to purge 'low quality' and 'unsupported' extensions may not have been the best metrics to

Magento Community Edition Hosted Solution

There was a flurry of activity in the Magento Community today on Twitter, Reddit and StackOverflow as for about 4-5 hours, the Magento Community Edition download page - http://www.magentocommerce.com/download - was redirecting all users to a new page on Magento's site entitled 'Magento

How I Work: Arranging Your Desk for Creative Productivity

A couple of weeks ago, a happy coincidence made me realize I hadn't rearranged my desk setup since we moved into our current offices at Creatuity almost two years ago - I read a brief article in Inc. that mentioned that people are more creative and less stressed

How I Hire: Questions & Screening

Kalen recently asked on Twitter for tips on hiring frontend developers: https://twitter.com/kalenjordan/status/453902785948311553 Many people responded with great advice - giving candidates a test project was a frequent answer, and a great step to take. However, even before you assign a test project, I think it&

Returning to my Geeky Roots in the Magento Community

Over the years as I've grown Creatuity from a single developer (myself) to a company employing over 25 people, my average day has changed quite a bit. Originally, I did everything - sales, billing and all of the development work. With my background in PHP development (I'

Acknowledging The One Thing Standing Between You and Your Goals: Fear

Fear, not a lack of time, money or opportunities, prevents us from reaching our goals. The first step to overcoming this is simply to acknowledge our fear. It's been an interesting week, throughout which a random set of coincidences has led me to realize that the biggest thing

Cooking and Reaching Your Goals

Don’t talk about it, be about it Seeking Fulfillment Beyond Work After spending entirely too many years focused on launching and growing Creatuity to the exclusion of almost everything else in my life, I recently decided to sit down and identify what I enjoyed in life and seeing and

The Death of Books

Long live books! Scribd - the new Netflix of Books As you may have heard, today Scribd announced an all-you-can-read eBook subscription plan. However, there are some notable limitations to this $8.99 per month program - thus far it only includes 1 of the 5 major US book publishers,

Dr Blog or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love New Topics

My Blog This Year or: A Lesson in How Not to Succeed as a Writer There’s a few secrets to success as a writter or especially a blogger, such as: post a consistent number of posts over time, write about topics that are timely, popular and you’re passionate

Magento URL Key Optimizer Userscript

Do you duplicate products in the Magento admin interface? If so, you've noticed that Magento doesn't change the 'URL Key' field by default, which means every time you duplicate a product, you have to edit this field manually. If duplicating products is the main

Is your iMac locking up, freezing or beach balling?

Some time ago, I added a Crucial m4 256GB SSD to my iMac. The performance boost was even better than I expected - the iMac now writes data about 2.5 times faster than the stock hard drive, and it reads data over 5 times faster - considering how much

Getting an SBA Loan for Your Small Business: Part I

I wrote this two-part article series for the oDesk blog, where it originally appeared. Growing a small business, even with the amazing tools available to the modern business owner, can be a challenge. One of the biggest challenges is often finding the time and money to power that growth. There

Truly Lean Startups Use Online Contract Developers

My first guest column for oDesk  is now live; they've been kind enough to give me permission to cross-post it here on my site as well. Let me know what you think!What do Dropbox, Intuit and HP have in common? Aside from being tremendously successful tech firms,

Spotify Killed the Radio Star

I love music - even when I was young, I almost always had headphones on and have over the years developed an interest in almost every genre of music out there. So, when Spotify, a music streaming website, finally made it to the US, I signed up right away! Spotify

Disappearing Weeks

We've all had weeks that went by in a flash, where you sit down at the end of the week and say "what just happened?" and feel like achieved little, if anything, of value - it's like the entire week just disappeared. A recent