We are working on 6 more projects from scratch at the moment and look forward to launching these new magento development sites soon.

Rocket Web Poland
ul. Tęczowa 57
53-601 Wrocław
Poland

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Now where developers spend 80% of their time implementing and 20% innovating, x.commerce seeks to flip this so that developers can spend 80% of their time innovating.

It is an open fabric and standard set that will allow any developer to follow a standard and bring their ideas to market.  It’s a place for merchants to extend their business with less risk than before since developers must adhere to some standards.

Please help us design this extension by answering a few questions about some problems you’re seeing now in search:

Recently a new client needed both hosting and control over the hosting account.  This is not something we provide.  Our at cost hosting does not allow any client access, it’s 100% managed by us alone.  Our client did some research and came across MageMojo.  The price is equal to my at cost hosting.  There have been a couple minor issues, but for the price they are hard to beat.  When my client’s site was setup, their DNS setup was broken.  We made some changes in the cPanel gui to later find out that changes need to manually be implemented via a support ticket.  This labor day holiday there was a mistake made at UPS or perhaps an attack to their dns systems that had any website doing real time lookups against UPS failing because it could not resolve the server.  This issue could be fixed at the hosting company.  Of the 4 different systems I monitor, MageMojo was the last to pickup on the issue.  Or perhaps they didn’t catch it and just picked up on the fix from UPS.  This issue was fixed at Rackspace about 8 hours before MageMojo for example.

Maybe once per year there will be an issue that one of the top tier hosting companies will solve quicker than MageMojo.  You also may get slightly quicker support with a top tier company.  Overall I’m recommending MageMojo for new Magento sites, particularly if you do not have special hosting requirements.

• When a specific format for data is expected, give an example.  In this case greyed out and invisible when clicked on.
• Use country selection to populate list of states.
• Use zip / postal code to populate City and State.
• This is the perfect place for a sales newsletter signup.

We made 3 changes to the search process and have seen vast improvements in search quality.  The first and second changes were quick.  We disabled the Mysql stop words file and allowed mysql to use 3 character words in its full test index.  This means that words like her, the, etc will actually be searched and not dropped.  In analyzing searches we didn’t see many improper uses of articles so it seemed safe to just allow all words to be searched.  We added these two lines to our my.cnf file:

ft_min_word_len = 3
ft_stopword_file = ""

The next change was to allow the product name to have greater weight than the rest of the product data.  We changed the default query to something like this:

SELECT ... other non-full-text-cols
MATCH (product_title) AGAINST ('lean body for her') AS rel1,
MATCH (content) AGAINST ('lean body for her') AS rel2
FROM table
WHERE MATCH (product_title,content) AGAINST ('lean body for her')
ORDER BY (rel1*1.5)+(rel2)

We have not noticed performance issues in dev but performance is a concern as we add the order by to the query.  With this change we’ve gone from having products where words and phrases are in titles come right to the top of the results rather than being buried.  We’re also taking full advantage of the main index so that results that would normally be first appear after the first couple product title matches.  This appears to be a vastly improved search.  We are about to launch this and I look forward to seeing an improvement in conversions.

Update 9/24/11 … the launch has been good.  No problems with performance.  Search results appear much more relevant.  Checkout Improving Magento Search – Part 2 and give us your thoughts about what else we can put into a Magento search module.

• Stay up to date with your shopping software patches and upgrades.
• Host your site with a reputable host, preferably one that offers PCI compliant hosting.  This will be more expensive but should provide a good foundation of protection.  At least have every port possible closed in a firewall and some assurance that the server stays up to date.
• Have a way of tracking what code is on your website.  This could be as simple as maintaining a master folder of code on your local computer and replacing what’s on the production website periodically.
• If you ever have to give your ftp or ssh account to someone, change the password.  You should not have anyone but you or someone currently working for you know how to put files on your live website.  Ideally setup a development area if you hire someone you do not know well.