Yellow Satsuma Blog

Apache Recompile + SOAP

poodle — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:28:50 +0000

We have just recompiled Apache on one of our web servers to include the SOAP service so we can provide further administration systems to our magento based websites.

its been a while

poodle — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:26:03 +0000

Its been a while but we have been busy so here is a little update of our recent activity.

Firstly we have completed several client websites

Tree4You, A magento ecommerce website with custom product photography and a unique affiliates system.
Ichabod Headless, A custom PHP build website for an anqiques collective in oxfordshire.
Cristobal, Custom PHP SQL website with administration area for a company in london.
Autocharge UK, A website for a company supplying starter motors and alternators.

You can see more details on all the above on our Client Portfolio

We also have several new and exciting website in the pipeline including one for a new movie which we are really looking forward to getting our teeth stuck into.

Besides all this website work we have also been doing extensive CAD work in the field of architectural masonry design. This has kept us busy between websites designing stonework for the likes of Barratt Homes and other construction companies. While this is not a service we widely advertise on our website we can offer many aspects of computer aided design services so please contact us with your requirements.

Wax Daddy, the new beginning.

poodle — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:11:58 +0000

Some time ago we launched Wax Daddy into the world of on-line sales. A full magento store with all the bells and whistles and a few extras as well. Well after some time of on-line trading and learning about the customer requirements we have just launched Wax Daddy’s second incarnation of their on-line store. This site was again built in Magento from scratch with a full fresh and new interface even more bells and whistles and now features a wordpress powered blog system to allow them to keep their visitors up to date with the goings on in the car world and make it easier to provide guides , tips and tricks on the car cleaning products.

Take a look now. www.waxdaddy.co.uk and see what its all about.

Server optimization

poodle — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:47:32 +0000

We spent a great deal of time this weekend performing some further optimization across our servers. This has considerably increased the number of visitors our servers can handle at any one time and has reduced website loading times across the board but especially with our larger Magento built on-line stores.

We have further upgrades and speed increases planned and will notify when these changes occur.

Yellow Satsuma re-launched website

poodle — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:12:30 +0000

Here at Yellow Satsuma we like to keep changing updating and revitalizing. So we have launched our new updated website for all to see. Its bigger brighter and helps keep you more up to date with our activities thanks to its new features.

We have now added our blog, RSS feeds, it connects to our twitter and facebook groups so no matter where you are you can keep up to date with the latest and greatest from Yellow Satsuma.

Based in Lancashire Yellow Satsuma is a small yet busy webdesign and development company specialising in small to medium size business startups and ecommerce with the help of Magento and other shopping sytems. No matter your web requirements we can help.

Dooleys Online Store, Reinvented

poodle — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:42:05 +0000

Today the last day of 2010 marks the launch of the new Dooleys Furniture website. For those of you who have not visited this site before you can do so at http://www.dooleysfurniture.com. Long established as an online retailer of high quality furniture it was decided that the older OSCommerce powered website was outdated and its limitations would not see them into the future. As a result of this a complete new store was built from the ground up using Magento as its base with addon modules and custom modules built around a completely unique custom built design template. This new magento site will help Dooleys Furniture interact with customers better, market and promote new products better, offer sales incentives and grow into 2011.

Wax Daddy hits Ebay

poodle — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 07:36:39 +0000

As you may or may not know the online car care retailer Wax Daddy is setup, maintained and run by Yellow Satsuma. Running our own online store gives us an insight into the needs of our clients and gives us a testing bed for future development of other clients websites.

Until now Wax Daddy was run from a Magento store only but after a suggestion from a friend and some analysis of the competition and of course our continuing desire to try things new we decided to give eBay a go.

Creating eBay listings into our just opened eBay shop is a time consuming process so we immediately knew we wanted some kind of automated process. We had looked at turbo lister previously but its still a slow alternative not to mention your still repeating the input of data from the online store. We therefore decided some kind of eBay and magento integration would be the best course of action.

We set up our eBay store and made an example item using our HTML skills to have it reflect our current site design, the eBay store design tools are not the most friendly but we made something we were reasonably happy with. Then for the integration.

For the Magento eBay integration we first turned to magento connect, this is a place where all the communities Magento modules can be found. We discovered a small number of modules for doing this task, two of them looks like the ideal for us. We settles on m2e (we assume that stands for magento to ebay) and although some investment was required for this module (commercial non free) we decided it was worth trying out if at the very least we learned something for future and existing clients.

Installation of the module was smooth, it installed without hitch. We received our license key and began configuration. Initially of course we chose to use sandbox. Ebay sandbox is basically a replication of the ebay website for developing and testing on. We had some problems with ebay sandbox which basically didnt allow us to create a seller account in the sandbox environment, this wasnt because of our module as far as we could tell but an issue with the ebay sandbox itself. Because of this issue we never fully got to test the module before taking it to a life production environment but after some configuration changes we were confident it would perform correctly.

What it did for us. Well quite simply put it worked, we could now add any of our products from our Magento site either singular or in bulk to eBay items either as auctions or as buy now items. We could define which category they landed in, which store category they landed in, the postage prices it was all available and configurable for us. It was also noted that the eBay items were configured as per your stores stock, so if you had 3 of an item in stock on your site it would set the available qty to 3 on eBay. Once an item is sold on eBay the sale is imported into magento for processing in the usual way so your reports and data is always up to date. Also if an item is sold on eBay its taken out of stock from magento and vice versa an item sold on magento is taken out of stock on your eBay item. Very handy indeed.

Its still early days for us with this system and we hope it will continue to prove useful and reliable should this be otherwise we will be sure to update you on the problems we encounter.

PHP news blogs & tweets

poodle — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 15:43:44 +0000

We have now developed the php code for our new soon to be released website which shows our latest tweets from twitter, blog posts and news items on the footer of our site. This should help to keep our visitors excited and up to date with whats happening in the digitally converse world of Yellow Satsuma.

Optimus Prime

poodle — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:00:08 +0000

We spent several hours late Friday night re optimizing one of our Magneto servers and some of our clients Magneto websites. This was a multi phase operation with a lot of testing to try and establish the best way to reduce first view load times across several pages.

We were able to achieve massive increase on some of our clients sites over 50% increases on one in particular with optimization of the homepage images, some alterations to the magneto system with combined minified JS and CSS files on the fly and additional server compression and cache systems.

Hopefully the reduction of page loading times will provide visitors with a better experience and help improve our clients SEO ranking as the speed of a site is something Google does pay attention to.

the satsuma blog

poodle — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:27:52 +0000

Welcome to the Yellow Satsuma blog, up until now we have been satisfied with providing our visitors with simple news updates about our activities and that’s about it. Now we have decided to enlarge our community and furnish fellow designers, clients and users of the internet with our creativity and ideas. A blog system is the ideal medium to quickly and simply push this information to our visitors and the release of this new blog system co-insides with our company re-focus and website re-branding for a more updated unified and informative company view.

We hope you enjoy the pages, information and news which will be published here and that it will be a continued source of inspiration to you.