Sometimes, I’m amazed at how much work is involved in running an online shop. Seriously! I would never have imagined that it would take this much work, but it does and it’s not the simplest of processes. It’s fairly easy to set up a basic shop and sell things online but to take it further than that is actually quite demanding and in light of what I’ve been up to this past few weeks, it is this area of business I want to talk about in this blog post.
Walter Scott monument – Edinburgh
This month I have done quite a bit of work on my website teageeks.com. And while it might not look like it has changed much from the outside, I have spent a lot of my time learning about how to operate it from the inside. Earlier this month, I went on a 3 day training course in Edinburgh to learn how to use the software from which teageeks.com runs. This was a really great opportunity for me to learn a lot in a short space of time. You see, no-one has taught me how to maintain or update a website. I’ve been learning as I go. This takes up a lot of time and means that if I decide to implement something (like the twitter feed on the home page) I have to search the web on how to do something before I can do it. I find this information mainly from videos, forums and wikis and often I can’t find my answer, or I implement the change and it doesn’t work. Back to the web. This has been a laborious process so far and I’m really happy with the website so far, however it was my hope that by doing a training course and learning how to use the software that my website runs from, it would save time and money in the long run and will free up time to focus on other areas like marketing, sales or improving processes.
View of Calton Hill – Edinburgh
The course, which I would highly recommend, was run by Mage Training. It was a 3 day course and the trainer (Deryck) was impressive with his knowledge of Magento. It was informative and clearly explained, with an easy to follow structure. And I even left with a bumper-size manual outlining everything that was covered in the classes, which will be priceless as a reference tool. I would honestly recommend this course to anyone who has a Magento store and wishes to get it up and running. The only thing I would say is that it covered a lot of ground, therefore being familiar with the admin area of Magento would be really useful and would, in my opinion, allow you to get more out of the course.
TeaGeeks.com 