This guide is written for experienced designers and frontend developers, as well as for merchants with an eye for design. Our mission is to explain the rules of the road, show you where things are kept, and how to get things done. One of the biggest challenges for some—even for those who have been designing websites for many years—is the fact that there is no single HTML page that corresponds to any given page in a Magento Go store. That’s because Magento Go is an object-oriented environment, and every page is assembled from separate components. This is also the same reason why so many designers love Magento, because once you understand the basics, you can do just about anything imaginable.
The best way to learn is to jump in and experiment with your ideas. As happens so often when you don’t quite yet know what you are doing—some of the best ideas find their way to the top. As far as the design of your store is concerned, you’re the expert in that department, and we’ll leave that part up to you. So jump in, feel free to experiment, and see what you can do!
The first half of this guide has an emphasis on page layout, and working with blocks of content and frontend apps. The second half addresses what might be considered to be more common aspects of web design, including working with cascading style sheets (CSS) and implementing JavaScript interactions. By the time you work your way through this guide, you’ll be ready to put the “how to” aside, and focus your energy on creating attention-seizing and crowd-pleasing designs for online stores.
