It is common to work with a development partner when setting up your shop. This can either be a freelancer or an agency. In this section we give some pointers to get the best result when working with such a partner. We will not go into details about project management or communication as that is a huge subject outside of the scope of this book, and also highly dependent on how involved you want to be in the development of your shop.
In this section we will discuss two possible tasks:
When you're working with a development partner, you will generally have both of these tasks for them as they probably will be building a theme and some functionalities.
This is the situation where you are not using a premade theme, but rather a custom-built one. When you're doing this, a good theme developer will go through the following steps with you:
Ensure that any parts of the site that are important are present in the wireframe, such as customer account links, layered navigation, buy buttons, and so on. A proper wireframe ensures the graphic designer understands what he/she is designing. Magento is a big software package and most graphical designers do not know every detail about how Magento functions. An example wireframe can be found in the following diagram:
Your product detail page is one of the most important pages of your store, as it is usually the place where your visitor decides to buy your product. Think about what you want your product page to look like. Visit other e-commerce sites you admire and try to determine the similarities between the ways they display information on their product pages. Also, try to think about whether the kind of product you will be selling should be displayed differently or not! After you have determined the ideal product page layout, make a simple wireframe or sketch that indicates the positions of the various page elements.
Coming up with a good layout can be hard. If you are in doubt about the layout of a particular segment of your site, it's a good idea to stick to something that resembles the biggest stores in your niche. In general, it's a good idea to have your store look and function as normal as possible, as familiarity breeds trust.