It isn’t just a Friday thing for Insite Digital.  On a serious note, we are going all out this month to raise money for Children’s Hospice Southwest, Little Harbour.

Sometimes we get caught up in the whirlwind of e-commerce, and generally running a rapidly expanding business.  That is why Dan and Mike, our directors suggested the whole team sign up for ‘It’s a Knock Out’. A charity event held in Truro on 12^th May at Truro Rugby Club.  Not only are we roping everyone in from our office, we are also joining forces with other local businesses to maximise our fundraising capabilities.  Two key team members are Dan Parker from FireText, and Sam Longsdale from Falmouth based Aberfal Pursuits, both doing their bit to raise money locally.

We have been so inspired by the work Little Harbour do that our team aptly named ‘Super Geeks’ have pledged to give £500 pounds to fund a remembering day for bereaved families.  This is just the start,  we will be holding an evening event and raffle in May, as well as completing mini fund raising days in the office, where one man in particular (Dan) will have to come to work clean shaven for the first time in his life!

Watch this space for more information about our evening event, or simply have a look on www.chsw.org.uk/knockout for details about supporting on the day.

For those who can afford to give a little, in order to help a lot here is the link to our fundraising page:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/insitedigital

We were very excited to finally hear the news at the Magento Imagine eCommerce 2013 conference yesterday; Magento released the newest edition of Magento Enterprise to enable merchants to scale more effectively and support ever greater numbers of visitors and buyers to their core ecommerce sites while streamlining their back-end operations.

The headline improvements are in optimised catalogue indexing, improved content caching, streamlined checkout flow, and improved tax recommendations that enable Magento Enterprise customers to extract ever-greater value, including faster load times and lower overall costs, from their Magento platform.

In addition Magento and PayPal also revealed two new developer extensions – “order ahead’ and “in-aisle selling” –available to merchants. The order ahead extension allows consumers to order and pay for products through the PayPal mobile app and pick up their orders in store. The in-aisle selling extension allows merchants to complete the transaction anywhere in their stores by connecting their Magento store to PayPal Here.

Over the past year Magento and our diverse ecosystem have continued to innovate on the Magento platform to support ever-larger brands, more robust product catalogue and more complex implementations.

We’re committed to building upon the Magento platform enabling greater flexibility, performance and scalability to empower merchant growth. The latest product updates improve critical functions for the systems integrators that work with Magento code directly and further ease platform management for merchants as they continue to expand their business – often featuring more than 1 million product SKUs.

Roy Rubin, co-founder and chief operating officer at Magento.

Key performance and scalability enhancements of Magento 1.13:

Optimised Indexing

Optimised indexing process to enable significantly faster indexing with limited to no impact to the customer’s shopping experience. This makes it easier to add and update products more frequently while ensuring URLs, promotions, navigational menus and product search tools are always completely up to date, while never slowing down the performance of the online store.

Improved Caching

Improved caching to enable even greater performance by invalidating only relevant pages making it easier to cache content without affecting site performance for your customers. Improved caching performance also drastically reduces server load enabling the to store to support even larger traffic volumes while conducting back end operations.

Speedier Checkout Flow

Tremendous improvements in further speeding up the checkout process by reducing page load times for browsing and placing orders. Faster checkouts significantly improve a customers’ shopping experience and customer satisfaction.

Enhanced Tax Calculations Algorithms

Improved tax calculation algorithms eliminating potential rounding offsets that can be displayed on buyer facing screens. .

Functional Improvements

Approximately 350 functional improvements in key areas including in the web store and shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components and payment methods.

We’re looking forward to working with Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13; the continued improvements will allow our clients sites to operate faster and deliver even more useful product features to their customers. These improvements allow them to grow quickly and focus on their business, rather than worrying about the technology supporting it.

Feedback on Magento Enterprise 1.13 by Mike Reed, Company Director

For more details please refer to the links below:

• Magento Blog
• Key Features 

Working alongside our Project Manager and Head of Development you will be joining a team responsible for the technical delivery of multiple high specification Magento eCommerce sites (Community & Enterprise) for a range of local, national & international clients.

We work with clients who demand the best on a technical level & from graphic design, usability & optimisation. Therefore you will be responsible for working with our graphic design & conversion rate optimisation team converting all their work onto Magento ensuring that all technical development is implemented to equally high standards.

At Insite Digital we pride ourselves on providing a creative, flexible and motivating environment for our staff, as from experience we know that if the staff are happy then the client is going to get a great service.

We offer challenging but rewarding career opportunities to the right individuals and will push them so they reach their full creative & professional potential.

With our office set in the beautiful county of Cornwall, based in Truro you’ll be a 20 minute drive to either coast for an after work surf or 5 minute walk into town for a drink or after a hard day’s work.

For more details Click Here to see the full job listing

Please Note: Insite Digital have a policy of actively not using recruitment agents that cold call and cold e-mail us.

Insite Digital will be attending the Magento Live Conference this year at the Etc Venues St Pauls.

Magento Live is an opportunity to see new and exciting developments from around the Magento community and to stay up to date with all of the upcoming Magento Releases.

There will be over 400 Magento developers, merchants, partners at Magento Live this year.

If you are going and would like to meet up, please get in touch.

info@insitedigital.co.uk
Twitter.com/InsiteDigital 

Anyway…..we’re really pleased that our this post is to introduce our new Web Project Manager, Natalie Newton. She is already proving to be a great asset to the team, whipping the development & design teams into shape (and the management) & further improving client communication.

Here is a little introduction from Natalie;

I’m excited to be joining the Insite Digital team as the new Web Project Manager.

My first week has been really busy; getting to grips with the current projects, meeting the team and familiarising myself with the workings of the coffee machine.

So you might be wondering, what does a Web Project Manager do?
Well, first and foremost I’m here to make sure our work is properly planned making sure that everyone is as productive as possible.

Secondly I’ll be keeping an eye on project progress and making sure that things happen when they are meant to. It’s difficult to take a bird’s eye view when immersed in a task so I’m here to look at the big picture leaving our developers free to do what they do best – build websites.

Finally, I’m here to make sure that our clients know what is happening every step of the way. If work is on schedule, I’ll say so. If something arises that will affect the project in any way it’s my job to make sure that everyone quickly knows what’s happening and our approach to dealing with it. I’ll always be at the end of a phone or email to answer questions and provide updates.

And when things are running as they should? I’ll be making the coffee for everyone!

We’re sure Natalie will be introducing herself, if she hasn’t done so already, to all our existing clients & if you are joining us soon then she’ll be one of your main points of contact.

Feel free to contact Natalie via any of the below:
T: 01872 858 082
E: natalie@insitedigital.co.uk

Dash (South West) Limited is a family owned business based in Redruth, Cornwall.

The company has roots in the newspaper industry dating back to 1925 when the late Percy Dale began retailing newspapers in the Cornish village of Chacewater. The retailing and home delivery business expanded during successive generations and the firm diversified into Sunday only wholesaling in an area which steadily increased in size during the 40′s and 50′s. During the early 1980′s the business expanded further, when Chris Dash won the first seven day a week newspaper distribution contract with News International.

Now in its 8th decade of family ownership, the company serves an extensive customer base from distribution centres in Redruth and Taunton and retail stores in Truro and Falmouth.

The Challenge

To deliver a single solution to provide a customer facing E-Commerce site for the highly successful retail arm of the company but to also use the same technology for a wholesale & trade solution. All of these need to tightly integrated with their back office system to ensure a single point of data entry & order/customer account management.

The project is now in the User Acceptance Testing phase & we’re aiming to have the project finished & the new sites launched in May.

Digi-Quick are a small team of dedicated photographers and electrical experts based on Bodmin Moor in beautiful Cornwall, England. Since 2006 they have been supplying customers with digital accessories the world over, ranging from professional photographers and filmmakers to enthusiasts alike. Having supplied many hundreds of thousands of happy customers, they have grown into one the UK’s top and most knowledgeable, electrical accessory suppliers.

The Challenge

We were brought in to take over from their original E-Commerce Agency to migrate Digi-Quick from their Magento Professional installation over to the latest version of the Magento Community Edition. The site we inherited was not functioning correctly with many core elements simply not working as they should. So as part of the project we not only migrated them to Community but also applied a  number of core fixes to the theme, database, indexing & caching issues.

The Outcome

We’re pleased to say that we overcame all the above issues & have now launched the site on the Magento Community version & now have a much happier client. We have also taken over the hosting from Rackspace reducing page load times to around 1 second & reduced the monthly hosting bill significantly.

Don’t take our word for it, this is what Sam Taylor one of the Company Directors thinks:

We have found Insite Digital to be a breath of fresh air, with deadlines being met and excellent communication throughout; such reliability is gold dust in this industry!  Our expectations have been exceeded.

The KPI’s (in the 1st 4 months)

Some of the key Features:

Live Site: http://www.digi-quick.co.uk

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What’s in a name?
We wanted a catchy new name but also wanted to retain some familiarity. From our research, The ‘Insight’ part of the name worked well and reflected our company values well. To complement the renaming we’ve had a complete refresh of our brand colours, with a new logo, a new website and a refresh of Insite Digital Towers.

5 Years and Counting
We opened our doors just over 5 years ago with the sole purpose of providing high quality, profitable e-commerce websites to our clients. Insite Digital is now a full E-Commerce agency offering best practice Magento design and development for a diverse range of clients.

Meeting Clients’ Needs
In order to deal with demand from both new and existing clients, the Insite Digital team is growing. We consider ourselves extremely lucky to have been able to recruit Matthew Gibbons, a great developer with superb PHP skills and experience. Matt starts his career with us on this very day and is a much welcomed addition to the office.

What do you need to do?
From today we’ll be using our new “insitedigital.co.uk” domain name. Our old email addresses will of course still work however if you could change the emails in your address book that would be fantastic. Our phone numbers, address, company number and VAT number are all the same.

2012 is shaping up to be a very good year and we’re all very excited about the challenges that lay ahead. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or just to say hello!

Tel: 0800 6226 975
Email: info@insitedigital.co.uk 
Web:  www.insitedigital.co.uk
T: Twitter.com/InsiteDigital
F: Facebook.com/InsiteDigital