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See you at Meet Magento Poland 2017!

See you at Meet Magento Poland 2017!

We have an internal process at Inchoo, where each Inchooer applies for the conference he would like to visit, and with a set of rules we decide who is going. Fair and square.

When we opened up an application for Meet Magento Poland, that will take place in Krakow on Sept 18th and 19th, within minutes (!) we had 2 speakers – Tomislav Bilic and Nenad Andrakovic, and 2 speaker’s chaperones – Nandino Loncar and Toni Pap.

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Empower Magento2 UI library

Empower Magento2 UI library

Magento2 came with very “controversial” frontend architecture approach. We will not discuss that but we will try to explain how to empower current Magento2 UI library to achieve most common frontend task.

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The Inchooers Comic Series

inchooers comic

Welcome to the page where you can find all of our The Inchooers comics. Yes, all of them.

Here you can find all our problems (well, not really, we are too embarrassed to show some of them) we encounter in daily work and some of the solutions we come up with. Some of those are very… well, interesting. So, we have asked ourselves – why not make fun of those situations?

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Setting the Audiences for Successful Ecommerce AdWords Retargeting and Remarketing Ads

Setting the Audiences for Successful Ecommerce AdWords Retargeting and Remarketing Ads

If you don’t run retargeting and remarketing ads, your marketing efforts may not be as profitable as they could be. On average, only 2% of visitors convert during their first store visit, which leaves staggering 98% of visitors unconverted. This is why we use retargeting and remarketing strategies.

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Magento 2 with Slick Carousel

Magento 2 with Slick Carousel

Slick is a great Carousel plugin good for any product list like Most Popular, Featured, Upsell, Cross sell products, or any other custom product list. I will guide you with step by step on how to add Slick Carousel and apply it on product list widget on Homepage.

Lets get started!

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Importance of style guides in design

Importance of style guides in design

One may call it Graphics Standard Manual, Identity Style Guide, Brand and Graphics Manual, Branding Manual, Brand book… People call it differently, but they all usually mean the same thing (although we should be careful about using “brand” in naming, cause brand books/manuals dictate not only visual and graphic representation, but the brand as a whole).

We’re basically talking about a set of standards and rules by which we enforce a certain style to be applied on company’s documents, presentations, visuals like posters and flyers, communication strategies or even photos.

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Magento 2 Custom CMS page layout

Magento 2 Custom CMS page layout

We’ve had a request to add a new custom layout for CMS pages in one Magento shop.
This can be very useful and can save you a lot of time for different static pages of your shop.

In this example we’ll create a layout named Inchoo Layout.

We should focus on two xml files: layouts.xml and page_layout/inchoo-layout.xml under Magento_Theme folder.

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Why you should do keyword research for your eCommerce store

Why you should do keyword research for your eCommerce store

Every time someone does a search for something on search engines such as Google, the search engine must go through thousands of pages and serve the best results that will give the user most useful information he searched for.

How does the search engine know what information to serve based on just a few words?  Well, search engines use to determine the best and most relevant information for every search term that is entered on search engine from user. Because of that, it is very important to create a strategy of keywords so that your eCommerce store could rank better every time user search for terms that are related to products that you sell. The ultimate goal is to rank on the first page of search engine and make your eCommerce more visible to users.

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Validate a custom form in Magento 2

Validate a custom form in Magento 2

This article will cover the fundamentals of validating any form in Magento 2.

The contact form on Contact us page will be used and modified for the purpose of the article. The form itself can be found in the following paths, depending on the type of installation you are using:

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CSS Media queries in Magento 2

CSS Media queries in Magento 2

It’s highly unlikely that there are some frontend developers involved in a responsive website development who are not familiar with the concept of CSS Media queries. In this post, I’ll be looking at Magento 2 way of implementing this functionality in its default theme development workflow.

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Adding videos to product page in Magento2

Adding videos to product page in Magento2

Today is even impossible to imagine a good product detail page without product video/s. In Magento 2, adding videos to the product details page is quite easy. The major problem is in most cases with an initial setup. Most of the product videos already exist online, either on youtube.com or vimeo.com. In the first case, it’s the most popular video publishing platform and for vimeo.com we can say it is more or less dedicated to professionals and photo/video enthusiast.

Google, company behind youtube, set few rules regarding sharing and embedding videos to other domains, in our case our online store. They require to have enabled youtube API key if you want to use embedding youtube videos beyond simple grabbing embed code from youtube videos page.

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Klevu – search engine that will increase revenue, self-learn and improve UX

Klevu – search engine that will increase revenue, self-learn and improve UX

One of most important parts of every store is its Search functionality. Implementing a more advanced search solution can have positive and big impact on search function, which leads to significant increase in conversion rate. After all, visitors trust in search results. If your store’s search experience is good, users will use it more than browsing by clicking through categories.

With artificial intelligence and self learning processes, search engines became even more powerful and provide us with features that were not possible before.

Klevu is one of those search engines – it is fast (really fast), it provides high level of customisation and most important – it learns from your customers and self-improves which results in more accurate search results and increase in revenue.

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Blogging for merchants: attract visitors to your eCommerce site

blogging for merchants

Every store owner knows how important blogging is for his eCommerce store. It’s a perfect opportunity to attract a broader audience that might not have a clear buying intent at the moment, but that will undoubtedly come back to you after learning something useful from your blog. However, if your articles are low quality, non-informative, and just there to fill out the blank space, you’re not using the blog section’s full potential on your site. To avoid frustration with articles that don’t get any attention, we’re bringing you blogging tips for merchants that can help you boost your eCommerce website’s online performance.

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Why so Sylius?

Why so Sylius?

Inchoo went to a Sylius meetup, and all you got… is an overview of this Symfony-based open source eCommerce platform in the making. We all love PHP, and with the growing Symfony community in Croatia, we wanted to see what all the fuss is about. Here is our take on Sylius as an eCommerce platform and, more importantly, its ecosystem.

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Ground zero – planning phase

Ground zero – planning phase © Pexels / Free images

If you have plans to start a new website on Magento and don’t know where to start, or if you already have an existing website and you’re thinking of revamping it, then you might find this article interesting.

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Inchoo won The Golden Marten Award

Inchoo won The Golden Marten Award

After 9 years in business, Inchoo won The Golden Marten Award (Zlatna kuna), traditionally given to the most successful local companies by the Croatian Chamber of Economy. We received it as the best small company in Osijek-Baranja County. Why did we win it for 2016? There were 21 distinct areas that were rated and Inchoo had very high scores in employment increase, average salary, non-material assets, financial stability and self-funding.

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Bypassing Magento 2 layout update restrictions in Admin

Bypassing Magento 2 layout update restrictions in Admin

Magento’s layout system has been vastly improved in Magento 2 to be more accessible, more powerful and to be more streamlined. But, for some reason, only a very small subset of layout functions is made available for use in Magento 2 Admin (category layout XML updates, to be more precise). In this article, we’re going to show a very simple way of bypassing this pesky restriction.

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Learning and adrenaline – Inchoo Learning Day #9

Learning and adrenaline – Inchoo Learning Day #9

We had another Inchoo Learning Day in Baranja on Friday, May 26. It is a day when all of us Inchooers collectively leave our offices and enjoy the beauties of Slavonia and Baranja, and combine learning with team building activities.

This was the 9th Inchoo Learning Day (ILD) in a row. This time; Zlatna Greda, an eco center about 30 km from Osijek, in the middle of forest. Zlatna Greda is an organized concept that provides a practical experience of coexistence with nature as a place to learn, but also as a place to have fun; you can visit the adrenaline park, take a walk, or see the animals. It’s like a house in nature which functions through practical examples of sustainable growth, such as the renewable energy sources, waste separation, social entrepreneurship and responsible business conduct.

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Version control systems in UI design

Version control systems in UI design

Our design team switched to working in Sketch a while ago but it wasn’t until version 43 we really started seeing some opportunities to change our workflows more significantly. It was also an opportunity for more designers to work on the same project as well as collaborate with developers more easily. If you’re looking for professional Magento web design services, feel free to check out our Magento Web Design Service for more information.

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Are you in for some RWD workshop? Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine is coming to Osijek, Croatia

Are you in for some RWD workshop? Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine is coming to Osijek, Croatia

We are proud to announce an awesome Responsive Web Design workshop by one and only Vitaly Friedman! This writer, speaker, author and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine will get up on stage at Inchoo’s hometown Osijek with smashing workshop “New Adventures in Responsive Web Design”.

Faculty of Economics at Osijek will be the main point of this event on June 17 from 9AM to 6PM.

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More/Less functionality in Magento2

More/Less functionality in Magento2

While working on a Magento 2 project for our client, I was supposed to create more/less button, which is not part of neither Blank or Luma themes. The button should be on product page, but only inside of Details tab on desktop (accordion on mobile), which displays product description field in Admin.

Before we get started, I have created a custom theme (Inchoo/MoreLess that is extending Blank theme), make sure to update the correct path for your theme as we go along. The code was written on latest (2.1.6) installation with sample data.

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A Developer’s Guide to Communicating With Clients

A Developer’s Guide to Communicating With Clients

If you are a developer that does not always feel comfortable to communicate with the clients and all you want to do is just code and more code, then this article is created with you in my mind.

While working with clients on daily basis, monitoring the communication between clients and developers and occasionally assisting developers in complicated dialogues, I have collected a good understanding of what’s the good way to communicate in given situation. And although each situation requires an individual approach, it was possible for me to standardize it a bit and share with you few situations and examples on how I think communication should go.

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Pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in Magento 2

Pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in Magento 2

Out of the box, Magento 2 offers fair amount of search engine optimization options but when it comes to category pages, we only have option to add canonical meta tags. In today’s blog post, we will try to spice that up a bit by implementing our own variation of canonical tag and by adding rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags to help bots with paginated content.

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This is why our clients never get penalized by Google

This is why our clients never get penalized by Google

Often, during an SEO audit, we figure out that the store that came to us for the audit suffered a manual or an algorithmical penalty from Google which resulted in a significant loss of organic traffic.

During the years we got pretty experienced in removing such penalties and getting the website back on the right track for clients that listened to our advice.

But, did you know our own clients who have a consulting retainer with us never got penalized by Google?

Here’s why…

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