5 of the very best Magento web sites
As you may or may not already know, Jigowatt runs the popular web gallery Magento Showcase which, as the name suggests showcases some of the most beautiful and / or functionally efficient online shops built on the Magento platform.
As keen Magento developers ourselves we delight in adding as many high quality sites to the showcase as we can find and while all are good, some are great… but a handful are just awesome.
And so, with Magento Showcase standing 50 posts strong we’d like to share what we feel to be the 5 very best Magento sites we’ve stumbled upon.
Without further ado:
Cacties
One of the very first sites added and one which opened our eyes to the true flexibility of Magento. Cacties demonstrates how far removed from the Magento default theme you can go without damaging the usability of the platform. Cacties has a unique look and successfully pulls off being a “boutique” store which suits its products down to the ground.
Lodger
Lodger, like Cacties before demonstrates just how flexible Magento is. We believe that one of the best qualities in a Magento site is that, without doing some digging, you don’t even notice it’s a Magento site. Lodger achieves this and more. The site boasts some really cool features too such as the alternate product views, unobtrusive shopping cart and extensive navigation structure. Lodger also goes a long way in proving how vital professional photography can be in an online shop.
MyDeco
While not perhaps as aesthetically stunning as the previous designs, MyDeco makes up for that in functionality. It’s hard to believe this site has been built with Magento when you consider a feature list which includes the ability to create a 3D representation of a room in your own house, decorated hypothetically with products available in the MyDeco store, detailed user profiles where one can save and share their own room designs (an amateur (and professional) interior designers dream!) and a feature rich, current magazine and perhaps best of all… the products in the store are pulled in from various big-name high-street chains such as John Lewis, so you have the full high-street choice of furniture at your finger tips. Ordering, billing and shipment is all automated so that the customer deals directly with MyDeco… A truly awesome site!
Spacecraft
Spacecraft is another good example of a site so customised, you just wouldn’t recognise it as a Magento shop. They’ve really thought outside the box with the page layout, the product details page is particularly impressive. A lot of AJAX has been utilised but it never becomes intrusive or confusing. Cool stuff.
Shop Outdoors
Shop Outdoors is a representation of what Magento is most commonly used for: A fantastic portal to sell a huge amount of varied products and I felt it was important to include a site of that sort in this list as the previous ones are all niche, boutique’y shops. Shop Outdoors demonstrates that you don’t have to move a million miles away from the default Magento page layout to hide that fact you are using Magento, it’s been very elegantly designed leaving all of the default Magento features intact. A great example of what can be achieved with this unrivalled platform.