My job title is IT Manager, but I spend more time working on our various web presences than anything. Right now I run the company's main site in Wordpress, our ecommerce store in Vortx (asp.net storefront), handle our SEO, and write our vendor API integrations.
Vortx is, frankly, terrible for us. We have ~50k products (many with multiple SKUs, and expecting to hit ~100k products by the end of the year) and about 200 categories, and the ecommerce platform is slow as hell apparently because of our category count.
Anyway, we're leaning toward a move to Magento now. I've never worked on Magento before but we're setting up a test server and the boss has given me as long as I need to learn Magento and build us a new ecommerce site on it. Soon as I finish writing this I'll be talking to a Rackspace specialist about hosting plans.
As I said, I don't know Magento yet. It looks to be quite a bit more complex than Wordpress and BC/Vortx and I'm not great at PHP either. I've read what I can find on Wikipedia and a bunch of forum posts about Magento, but could use some more feedback:
I'd love to sharpen up my PHP and learn Magento. It'd be a huge feather in my hat to knock out this big migration, and my ticket to getting a minion to handle the more mundane IT crap that tends to eat up a lot of my time.
However, it's a big enough project that my Boondoggle sense is tingling. Is it reasonable to think, as someone with 4 years of CMS and ecommerce experience but pretty basic programming skills, that I could learn PHP and Magento to a useful level and build a new ecommerce site of moderate complexity in, say, 3-4 months? Or am I better off bailing on this and recommending an experienced developer? If the latter, how much should we be expecting to pay for a fulltime Magento dev? My quick research has shown a salary range of 70-140k, but that's a pretty wide range.
Side note - we used to be on BigCommerce, but left because Vortx had a key integration that was above my programming skills at the time. We've considered going back to it, but it has other problems that don't work well for our use case.
Vortx is, frankly, terrible for us. We have ~50k products (many with multiple SKUs, and expecting to hit ~100k products by the end of the year) and about 200 categories, and the ecommerce platform is slow as hell apparently because of our category count.
Anyway, we're leaning toward a move to Magento now. I've never worked on Magento before but we're setting up a test server and the boss has given me as long as I need to learn Magento and build us a new ecommerce site on it. Soon as I finish writing this I'll be talking to a Rackspace specialist about hosting plans.
As I said, I don't know Magento yet. It looks to be quite a bit more complex than Wordpress and BC/Vortx and I'm not great at PHP either. I've read what I can find on Wikipedia and a bunch of forum posts about Magento, but could use some more feedback:
I'd love to sharpen up my PHP and learn Magento. It'd be a huge feather in my hat to knock out this big migration, and my ticket to getting a minion to handle the more mundane IT crap that tends to eat up a lot of my time.
However, it's a big enough project that my Boondoggle sense is tingling. Is it reasonable to think, as someone with 4 years of CMS and ecommerce experience but pretty basic programming skills, that I could learn PHP and Magento to a useful level and build a new ecommerce site of moderate complexity in, say, 3-4 months? Or am I better off bailing on this and recommending an experienced developer? If the latter, how much should we be expecting to pay for a fulltime Magento dev? My quick research has shown a salary range of 70-140k, but that's a pretty wide range.
Side note - we used to be on BigCommerce, but left because Vortx had a key integration that was above my programming skills at the time. We've considered going back to it, but it has other problems that don't work well for our use case.
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