We're very proud to announce the completion of one of our most recent projects, the total revamp of fair trade clothing website Arkadash. Owned by dazzling duo Chantelle and Vik, Arkadash sells fair trade, sweatshop-free, organic clothes from their dinky shop in Chorlton. Their site is based on our awesome Lava eCommerce platform, styled by Sizzle's awesome in-house designers, and hosted on our awesome professional-grade servers for maximum reliability and uptime. And, of course, they're on our awesome support package so they get friendly help whenever they need a hand getting to grips with their new system.

We hope it does the job all Sizzle sites are designed for - encouraging enquiries and orders. With that in mind, stop reading this and go and check out their site and buy some lovely organic socks!

We're really chuffed to announce our newest (and very awesome) product - 'Lava', a highly functional yet easily implemented eCommerce platform created and refined over the course of the last four years, blending our extensive web design and web development experience, with a few funky bonuses too.

We polled local businesses and found that while everyone recognises the importance of getting a website up and running, many are put off by the costs associated with a fully bespoke web development project. And if your business sells physical products, it's hard to ignore the potential worldwide market you could reach with an eCommerce site. For many businesses in this situation, they find themselves forced to accept a low quality, "cheap and nasty" amateur-looking platform, or worse, no web presence at all.

Naturally, we thought "..Hang on a minute - we've got years of experience in creating eCommerce sites, and our design skills are top-notch. Why not create an easily branded, great looking, simple to use, affordable yet high specification platform for eCommerce sites, that any small business can afford?"

...And that's exactly what we did. Lava is built to be easily themed, creating swish and smart-looking eCommerce sites in a fraction of the normal development time. We will have your LAVA website up and running within seven working days of proposal acceptance. If you require that bespoke touch then extra design time is available to make your website really Sizzle.

Lava comes with everything you need to sell products online, backed up by the unbeatable support of Sizzle's friendly in-house gang. You can add and remove products, upload images, determine product variations and price points, set special offers, manage order histories, track popular items, edit page content, manage a newsletter, and much more (as if that isn't enough!). And, of course, you can accept payments directly to your business bank account, meaning all you have to do is ship the order!

We're really looking forward to getting our lovely Lava Ecommerce system working for your businesses. We've got first-hand experience of how eCommerce sites can boost business profits despite today's grim economy, and we're looking forward to helping more small businesses become online successes!

Contact us for more information - we'd love to hear from you!

We currently have web agents in Manchester, Leeds, Preston, Bolton, Bury and Salford and are looking for quality people to join our expanding team. Email lava@sizzlemedia.co.uk for more information.

We're happy to announce the completion of one of our biggest projects to date: The New Indian Ocean Website! Featuring an incredibly comprehensive set of features and functionalities, it's an all-encompassing bells-and-whistles bit of work featuring, but not limited to:

• Polls, giving visitors the ability to vote on issues relating to the business
• Newsletter functionality, letting visitors easily subscribe to the latest goings-on at the restaurant
• Image galleries featuring user-uploaded content
• User login and registration functionality with confirmation emails
• Online booking, giving users the ability to book tables directly through the site
• Recipe database with commenting ability
• News and blog functionality, ensuring that visitors remain up-to-date on the latest news
• Calendar of events providing quick links to every item, with full descriptions and photographs, along with reminders for logged-in users

..The Indian Ocean is the North West's best Indian restaurant, so it only seemed fitting that they were provided with an appropriately awesome website!

Congratulations to the Sizzle members involved in the completion of this project! You've done us proud.

You can check out the new, sleek site at http://www.indianoceanonline.co.uk

Around November last year, Sizzle Manchester looked into some of the free and upcoming open source platforms available for e-commerce websites as cheaper, off-the-shelf alternatives to bespoke websites for our clients. One that stood out as a forerunner and possible osCommerce/Zen Cart competitor was the very new, very shiny, and very impressive Magento.

Magento is written in PHP and built upon the Zend framework. For those of you who still don’t know what Magento is or what it can do, go here now... It’s ok... We’ll wait. Back?

Magento supports tons of payment options (Protx, Google Checkout, and Paypal), and the Magento community provides tonnes of new additions, modules, and proprietary add-ons every day.

We originally looked at GoDaddy for a temporary test hosting solution, as they had recently added PHP 5.2 support and they support .htaccess files to override certain hosting features. However, we still had some problems getting it to work straight from the box, although a quick search of the internet and Magento forums brought the majority of answers we needed, so we’ve decided to put together a quick start guide to getting Magento up and running on GoDaddy!

We have used both the economy and deluxe Linux packages available on GoDaddy successfully, including the free hosting provided with a domain (although you should beaware that GoDaddy puts rather intrusive advertisements on the free hosting). Step by step:

1. To start with we downloaded the Magento 1.2.0.2 package.

2. In the root folder we opened the .htaccess file and added the following line under the CGI options section:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php

3. At this point we were able to get to the install screen, however some users have reported that the php.ini file needs to be renamed php5.ini and the following line changed from:

#cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 to cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

4. Once installed and running, we hit one more snag - The administration panel didn’t work in any browser! Again, a quick search of brought us the solution and we have provided the package from the Magento Forums here for you to download and use. You should unzip this and place this over the head.php file in “app\code\core\Mage\Adminhtml\Block\Page” Hopefully later versions of Magento will address this.

Using this technique we were able to get Magento installed on three separate test accounts (Free Hosting, Economy and Deluxe), although the website performance did vary dependent on which account we were on, the deluxe package obviously fared slightly better.

Hopefully this is all you’ll need in order to get Magento up and running on GoDaddy Linux hosting. We have also provided the pre-modified 1.2.0.2 solution we used to install it here. Once installed you should be able to update to the latest version without any problems.

So there we go. Hopefully, in the very near future, and once we’ve got our head around the design and skinning aspects, Sizzle Manchester will be able to offer Magento solutions, and despite our success and more importantly the community’s success, they will be hosted on our own dedicated servers, not GoDaddy’s.

Please note that Sizzle Media takes no responsibility for the use of these files, nor does it claim any copyright to them.

UPDATE: LifeBlue.com have provided instructions for v1.3.2.1 of Magento on Godaddy here

Here on the Sizzle website, our web design portfolio page has always been a bit lacking. This isn't because we're lazy or anything like that, it's simply because we've been very busy making the best, most affordable pay monthly websites in Manchester! Well we've finally managed to squeeze it in, and cor blimey, it looks wonderful. We'll be adding sites and in-depth descriptions as time goes on, and we're also planning a similar 'print portfolio' page to show off the diverse range of talents in-house here at Sizzle.

Remember - We're not just a website company, we're a multi-talented and highly-networked bunch of media-savvy creative geniuses!

It's nearly the end of the year, and it's been an exciting time for the gang here at Sizzle Media. We've grown, we've shrunk, we've moved offices, we've got great new clients, a swanky new website, and we're looking forward to creating some stunning websites in 2009. We're still on-track for our goal of providing the best, most comprehensive web design Rochdale (and Manchester!) has to offer, and we've got some innovations coming up that'll blow your socks off, allowing us to provide web development at a level of affordability never before seen.

We hope you have a tremendous Christmas and we hope Santa brings you everything you've wanted. See you in 2009!

Today marks a monumentous occasion in the history of Manchester's I.T. industry - the launch of the Sizzle site! From this day forward, businesses across the North West will be able to get the professional web design they deserve, at highly-affordable prices and done with a smile.

You might be thinking 'who are these guys?', so let me explain. (more...)