Hello. I am trying to start up an e-commerce site using Magento software. However, none of the Magento developers that I've met are able to do good graphic design work. So here's what I'm thinking about doing and I need some advice to make sure this is feasible: 1. Finding a web/graphic designer to make our website design. 2. Sending the .psd files from the designer to a Magento developer. 3. Have the developer take the .psd files, put them into Magento, and finalize the site. I am just wondering if this is possible. I've seen this sort of thing done before, but not with an e-commerce site. Any advice/guidance would be really helpful and appreciated.
That sounds fine but what I'd do is find the web/graphic designer find the developer and get a generic version of the shop up and running with actual things you plan to sell, protect the site from prying eyes but give the designer the password etc. Get the developer to create a guideline for the home page, category page, item page and text based pages showing which output is from the template and can be changed, and which is from the store's engine and can't be changed ask the designer for a design for your home page, category page, item page and text based pages. The designer then creates html pages with separate css files to display that content. The developer uses the html pages to move the html into the template files.
It's better if designer and developer could work together to see what need to be designed in the site and check if design is implemented correctly.
Making them work together would be great. Both of them would be able to check out the requirements and thus avoiding delays in the development process. Initial discussion to create the layout and navigation system is really important.
My condolences. That's because the people who made Magento don't know enough about MODERN HTML or CSS to give you the versatility to style it in a meaningful fashion without throwing it ALL away and neutering the upgrade path in the process. It is a poster child for what I mean when I talk about developers with "their craniums wedged up 1997's rectum". The default theme has hundreds of K of scripting for nothing, static style in the markup, redundant/pointless DIV and classes, absolute URL's pissing away bandwidth for nothing, tables for layout, select+scripting doing anchor's job, little if anything resembling semantic markup, and little if any separation of presentation from content. Much of this idiocy is hard-coded into the source outside the theming, meaning you basically have to rewrite how the blasted thing works to do anything meaningful with it -- or spend time manually buffering the output and postprocessing it, dragging performance down into the 9th ring of hell. Which is why for what you are talking, I think it would be easier/simpler to just make a new system from scratch, than waste time trying to turn that outdated steaming pile into something it isn't.
What Sarahk said would work. But have the developer do the html/css part as well. Some designers really just concentrate on designing and doesn't know any html/css.