I’ll start by way of introduction. We have been thrust to the forefront of Magento development, somewhat in spite of ourselves, and wanted to share a few of the things we’ve learned along the way. Let me explain:

Delorum started as a design firm about 4 years ago. Three partners with branding and design backgrounds decided to move back to rural Idaho and build a firm. We started locally, and within a couple of years had attracted attention from some major players on the ecommerce scene. We were hired in a pinch on a project that was over budget and past due, mainly for design, user interface and Flash. That forged an early relationship with an ecommerce veteran (Troy Brown formerly with Eddie Bauer / Expedia / TommyBahama / currently with Zumiez) which is largely how we ended up building possibly the fastest Magento implementation on possibly the highest volume Magento site to date (that’s a relatively educated guess).

Moving from a design firm with an IT department of 1 to full enterprise Magento support in a few short months has taught us a few things about Magento development, and we’ll be sharing those discoveries over the next few months. We’ve custom coded a lot of Magento modules along the way, including some low-level programming, and we’ll be introducing and detailing those efforts as well. Here’s a list of topics, a couple with their own modules:

1. End User Performance Increases:
   Magento Performance Optimization (2x – 100x site performance increase, still finessing modules)
2. Admin Performance Increases:
   Ex: Faster Magento Save, Magento Community Staging Environment, Faster Left Nav Indexing
3. Increased Functionality:
   Customer-Defined, Magento Bundled Products (Easy to Use, High-Selling, More Dollars per Transaction)