Magento 1 Responsive Theme

Helped modernize the Magento 1 frontend by building a core responsive theme for Magento, Inc.

Our CEO, Erik Hansen, oversaw the architecture, design, and development of these projects while he worked for Classy Llama, an agency he co-founded in 2007. Magento is not and has not been a Kraken client.

I had the opportunity to work with Erik on a project that was critical for the success of Magento and was the main-stage highlight at Magento Imagine, our largest user conference. Erik is very knowledgeable in Responsive Web Design and Magento software development, but what’s more important is that he provides pragmatic guidance and can do the right tradeoffs when limited by the software. Erik’s commitment to user satisfaction is unparalleled—he went above and beyond, working overtime to make sure the documentation and user experience were right, as well as provided post-launch help. I would definitely work with Erik on any other project.

Piotr Kaminski

Senior Product Manager, Magento, Inc.

The Need

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is the de facto approach for building websites these days. However not too many years ago, many eCommerce merchants had to build and maintain both “desktop” and a “mobile” themes. In 2013, the only native themes available in Magento were “desktop” or “mobile” themes. Magento, Inc. realized that they needed to modernize their frontend theme, so they looked for an external team to build a new frontend that would implement RWD best-practices.

The Solution

Erik was the primary contributor to a project to build a responsive theme for the core Magento 1 product, and worked in collaboration with several other great developers.

Magento released the theme in Community Edition (CE) 1.9 and Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.14.

We wrote extensive documentation for how to work with the new theme here.

Quick preview of RWD theme

Results

Building custom themes on RWD theme helped reduce development time as much as 50%
Consolidated frontend code to improve performance, eliminating unnecessary code
RWD theme is optimized for faster site speed and reduced page load time

Update April 2019: The web has come a long way since the Magento 1 RWD theme was built. We learned a lot of things in the process of building the RWD theme and would do a number of things differently if we could go back and rebuild it today (de-couple the JavaScript, use a more modular CSS approach, etc). However for its time, we think the RWD theme was quality and helped the thousands of merchants that used it as the base for their custom themes.