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These days we are building more and more e-commerce sites for clients and Miva Merchant has proven itself to be one of our more valuable tools in really delivering a top-notch storefront. So when the folks over at Miva Merchant HQ asked us to guest author a post on their blog, we jumped at the opportunity. We’ve developed a wide range of online stores using many different shopping cart platforms over the years, such as osCommerce, CRE-Loaded, Zen-cart, Magento (Community & Enterprise), Yahoo Stores, eBay Stores, Drupal and even Wordpress to name a few. With this kind of experience under our belt, we can tell you without hesitation that the road to success is much smoother with Miva Merchant.

This month at the Miva blog we discuss making your website design top-notch while also keeping it relevant to your industry and audience.

I first started working with Miva Merchant back in 2001 as a freelance developer. Back then, most people’s first exposure to Miva Merchant (originally Miva) was the result of it being offered as a free shopping cart add-on to their hosting plan. Since it was free software, many small businesses began using it without even really considering other choices. Over the years since then, many free open source shopping cart platforms have come and gone; and while many of those original Miva Merchant customers may have jumped ship along the way in pursuit of that mythical perfect free shopping cart, those who stuck with Miva have been the beneficiaries of a mature, solid, well-built platform that has made millionaires of many of those first small business owners.

Read our complete post at the Miva Merchant Blog.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of  our latest client website at www.flipnfit.com for    Flip N Fit, a San Diego-based designer and manufacturer of gymnastic, cheer and dance apparel. The client came to us to utilize a MIVA Merchant shopping cart to generate greater sales and overhaul their previous design to better showcase their unique, hand sewn products.

We gave Flip N Fit a fun, energetic design to attract their young, female demographic and easy-to-use navigation to make finding products and checking out a breeze! Since Flip N Fit does not have a retail storefront but sells to gymnastics centers and dance studios in the greater San Diego region, they wanted an efficient way to track referrals and offer personal discounts. We employed a variety of MIVA modules, including one that would allow the client to track how the shopper learned about the company.

To create the retail-store experience for Flip N Fit’s customers, we customized their MIVA Merchant cart to allow for color swatch options, related products, a detailed size chart, and easy shipping options. The result? A virtual storefront that Flip N Fit was missing. Flip N Fit’s new online home is the perfect way to have a face in the community—both online and locally.

In the day to day hustle and bustle of running your own online business, it’s important to periodically go through your own website and ensure that things are in proper order. Just as you would with any retail business, it’s important to “walk the showroom floor”, so to speak and make sure that the things you depend on to operate your business are functioning correctly. With your online store, you should go through every step of your checkout process and actually run a live dollar transaction to make sure that everything works and also that your customer experience is the way it should be. Things are constantly changing online – new web browsers get released and updated, website hosting servers get patched, security subscriptions expire etc, and these changes can cause formatting errors, popup security alerts and even broken pages and checkout problems. Very often these problems could be occurring for days or even weeks before you find out. Don’t rely on your customer to take time out of their busy day to notify you of any errors they encounter.

This is especially important if you have employees making continuous updates to your website content. Most shopping cart platforms, including MIVA Merchant, have global headers and footers for content that is included on every page of the site, such as your site navigation links, footer information and promotional banners. This content is being delivered to the web browser when a visitor is on both non-secure pages as well as on secure pages, such as when in the checkout process. As the global areas of your site get updated with new content, you need to make sure the links to banners or security badges or any tracking codes are created correctly so that they are accessible on every page in the website and do not cause security alerts or broken images.

Of course, having a reliable and professional development support team handling your store maintenance and website updates will minimize any shopping cart problems, but it’s always smart business to be hands-on with your online store. Even in the absence of any technical problems, it’s still a good idea to run through things and keep the customer experience fresh and up-to-date. Never just assume that if your shopping cart worked ok yesterday, it still will today. Check, check and triple check.

The Restaurant Depot is one of the nation’s largest restaurant suppliers, with over 70 warehouse locations nationwide. But in order to truly compete in this modern digital age, you have to be represented online. That’s where the partnership between Durrani and The Restaurant Depot was launched. We’ve been with them from the beginning, designing and developing their first online storefront with MIVA Merchant version 4 and recently embarked on a design overhaul and major migration upgrade to MIVA Merchant 5.5. MIVA 5.5 provides online merchants with a ton of flexibility and expansion opportunity. The Restaurant Depot, online at TheRDStore.com, relies on Durrani to support their online store and product database of almost 10,000 products – one of the largest online restaurant equipment and supply retailers. 

 
But we didn’t stop with just their main online store. The latest and most exciting development with Restaurant Depot has been the creation of several prototype in-store kiosks, which feature a cloned version of their primary website and allow customers to easily search for available products both in store and online. This gives customers a much wider choice of equipment and supply items then just their local neighborhood warehouse can provide. If the Kiosk prototypes are successful, Restaurant Depot hopes to roll them out to most of their regional stores.  For us at Durrani, this project was a huge success for many reasons – one of which is that it demonstrates the strength of the MIVA Merchant e-commerce platform. Clients always ask us if MIVA is the right choice for their business and The RD Store is a great example that shows MIVA can keep up with the best of them and perform at an enterprise-level that will grow as big and as fast as your business.

We were recently quoted in the September 10th issue of the online newsletter Ecommerce Notes, by Practical Ecommerce. This is something we stress to clients all the time. Sometimes in the rush to get their site designed and launched, many overlook just the simple basics like having solid product descriptions and clear images.

“Image is everything and online shoppers need to come as close to touching and feeling a product as possible. You need to overcome the obstacle of customers not being able to experience your product, like they can in a retail store. Take time to present your products in the best possible way with clear and vibrant images and accurate descriptions."

Joe McDonald, Managing Partner, Durrani Design

Click here to view the full newsletter and learn more about Practical Ecommerce.

The team at Twitter has published a new online guide to help businesses wade through all of the chatter and confusion over how Twitter can be a useful resource for a business.

Twitter 101 takes you on a guided tour from “What is Twitter?” to the lingo and best practices.

From Twitter 101:

So what does Twitter do for businesses?

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

Here at Durrani Design, we have many conversations with many clients about how to best implement a social media strategy for their company and we are always available to help in person to fill in the gaps where the online guides, such as Twitter 101, leave off. Many business owners and managers can be overwhelmed or even intimidated at the prospect of tackling social media but the key is to just start off slow with small manageable pieces. Don’t try to become the social media king or queen overnight. Setup your Twitter account or Facebook accounts and just build them over time. Take the time to make your online identity credible, trustworthy and personable. If you are constantly pushing marketing or sales pitches without engaging in the online community, your followers will become bored and disengaged about you and your business. You need to participate and contribute to the community at large.

I know it’s hard to find the time. We are all maxed out with busy schedules and floods of information on a daily basis, but a methodical and consistent approach to social media will eventually be a rewarding investment for any business. Just a post here and a tweet there is all you need to do to eventually become a fully fledged social media guru that even your 13 year old will be proud of. Remember to be patient; there are no get popular overnight gimmicks. Be yourself online and your customers will follow.

I always tell people, building a social media campaign for your business is much like giving someone who is in trouble CPR, you don’t always know what you’re doing, but doing something… doing anything, is better then doing nothing at all.

Click here to read the Twitter 101 Guide For Business.

Sometime last year, I heard some rumblings on the web about a cool new online phone service called Grand Central (www.grandcentral.com). The lure was that you get your very own personal phone number and get to keep it for life. You could setup personal voicemail and have your calls forwarded to any other number. At the time, the rumblings I was hearing were complaints from the existing user base because Grand Central had reorganized and broken their prime directive – that you keep your number for life. They were arbitrarily reassigning new phone numbers to many of their loyal users. The dust settled and shortly thereafter a new story hit the wire that Google had acquired Grand Central. During this period I had signed up for my own account, not quite sure how I would use it, but needing it none-the-less because I am a sponge for the launch of anything new that is technology related. The other reason I thought I might find it useful was that I had moved to San Diego from Seattle and had kept my Seattle phone number. In a world where almost everyone is now on a cell phone and long distance calling is a non-issue, I didn’t see a reason to change, but occasionally have a local number can definitely be handy with business.

Now fast forward several months to this week when Google announced the re-launch of the Grand Central service as Google Voice. As an existing Grand Central user, I was happily surprised to receive an invite to upgrade my account. Google has kept everything that was good about Grand Central and turbo charged it with a few new features. Among my favorites are call routing – forwarding phones to different numbers based on who is calling; sending, receiving and storing SMS messages – independent of your cell phone provider; voicemail transcripts – Google translates your voicemails into emails; listen to voicemail, store and forward voicemail online; and several more very cool features.

Here is a run-down of the new service courtesy of the Google Voice website:

Google number – One number for all your calls and SMS

• Call screening – Announce and screen callers
• Listen in – Listen before taking a call
• Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
• SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
• Place calls – Call US numbers for free
• Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
• Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
• Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring

Google voicemail – Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts

• Voicemail transcripts – Read what your voicemail says
• Listen to voicemail – Check online or from your phone
• Notifications – Receive voicemails via email or SMS
• Personalize greeting – Vary greetings by caller
• Share voicemail – Forward or download voicemails

Voice features – More cool things you can do with Google Voice

• Conference calling – Join people into a single call
• Call record – Record calls and store them online
• Call switch – Switch phones during a call
• Mobile site – View your inbox from your mobile
• GOOG-411 – Check directory assistance
• Manage groups – Set preferences by group

There are several other service providers out there that already provide some of these features but they require paid subscriptions and many don’t include all of the services in one nice package. I previously subscribed to services such as GotVoice to have my voicemails recorded as MP3 files and emailed to me, which I really liked, but I didn’t have enough call volume to really justify the monthly fees.

I’m excited about the possibilities of using Google Voice. Now the only thing I’m faced with is figuring out how to wedge the new Google Voice service into my existing workflow so I can take advantage of the cool upgrades. Visual voicemail with my iPhone is light years ahead of the old dialup voicemail, but it is very nice to just read the transcript via email or text while in or on your way to a meeting.

There’s no official word yet on when the service will open up for all new subscribers, but the Google website says “soon”.

Clients often ask how to customize the little logo for their website that appears in their web browser tabs, title bars and bookmark lists. This little icon is called a “favicon” and is 16 pixels by 16 pixels. Here are some familiar examples.

Some people try and create the actual 16 x 16 graphic by hand using Photoshop, but editing at that small level of detail can be difficult and you often end up with a blurry and pixelated square.

Here’s a quick and easy shortcut to creating your own custom favicon for your website or blog. Find any square graphic that you want to use as your favicon. Ideally, this graphic is a larger, detailed graphic, around 200 pixels by 200 pixels, such as our Durrani “D” graphic that we use for our logo mark, pictured here to the right. Any image you want to use is fine and can be a .jpg, .gif or .png file type.

Then just go to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/, browse to your graphic and click the button to generate your favicon. You can even optionally animate your graphic. The generated favicon file will be a compressed ZIP file that you can download to your computer and extract.

Transfer (FTP) the favicon.ico file that you downloaded, to the root folder of your website (the main public directory). A web browser automatically looks for the favicon.ico file when it loads your website and if found, will use it instead of the Internet Explorer or Firefox default icon. Now when someone visits or bookmarks your website, your new graphic will show up as the custom icon and will give your site a unique branding to stand out from the rest.

We used the “D” graphic above to create our site favicon. Here’s what the final image now looks like in a web browser:

One quick note – web browsers typically store or “cache” these files in a temporary folder on your computer each time you visit a website, so in order to get your new favicon file to show up, you might have to close and reopen your browser and/or clear out your browser temporary internet files. You can also try pressing the CTRL key and F5 key at the same time to force the page to load from scratch and refresh the all content and images.

That’s all there is to it. So go make your website bookmark and browser tab stand out from the rest with your new custom favicon.

A LinkedIn member posted a question in the "Answers" section, which read:

What is the average cost of developing a commercial website? (without hosting and domain name cost)

I have heard it can range from $1500 – $30,000.
What have you experienced?

As a website design agency, we are faced with this question daily. I took a few minutes to reply at the LinkedIn site and have reposted my answer here below. I think it’s an important question and something every business should consider.

Reply via Linkedin.

The secret question you are asking is, "What’s the best deal I can get, if I’m going to build a website for my business?". Don’t get me wrong, it’s a legitimate question. As the previous response stated, it depends on what you’re asking for. The range of complexity in web design is huge. Ask yourself, what do you want your website to do? What is the intended action I want a visitor to take when they visit my website? You don’t need a large-scale commercial website built using Flash if you are really just trying to sell a simple product… unless you are Sony, it’s wasted money.
If you were going to build a new house, would your first question to the builder be "What is the average cost of building a new house for my family?" We probably wouldn’t think of asking a simple question like that without first considering what your purpose for building the house is. How many rooms, is it for a family, what is the growth expected, will you need more rooms in a couple years (before you intend on building a new house) etc. Websites require no less planning then this. Sure, lots of 16 year old kids are running around building websites these days and you could get a great deal. But they are building websites… not businesses. Will your website convert on the goal you have set? I would sit down with someone who will help you think through your plan for your commercial website, not just what software you should use and how much it will cost. You could spend a ton of money and still not get the website you need, or you could spend a moderate amount and get your perfect online business. You get what you pay for these days. Not all websites are created equal. I’ve built many websites for $1500, as long as it fits the client’s needs.
Just remember, you are building a business, not a website. A website should fit snugly into your overall business objectives.
As they used to say in the days of dirt roads and horse drawn wagons… "choose your rut carefully… you’re going to be in it for the next 30 miles."

If you’re a member of LinkedIn, you can connect to me at: www.linkedin.com/in/durranijoe

Setting up your digital office can be expensive. Many new businesses fall into the trap of thinking they have to setup a complete office environment to appear legitimate to their clients. One of the major startup expenses is the office phone system. Setting up a business line from the local telephone company can cost upwards of a $100 or more with taxes and fees as well as installation costs lumped on, and that’s just for a single line. Setting up a multiple extension phone system with voicemail and fax capabilities is an entirely different investment and can end up being several hundreds of dollars in phone equipment and extension routing software.

It’s important to spend your often limited resources on useful technology and functional things that actually serve a useful purpose to your startup business. That’s where voice-over IP (VOIP) or internet based telephone systems come in. At Durrani, technology is our business, so we are always looking for ways to implement new technologies that help our business run more efficiently.

We examined several services and decided upon RingCentral.com.With RingCentral.com our basic monthly subscription gives us up to 5 configurable extensions, a unified voice and fax line, voicemail on each extension, an automated attendant (a virtual operator that greets callers and allows them to select an extension or leave voice messages) and the ability to forward incoming calls to several other numbers, such as a cell phone, in sequential order or simultaneously. The service also includes a PC application that resides on your desktop so you can answer calls (with a headset) and monitor voicemail and fax messages. Each person with an extension can completely configure their own services down to the hours they want their phone to ring and how many rings it should ring for. Take for example my extension #101. I have it setup to ring on my office desktop first, then rollover to my cell phone. If I don’t pick up the call on either my desktop or cell phone, it rolls over to my RingCentral.com voicemail. I then get an email and optional text message notifying me of the new voicemail.

The system also automatically detects incoming faxes and converts them to your choice of document format, such as a PDF, TIFF, or JPG. And the fax gets emailed to your email account. You can also setup your desktop computer to automatically send any incoming faxes directly to an office printer. Faxes can also be directly sent to an individual extension number.

Any optional toll free numbers associated to your account are completely integrated to your system. Inbound calls can be routed to any extension or office phone. We have several 800 numbers (which only run about $5 per line per month) and we have them routed to separate office phones with unique voicemail systems to take messages and deliver them to designated staff.

RingCentral.com lets you manage your office and client communications virtually from everywhere. Not only is it significantly less expensive then traditional phone systems, it’s smarter and more convenient. All for less then $50 a month.

There are many other features we won’t get into here, but you can get your own free 30 day trial by clicking the banner below. Once you try RingCentral.com you won’t look back.