Durrani Design » MIVA 5.5

A Virtual Facelift for Flip N Fit

Joe — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:59:15 +0000

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.

The RD Store MIVA E-Commerce Redesign

Joe — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:51:11 +0000

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.

Finding Your Inner ZEN and Looking Good – The Launch of The New ZENsei Website

Joe — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce the launch of our latest web design project at ZENsei.com. ZENsei, a fellow local Encinitas business, joined Durrani as a client in the fall of 2008. At that time, they were struggling underneath the burden of an online store that was difficult to maintain and update, where months would go by before they were able get new product clothing lines posted on the site. They also wanted to create a fresh new Flash introduction to really showcase the rich details of their fashions. As we’ve said before, image is everything and online shoppers need to come as close to touching and feeling a product as possible or else you won’t get the sale. As an online retailer, you need to overcome the obstacle of your customers not being able to experience your product like they can in a retail store.

We started by creating a large expanding view flash runway for each of their seasonal collections to show each item in multiple full-size detailed views. This allows customers to really get in and experience the fashion. After launching the flash runway, we went right in to work on redesigning the website to match.

Part of the problem with the original ZENsei website was that it was built in osCommerce. Now, we’ve used osCommerce ourselves and it is a popular open-source shopping cart platform but, in our experience, for every benefit it has from being free and open source, there are equally as many negatives for maintaining it and trying to build a business with it. We’ll save the osCommerce versus other systems discussion for another day, but for ZENsei we put them into our favorite shopping cart of choice, MIVA Merchant 5.5. MIVA is an extremely extendable and expandable system will grow with any size company. The source design templates are simple to work with and maintaining the integrity of the core system files and maintaining security is much much more efficient.

So, after a few months of work, we have now launched the new website. At Durrani we are firm believers in rapid application development, which simply means getting the site up quickly so it is functional, operational and making money (or serving the other business goals you have set). You can always polish the look and tweak the fonts and colors and graphics once the site is live, but all to often, sites get delayed for too long to get things just perfect. Of course, we don’t ever want to merely launch buggy or poor quality work, but there is a right time to go live and we get there quickly.

The economy is bad and continues to get worse. This is no time for businesses to roll into a ball and crawl under a rock. The marketing work you do now and plans you put in place will all be much stronger when the economy bounces back.

We invite you to sit back, relax and browse through the NEW ZENsei.com.