One of the most powerful features of Miva Merchant is the ability to customize every aspect of the look and feel for every page of your store. Miva Merchant gives you full control for every design element through what Miva calls “Pages.” Pages are essentially different templates for different parts of your store. The storefront has its own page and so does the category page and the product page. A default Miva installation has 39 different pages. Each of these pages contains the HTML and SMT (Store Morph Technology–A fancy word for Miva Code–more on this later) that generate the way the page looks in the browser. Not only can you customize all the existing pages of Miva but you can also create unlimited new pages for things like About Us, Contact Us, policy pages or any other content pages you would want to add to your ecommerce store.
Miva Merchant Ecommerce Blog
The Miva Merchant conference is just days away in San Diego, California which is truly a dream destination. Make sure you reward yourself with some fun and relaxation during your visit. Today I am going to highlight some of the activities and places you may want to visit on your business trip.
Arriving Early
Arriving in San Diego before Wednesday offers both business and pleasure activities to those seeking adventure.
When Miva Merchant 5.5 Production Release 6 was released back on July 28, 2009, there were numerous updates and changes. One of the new items added was a page called NTFD (Not Found). From the release announcement, “The software now routes requests for pages, products, or categories that do not exist to this page.”
By default, the page takes on whatever your site’s basic styling is and will relate the following messages based on the request that was made:
- Page: Page ‘xx’ no longer exists.
- Category: Category ‘xx’ is not available at this time.
- Product: Product ‘xx’ is not available at this time.
Now this is all fine, it tells that what I had a link for is no longer available. But what do I do now? If it was a link for a product, are there any replacements or suggestions for it? It would be great to have a little guidance in this area. This is where some creative IF statements come in handy. Use the code below to replace the default NTFD page code and turn your response messages into something more useful like…
Greetings,
I was planning on writing a post on troubleshooting. However, it quickly became more of a treatise…so while I figure out how to break it down into digestible chunks, I’d like to share three great tools (Firefox plugins) that I can’t live without these days.
Two are old standbys that haven’t caught on with the Miva Merchant world, the other is a new (at least to me) plugin that is an answer to a daily (ok, hourly) prayer.
First of all, if you are not using Firefox, stop reading this blog right now and get it. No, and I mean NO store owner, developer, designer should be using anything else for work. (Of course, you’ll want to have other browsers on hand for testing what the great unwashed experience.) Fire Fox is a vastly superior tool: whether it’s a better browser or not I won’t argue about, but for working on sites, there is no comparison.
Read More...A major benefit to displaying social network icons on your site is that your customers can instantaneously give feedback about your site or products in the exact moment it occurs to them, before they are distracted to something else. Here’s a social media icon set I have created. I’m happy to make it available for all Miva Merchant blog readers to download and use for free. Enjoy!
This is a guest post by Susan Petracco of NetBlazon. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Miva Merchant.
I’ve been designing and building e-commerce sites using Miva Merchant since 1999. Baby have we come a long way since then! In those days, many e-commerce sites looked strikingly similar to every other e-commerce site…and not in a good way. We’re not talking usability conventions…we’re talking boring. Part of the cause was simply a lack of evolution of the web. But it was also hard to implement a creative design using older versions of Miva Merchant (or any other e-commerce package) back then. Fast-forward to 2010 and things have changed drastically for the better.
Besides running, the worst part about a race is not being able to see the finish line. It’s the same for checking out on an ecommerce store. Users should feel as though they are making progress, not just filling out endless forms. Unless your shoppers are Bear Grylls (if they are, awesome), they are going to want to know where they are at all times. The easiest way to do it during checkout is using a checkout progress bar. Here are some best practices to follow when designing a checkout progress bar.
Start by Showing a Secure Connection
A secure connection is a major make-or-break factor when it comes to ecommerce. If a user doesn’t see the lock, they will be uncomfortable putting in their information, and most likely leave your site to shop somewhere else. If you are creating a checkout progress bar, why not start by showing them that their information is safe?
Are you ready for a sneak peek at the fancy shirt all of the Miva Merchant conference attendees get? Hold on tight because this post is for you! Before we get to the shirts though, make sure you check out the new Miva Merchant home page http://www.mivamerchant.com/
Your Opinion Counts
The past few months have been extremely busy with the holidays, the upcoming Miva Merchant Conference 2010 and redesigning our home page to be better for existing Miva Merchant customers and also for new visitors to the site. Be sure to give your constructive feedback because we’re monitoring the analytics data and reactions to make the site even better.
Despite the complexity of shopping cart software, a goal of Miva Merchant is to make store building easier for designers, developers and store owners without compromising the flexibility necessary for ebusiness.
Ten months ago, Preston, a member of our web design & development team, moved over to the software development team responsible for building the core Miva Merchant platform. Today I share with you some new discoveries and great advancements that resulted from the crossover, hopefully to make your store creation, testing and maintenance easier.
Many e-commerce stores are either completely run by one person, the owner, or have a very small staff. Without a large staff, many merchants find themselves adding new product images and making promotional banners for their online store.
Without any formal web design training, store owners figure things out as they go. There are a lot of great online tutorials and other resources; however, the majority of store owners are not web or graphic designers. Today I want to share some fundamentals of proper product image formatting so you can avoid common design mistakes. I promise not to use any big words or confusing design phrases.
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