This is a guest post by Forrest Yingling the Marketing Director for WebNet Hosting, a Premier Partner with Miva Merchant and providers of Basic Web Hosting and Business Web Hosting solutions. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Miva Merchant.

Your Host is Your Foundation

It’s easy for online business operators to forget that the company hosting their store plays a key role in their business success. Beyond the obvious factors, such as minimized downtime, maximized site speed and good technical support, your host company should be able to offer you numerous other advantages, such as personal attention, the ability to grow with your business and other factors that will be discussed in this post.  When searching for a web host, remember that finding the company with the cheapest price is not the goal.  Paying a higher fee for better service and more dependability is ultimately the smartest decision.  Conversely, the most expensive company is by no means going to be the best either.

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Are you looking for an easy, fast and affordable way to get your products listed in Google Product Search, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber.com and more? Watch the recorded webinar below to find out how to submit, manage, and optimize product listings on the top comparison shopping sites through a single data feed.

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Heather Dawson, Chief Customer Officer at Runa, details how you can use Runa on your Miva Merchant store to double your profits without increasing traffic. In addition, Rick Wilson, President & COO of Miva Merchant recaps the announcements made at the 2010 Miva Merchant conference.

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During years of working with the Miva Merchant software to build beautiful and powerful online stores, the web design and development team at Miva Merchant have accumulated a set of tools, tricks and tips we use daily to make development quicker and life easier.  Here are 8 of our most helpful tips, tricks and tools for building Miva Merchant Stores.

1. Start with a Framework

Frameworks are a new feature in Miva Merchant 5.5. They allow you to save all the page templates into a single package and upload them to any store. If you are a web developer and you build multiple Miva Merchant stores for yourself or your clients, you need to start with a framework. A framework allows you to customize the checkout process, login pages and other common pages only once and gives you the ability to reuse them over and over. Having this solid foundation to build on will greatly reduce development time and get your project off to a fast start.

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Do you want to double your profits this year? Join Heather Dawson (Runa) and Rick Wilson (Miva Merchant) for a webinar on how to grow sales without increasing search marketing spend. In addition, you get key highlights of the Miva Merchant Conference from Rick Wilson; so if you missed the conference make sure you register for the webinar on Thursday, March 25 @ 10:30 AM PDT.

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In this episode of Matt’s Musings (episode 2), we’re talking about forgetfulness. Okay, so I’ll admit it, the default functions of the Miva customer log in page are a bit lacking. The forgotten password operation is confusing and there is no built-in way to help with a lost user name.

Well that all changes now. Today I am going to show you how, with a little HTML, JavaScript and the Tool Kit module, you can have a fully functional log in process that just needs your CSS applied. Included are versions for both Miva 5.5 and Miva 5.5 Wombat. Just copy each section and paste it into the appropriate regions of your LOGN page.

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This is a guest post by Leslie Kirk, owner of http://www.lesliekirk.com/. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Miva Merchant.

I have been part of the Miva Merchant Community since 1998 not only as a developer/integrator, but also an online shopper. When I go shopping online, I always try to look for a Miva Merchant store as a small way to give back to the community. I also like to look around to see how Miva Merchant is being used to offer variety of products and services. While looking around for my own shopping needs I found a few sites that left me thinking “why didn’t I think of that?” when looking at the products being offered.

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Once you have your template designed, you need to prepare the graphics to be implemented within the Miva Merchant CSS framework. My last post talked about how to design a template. Now we will get into cutting up that template into usable images. The items designed to be customized include the logo, top header background, search button, phone number, top navigation bar, left navigation bar, promotion graphic, featured products section, best sellers section, and footer.

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With CSS3 on the slow rise and Internet Explorer 6 on the (painfully slow) downfall, most of the time we as developers and designers are forced to use individual images for each button if we want cross-browser friendly, good looking buttons. Especially when it comes to ecommerce, this can sometimes add up to 20+ images. You’ve got buttons for Login, Checkout, Express Checkout, Update, Remove etc.

There are a few different ways to get around this. You see that rule book? Go ahead and throw it out the window. ANYTHING GOES IN ALEX’S KITCHEN.

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How do you combine online & offline branding for maximum exposure? Conferences, trade shows and local meet up groups are all great ways to increase your brand awareness so today’s store spotlight focuses on leveraging promotional items in your marketing mix.

People love free schwag so Victor Hopson, owner of The Imprint Store, helps you spread your brand to every corner of the earth with everything from common promotional pens to out-of-the-ordinary tools like an imprinted hammer that you can loan your trade show neighbor for booth setup assistance (or keep them in check!).

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