Our lights and home furnishings are designed with our own high standards in mind. We believe that good, solid design is found in the ironic joining together of contrasting elements, simple lines and luscious colors. You can see the exchange of light and darkness, strength and delicacy, edge and elegance at play in all of our products.

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Can you please tell us some background about your store? We started the lighting part of our business in 2005 on Miva 4. I had experience with Miva before that as a partner developer at NetObjects and was impressed with the extensibility with plug-in modules. What were you looking for in an online shopping cart system? Customization and ability to add on features through third-party modules. I knew that I would never be happy with an off-the-shelf closed system and tried a few open source varieties to find that they were under-supported.

What do you believe is the greatest advantage of Miva Merchant? With Miva 5, the biggest advantage to us is to be able to dive into the code for each page and really customize it so that we can make it do whatever we want. We study a lot of other ecommerce sites from companies that are 100 to 1000 times our size and in many cases, we can pull off the same tricks with an in-house customization, a plug-in, or a customization done by an outside partner.

Niche Modern Lighting Stats: Launch Date: Miva 4 – 2005 Miva 5.5 – May 2010 – we really started refocusing on our website when we transitioned to 5.5. This was a huge change for us. Our HTML output is much cleaner, although we still have a way to go and want to next devote some time to new wombat features and moving to CSS-based layouts. Product Count: Around 80 Web Host: CybrHost is our webhost, and they are integral part of our success. We have a dedicated virtual server with them. Not only are they nice people to work with (Matt, Gary and Justin), their response times are phenomenal. I’ve actually had problems solved by CybrHost within 90 seconds of putting in a trouble ticket. In a world where bad service has become the norm, it is really easy to take even mediocre service for granted. I’m blown away when I receive such accurate and quick responses because our website is critical to all of our customers, regardless of whether they buy online or not, they are all still coming to the website for research. Who designed & built the store?: We do a lot of it in-house, even though we only have 6 people on staff (2 partners and 4 employees). Myself and my assistant are the only ones touching the website or marketing. We also rely on Gary Hodder and CybrHost for additional support, as well as Kemper Strategic for things that are too tricky for us to do in-house. Our site also wouldn’t be the way it is without support from 3rd party module vendors. We extensively use Product Page and Category Page template modules from Sebenza and a host of other modules from Emporium Plus.