Last week I was asked to write a blog post for the Miva Merchant E-commerce Blog. Susan Petracco of NetBlazon had recently written a fabulous article 15 Gorgeous E-commerce Designs Leveraging Miva Merchant and I was asked to do something similar. I wanted to keep it fun so I started with a few “fun” Miva Merchant sites that I was familiar with. Then a title came to me while searching for additional sites to include – “Fun, Fur, and Feathers” became the working title for the blog post I was working on.
Using a few related keywords and combining it with “merchant.mvc” I was able to find numerous sites that fell into my thought process. Fun sites – toys for kids, toys for grown ups (the G-rated kind). Fur sites – great stuff for dogs and cats.
For feather sites, I already knew of something unique, unusual, and fun – Avian Fashions – Home of the Revolutionary Bird Diaper, the FlightSuit! I have know about this feathers site for over ten years now. It has always been loaded with fun. The site has great step-by-step cartoons that guide you through how to put their product – a bird diaper – on your bird. They make use of video clips, a blog and Twitter, how could that not be considered fun?
While I was hunting for furry sites, another “F” type site came to mind – Faith. Perhaps because I have had the opportunity to work on a Priest’s site, a Rabbi’s site, a Deacon’s site, a group of Nun’s and to work at EWTN – the largest religious media network in the world. So I search for a few sites of faith that also used Miva Merchant.
I found myself narrowing my list of sites down to 15 to keep the post manageable. Some of sites didn’t play nicely with ScreenGrab so I resorted to my most favor key combination on a Mac ?-shift-4 which let me drag and capture the portion of my screen that I wanted.
With text and images completed, I submitted my article for publication. It is with great pleasure, I share with you Get Smart – 15 Fun & Quirky Ecommerce Designs*
*it should be noted my submitted title was Finding Fun, Fur and Feathers using Miva Merchant
My only disappointment at AmericasMart Atlanta was the lack of wifi availiblity. I had wanted to be able to show people what we were talking about, so I toted both my laptop and my iPod Touch. I figured an event that touted “Project Social” would have wanted to make sure that all means of access were available. I was able to tweet and post to Facebook via text message but the true interaction was lost because I didn’t have a “smart phone” with a data plan (not really a smart thing to have when you don’t have a job). I did try hunting for the wifi signal, but if it wasn’t where I was trying to explain the benefits of Facebook and Twitter it wasn’t worth the snipe hunt.
It was a fun time catching up with old friends and even other users of Miva Merchant. How could I not have a good time, wearing a hat like this? It was a great promotional giveaway for a new company – 