Check out these E-Commerece sites designed by Sumy Designs.
![[Bloglines]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
![[Digg]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Google]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[kirtsy]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/kirtsy.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Twitter]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://sumydesigns.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
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Check out the new blog masthead for Runner Leana. She just finished the Walt Disney World Marathon with a 26 plus minute PR! Way to go Leana.
It is still not too late to order your custom masthead from The Masthead Factory. The discount is in affect until January 31st. Just select custom masthead and enter the code HOLIDAY at checkout.
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Check out the new blog masthead design for Kona Shelley.
It’s not too late to order your custom masthead from the Masthead Factory. Enter the code HOLIDAY at check out and receive $15.00 off. You can’t beat $35.00 for a custom masthead.
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We’re very excited to create this logo design for The Mac Sports. A new indoor sports facility in the Dallas/Fort Worth area specializing in Volleyball and Basketball. Stay tuned for their new web site design.
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I was very excited to get the chance to work with Julie of mothergoosemouse.com on one of her projects, Parent Bloggers Network. They were ready for a fresh clean look for their blog, and I think we delivered. Go ahead over and check itout!
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Follow June on her journey to qualify to the Boston Marathon. Long Runs, Speed Training, Hard Work, Determination, Blood, Sweat, Tears and a few Martinis. Sounds like fun to me!
And don’t forget mastheads are $15.00 off until the end of January. You can’t beat $35.00 for a custom masthead for your blog or web site!
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I was thrilled to be contacted by Maria at Banana Blossom Press about revising her site. She needed to upgrade her shopping cart to something more functional and user and admin friendly. We did a complete site overall and I am really pleased with the turnout.
Banana Blossom Press sells the neatest line of fitness related greeting cards. Uncomplicated cards is their logo, and it fits. Elegant cards for every running or other fitness related occasion. Take a few minutes and peruse their collecion! It’s really great.
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Since I’ve been doing web design, I’ve dabbled in different shopping carts. Originally I started with OsCommerce. And in fact, my very first OsCommerce shop is still open and running. (And doing quite well. Check them out for all your fondant needs.)
Of course, OsCommerce is great because it’s free, but learning to design in OsCommerce is quite a challenge. I quickly moved on to CRE Loaded. I have liked CRE Loaded for the most part. It’s admin is very user friendly. I can design it fairly easily. It’s been missing SEO URLs, which are updated in the most recent release, and the one page checkout is in the works.
Still, it doesn’t have any built in analytics. There isn’t a good gift certificate or gift order module. Styling the confirmation emails is a hassle and formatting the product layout is hard as well. The forums are well populated so finding help usually isn’t too hard.
In the past year, I’ve had a client who wanted to use PDG Soft. She liked it because it would sync with Quickbooks POS and update all her products and keep a real time inventory. This is mostly true. It did update with Quickbooks POS with a web connector, but the web connector has been unreliable. The photos did not update, those had to be updated separately. The thumbnail generated by POS was too tiny, and I had to manually resize almost every image to make it fit without being disproportionate.
Then SEO URLs was a disaster with PDG. I spent hours and hours doing mod rewrites to get them functioning. There’s only a spot for one image per product, and you can only put each product in one category. The one plus with PDG is that their tech support is quite good, although I’ve trade more than a few frustrated emails.
I would definitely not go with PDG for another client, and am looking for alternatives. What shopping carts have you used? What have been your most important features?
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When we recently redesigned the Sumy Designs website, we purposely went with an all HTML/CSS site instead of a more complex content management system. Our old site was a Joomla site, and I liked it quite well, but I felt like a lot of the features were not really needed for this kind of site. What I really needed was a way to get our information and rates out there, show our portfolio, and allow people to contact us. Using an all HTML/CSS site had the added plus of being able to have 100% search engine optimization with SEO URLs, excellently formed page titles, and good meta data.
The one drawback, though, is that we’ve had a terrible time with contact form spam! The robots have found our site, and we are getting hit daily, repeatedly.
Originally, I made the fields all required, so that anyone skipping a field would not be able to submit. But the ‘bots got too smart for that, and just started filling in all the fields.
I know there are options such as Captcha out there. But this isn’t friendly to visually impaired users and also, it doesn’t look good. So I sought out alternatives.
The one I ended up going with was adding a quick little field that asks users to answer a simple question, such as “What is 1+1?” If they answer anything but 2, then they can’t submit.
I just implemented it today, so I will report back later with my success or failure. See my contact form here. See the instructions here.
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