June 6, 2010 in Blog by admin

10 Reasons Why I Prefer the Miva Merchant Shopping Cart

I have been working with Miva Merchant for over seven years as a user, a consultant, and now as owner of MerchantTutorials.com, a Miva Merchant Flash Video Tutorial site and Miva Merchant Educational Partner. Why do I prefer Miva Merchant over other shopping carts, especially when some carts are “free?” Here are my 10 reasons:

1. With hundreds of third party modules available (usually for $20 to $100), adding functionality is extremely easy. Alternatively, most platforms, especially open source, require custom programming or, worse, have free open source add-ons that are not supported well.
2. Miva Merchant can be hosted with any of dozens of hosts who specialize in Miva Merchant. Many platforms require you to host with the company itself, reducing your options and leverage for support. Additionally, if you’re hosted with a shopping cart company, and they die, your store is gone forever. All good Miva Merchant hosts will move your site to their servers at no charge.
   
3. Miva Merchant is one of only a few platforms who are investing the hundreds of thousands of dollars to be PCI PA-DSS Compliant by the July 2010 deadline. Any platform that is not compliant will not be able to (legally) accept credit cards after that deadline. Many shopping carts, especially open source, will have to close up after the deadline. http://www.tophosts.com/articles/009189.html
4. Miva Merchant 5.5 is based on MySQL, which is much better than the dBase database format of version 4. It allows unlimited numbers of products, categories, customers, etc., without a loss of site speed. Sites on Miva Merchant 5.5 are significantly faster than the prior version.
5. Most other platforms are written in PHP. This commonality has made PHP applications a target for hackers. All PHP applications, like WordPress, need updates constantly. Usually a security flaw is discovered only after hundreds or thousands of sites are compromised. Miva Merchant is written in their proprietary language (MivaScript), and then compiled so nobody can see the source code. I have not heard of a single security vulnerability with Miva Merchant 5.5.
6. Done right, Miva Merchant can be easily understood from one developer to the next. So, if something happened to your site developer, you could find someone else in the industry who can get in and, within an hour or two, know everything about your site’s setup. With most other platforms, there would be so much custom functionality you’re pretty much forced to use the same developer, and it’s expensive to pay a new developer to reverse engineer his code.
7. Some carts actually charge a percentage of all sales, leading often to hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in fees. This is especially true of Yahoo Stores and Amazon. With Miva Merchant, you can lease your license through a Miva Merchant expert host usually for less than $10 a month when you host with them.
8. Miva Merchant has a dynamic user and developer community that is willing to help with almost any question at the user forums and/or directly. I learned all I needed about Miva Merchant from other users (since my tutorials were not available), so I contribute back as much as I can on the forums. Competing developers, hosts and consultants are very cordial to each other, unlike any other community I’ve seen. This makes the annual Miva Merchant user conference as enjoyable as any conference I’ve ever been to.
   
9. Once you get used to it, Miva Merchant is extremely easy to manage. Check out this video tour of the Miva Merchant administrative area I created to help you see how quickly you could be up to speed.
10. Miva Merchant is extremely flexible. It defaults to a base structure – header, footer, left column navigation, content section, navigation bar…
    
    But you are not stuck with that structure like most carts. There is simply no limit to how you can customize your store with Miva Merchant. Check out the Miva Merchant Store Galleria and you’ll see what I mean. If you are not a designer, you can purchase one of dozens of Miva Merchant skins to get your foundation quickly, and be online with minimal work.

Do you have reasons I haven’t listed, or even reasons you don’t like Miva Merchant?

NOTE: This article was first posted at http://www.chucklasker.com/blog/.

June 6, 2010 in Blog by admin

Rare Discovery – A Legitimate SEO Consultant!

Let’s face it, SEO “experts” are a dime a dozen, mainly because anyone can say they are an expert in SEO. My experience is that probably 95% (maybe more) of people and companies that say they can help you with search engine optimization are either idiots or scammers.

Most of these so-called experts use either black hat methods (immoral methods that can get you banned) or techniques that are so outdated they include something called the “keyword meta tag.” It’s like taking your plasma television to a repair shop and they tell you they may have to replace the “picture tube.”

So it’s very difficult to get SEO help. Additionally, the best SEO work is done by the site owner/manager who knows the target market and the product/service/subject better than any consultant could. That leaves you with a high-risk hiring of a consultant, or spending 10 hours a day becoming an expert yourself. Ugh.

Enter John Limbocker of SEO Dominators.

This is John in the black t-shirt having lunch with me and some others at the 2010 Miva Merchant Conference.

I met John a few years ago at a Miva Merchant conference, and really got to know him over the past year. When I reached a point where I trusted John, I signed up for his SEO Bootcamp. Expecting pap and platitudes, I was completely shocked to find powerful tools, realistic advice, weekly teleconferences where I can ask questions, and advice that actually makes sense. And for Miva Merchant users – John understands Miva Merchant!

I referred John to a friend of mine with a retail site and she has done nothing but sing his praises. “Yes, we’ve been pretty busy. I can only rave about John Limbocker, I give most of that credit to him. I can unconditionally recommend him and his services without reservation. Without John, I think we would have been in a lot of trouble this year.”

John offered a 50% off coupon for his SEO Dominators Club. He has kindly decided to extend that offer for me to post on my blog, here.

Just enter coupon code MIVA at checkout

Then let me know about YOUR experience with SEO Dominators.

NOTE: This was first posted at http://www.MerchantTutorials.com/blog/.

June 6, 2010 in Blog by admin

Are You Alienating the Color Blind?

Up to 10% of males have trouble navigating your site.

Scary, right? It may not be true if you’re using colors with color blindness usability in mind. But most designers ignore this huge segment of the population. And color blind people notice – and vote with their wallets – when a site uses poor color choices, especially with navigation.

From Usability Interface, Accommodating Color Blindness: There are two major types of color blindness. The most prevalent causes are confusion between red and green. This type affects approximately eight to ten percent of the male population. In another type, an additional one to two Percent of men suffer from a deficiency in perceiving blue/yellow differences. Less than one percent of women suffer from any form of color blindness.

Odds are you have a friend or relative who is color blind. You may not notice because in reality it should be named “color weak.” Only 0.005% of the population is truly color blind, meaning they see mono-chromatically. The rest have varying degrees of perception deficiency. The vast majority of the color weak have red-green deficiency. If you’re interested in knowing more about color blindness, go to WeAreColorBlind.com.

Life as a “Color Blind American”

Most people will be surprised to find out that I am color weak. Yet I design logos, graphics, web sites, etc. It sounds like it could be a problem, but I have adapted. On the positive side, my designs are automatically color blind accessible. Then, I use tools like Photoshop’s color picker, online color wheels for recommended color combinations, and the eyes of my son, wife, or anyone else nearby. It is common for me to say to someone, “can I borrow your eyes?” You’ll also notice my logos all look good in black and white, which should always be the case anyway since people still print with black and white laser printers.

Okay, I'm wearing white contacts in this photo.

Before I was diagnosed as a child, I had trouble in school. I colored in trees either all brown or all green – trunk and leaves. Same with grass. My kindergarten teacher used Color Phonics to teach reading, and they had decided I was learning-disabled until my mother decided to teach me how to read old-school style with books and practice. Even knowing I was color weak, my 7th grade art teacher failed me for not getting color wheel questions correct on a test. And I can’t tell a live lawn from a dead lawn.

A perfect example of a color blindness usability failure is traffic lights. Red-yellow-green is the worst combination possible. I use the position of the lights – the top is red, the middle is yellow, the bottom is green. Heading towards a flashing red or a flashing yellow, I don’t know which it is, so I don’t know whether to slow down or stop. Do you use the red-yellow-green paradigm for navigational instructions on your site?

Most of the time when I tell someone I’m color blind, they start testing me. “What color is this shirt,” “what color is that wall?” There’s usually a lot of laughter and wonder, then an uncomfortable moment when the person realizes they might be offending me. Don’t worry – it’s not like asking someone in a wheelchair, “can you climb these steps,” “can you jump over this box?” Color blindness is mostly just an inconvenience – unless we’re broadsided while running a red light we thought was yellow!

My online experience is similar. Many many sites use color as visual cues for navigation and presentation of information. I often will be stymied while browsing. If it’s bad enough, I leave the site completely, usually angry. I find the worst offenders to be Christmas sites – with all that red and green all over the place. It’s enough to make me a Grinch. Here are some examples:

Jeffrey Veen Blog – There’s links somewhere in the paragraphs. I didn’t know that until someone told me.

Gizmodo – This pie chart is a good example of an unusable graphic for the color blind.

Want to see a graphic that will knock out every color blind person? The person who did this should be slapped. Physically. Then fired. (See the anger I was talking about?)

Design Best Practices

The key to visibility for the color blind is color contrast. Colors on the opposite ends of the spectrum are the most contrasting. Black and white is the best example. A good way to start a design is to use gray scale. Then, add colors for interest, always keeping in mind contrast, especially regarding usability elements, like navigation and buttons.

Don’t use colors to differentiate links from non-links. Use the universally accepted underline.

Don’t use color as your sole visual cue in presenting information. Colors are okay, but additional cues, such as shapes or arrows, help. Here’s an excellent example of well done charts, where they connect the legend to the chart, so color vision is not required to understand the information.

Use bright, bold colors. Color weak people can see colors, they just have trouble differentiating between certain hues. Put orange and red together, or green text on red, and you’re courting trouble.

Tools

The best tool is to find some color blind friends to look at your designs and tell you what they think. Barring that, these sites can help you understand and simulate color blindness.

We Are Color Blind – many tools and examples.

Vischeck – see web pages and images similar to how color blind people see them. Includes a free Photoshop plugin!

Accessibility Color Wheel – analyzes the contrast of a color pair and shows how color-blind people see them.

Think you might be color blind?

Here are two online color blindness tests:

Ishihara Test for Color Blindness

Color Vision Test

If you suspect you may be color weak, see your optometrist for a definitive diagnoses. It really does help to know.

Your Turn

Let me know about your experiences with color, whether you’re color blind or not.

NOTE: This article was first posted at http://www.chucklasker.com/blog/