Nathan and Andrew have been out in San Diego for the past three days at the annual conference for Miva Merhant.  Miva is our eCommerce platform of choice and  they announced a great new set of features and new security enhancements. This will allow Miva to be PA-DSS compliant in time for the July 2010 mandate from most major credit card processors that all eCommerce solutions meet new, stricter compliance rules.  Miva will be one of one a few eCommerce systems, at this price point, that will meet this new mandate.  The jury is still out on when the major processors, such as Authorize.net, will actually enforce the new rules, but this has been coming down the pipe for over three years, so it should be soon.

One part of the new requirements is that eCommerce stores must now use three servers, each protected wth specific firewalls and encryption to serve the website, host the database and to house the encryption keys.   TayloeGray is working with our hosting providers to build a system that will ensure that our eCommerce solutions meet this mandate.

The new version of Miva also has a bunch of new features to make running an online store easier.  There have been improvements to the templating system, order processing, inventory tracking, shopping cart, returns and more.    The new version had eight rounds of beta testing to ensure both PA-DSS compliance and reliability.  It should be shipping (downloading, really) in the middle of March.

Also, Wordpress made some announcements about the 3.0 version of their software this week.    It looks like the 3.0 version will include many of the social networking features of Wordpress multiuser (MU) as well as new features to make it a better content management system.  You can read that announcement here.  WP 3.0 looks like it is going to be a big improvement to an already awesome platform.  TayloeGray builds all kinds of Wordpress based websites. Two good examples:  www.hip2save.com, gets 4 million page views per month.  UNCWEC.org is the first UNCW program website, not designed by UNCW itself to be linked to from UNCW.edu and promoted in an official UNCW press release.  UNCW officials say that is a big deal!

One last thing, is you have not checked out our new Facebook application and page for Hanover Center Shopping Mall, in Wilmington, NC, please do.  Fans of the page get access to coupons and deals.  It has some cool technology under the hood to make it work.  More on that later.

We just wanted to say hello to the thousands of Hip2save.com readers who have come to our website since we launched the new version of Hip2Save.com

For those who do not read the site, you should check it out.  Collin lists great deals on consumer products and has fun doing it.  Her site gets about 1.2 million people reading it per month.

TayloeGray started working with Collin about two months ago and was planning on launching the new version of the site after the first of the year.  She had been on Blogger, using the free blogspot domain.  Without warning, her site was deactivated for some unknown violation of a term of service.  To this day, the site is still of and there has been no response from Google (Blogger’s owner).  The old site was hosted at hip2save.blogspot.com so it was totally offline.

We had built the new site, exported her 5,000 posts and 90,000+ comments from Blogger, but had to call all-hands-on-deck over the weekend to finish it up.  The day of the outage, we put out announcements of the temporary website across Feedburner, Twitter and via other blogs.  By Tuesday (four days later), the new site was up and taking the traffic.

After all the dust settled, here is the post mortum.

• Traffic is only down 5% over the previous week, and not counting that it is a holiday week.
• Banner ad impressions and click throughs are up.
• Her Facebook page got over 2,500 fans and Twitter page got 400 followers in four days
• We migrated the site from hip2save.blogspot.com to hip2save.com without loosing Google page rank.

Overall it was quite a project, but because of the hard work of our team and the dedication of her readers, the site made it though.  In the new year, we plan on adding more features, improving the site and adding Facebook and iPhone apps.