Toyopia is now live!

Toyopia.com went live today. There are a lot of custom things going on with this site, such as the slideshow graphics and the "panel" style menu.
Craig did a lot of work in a short time: I sent him instructions at 9pm when his dev site went up, and by 9am the next morning, he had set up pages, added products, inserted placeholder slides, and organized his categories! Wow.

Toy Shop of Westford is Now Live!

Toy Shop of Westford is now live! Sonya Kalajian's shop is in Westford, Massachusetts, in the Westford Valley Marketplace. 160 Littleton Rd., Westford MA 01886

Cheeky Monkey goes live!

Cheeky Monkey's new site is now live!

Tip: Tabs for Toy Stores

Firefox lets you set multiple home pages, so when you open your browser, you can have a set of tabs come up automatically. I believe Safari and IE8 let you do this, too.

I would highly recommend you have your store's computer set to automatically open the sites you need to manage your web-store. Homepage and backend at least, but you can set up as many as you find useful. Webmail? Webstats? Your competitor's sites? That might be an easy way to feel good about yourself! :^)

Don has the computer at Hopscotch set to open five tabs:

1. The toy store's front end homepage
2. The back end admin,
3. a tab for authorize.net,
   
4. UPS
5. and FedEx, to compare rates
   

At work, I have our CRM, Google Calendar, and our Facebook page open when Firefox starts.

To set up your own tabbed homepages, in Firefox, go to "Tools > Options..." and click on the "Main" tab.
In the Homepage line there, you can paste in the URLs of each tab you'd like to come up when Firefox starts, separated by a "pipe" symbol: | . That's space_[pipe]_space. The pipe symbol is found on the backslash key, right above the enter key.

Smart Kids Toys is live!

Smart Kids went live yesterday - congratulations! The domain for their new website is www.sktoys.com (or www.smartkidstoys.com, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.)

Smart Kids Toys are in Greenwich Connecticut, at 17 Elm Street.

I drew them some new kids for their site, which was fun. I like doing the little illustration bits that come around every so often. Thanks, Mary!

The R is for Irony

It gets worse - apparently "shoplocal.com" is a site dedicated to tracking sales at huge chain stores.

Geppetto's goes live

Geppetto's (a child's fantasy) just went live with their new web site yesterday. The site is supporting their 8 stores in the San Diego area, and their catalog. They were pretty clever about pulling special categories out of the catalog products in order to go live quickly.