Ramblings from an OG

[lesliekirk]

I feel like I'm the last bastion of people working with small mom & pop (or in many cases just pop) businesses. I was approached today to create a website identical to another business similar to it. The two business owners are friends and sell the same stuff - memorabilia. The first owner doesn't sell online; he's "old school," call or email him. He also takes his wares to shows in his region. Update information comes to me via email or CDs mailed via USPS. There is so much I'd love to change about his process. For years, I wanted to get him onto the Miva platform, even if he never sold from it. It just would have made my life easier. You probably would have thought I'd move him to WordPress, but his site is just plain 'ol HTML (well, it's Bootstrap). The site has hundreds of pages and lots of categories with items that I manually flag as sold and change out when he mails the updates.

Now I have his friend. He wants a website just like it. It got me missing the very old days when Miva Merchant came as part of the hosting plan. But don't get me wrong, if I didn't love the application and the people of Miva as much as I do, I don't think I would have made it to the 30-year mark with the platform.

[Kent Multer]

I do have some clients who run "very small" businesses: 1 person, a couple, or a family. Some of them are actually pretty big, if you measure by their their budget or customer base.

Wow, 30 years! I'm not quite there yet; I wrote my first module in 2002. At the time, the dot-com recession had hit me pretty hard; I had been living paycheck-to-paycheck for a while. Then I got a call from someone who had read my Miva Script book. While writing his module, I made a lot of contacts in the Miva user and developer community, and it basically restarted my career. The forums and the in-house devs were a big help, and I've tried to "pay it forward" by answering questions in the forums for the next generation. Thanks, everybody!

[jsdva]

It got me missing the very old days when Miva Merchant came as part of the hosting plan. But don't get me wrong, if I didn't love the application and the people of Miva as much as I do, I don't think I would have made it to the 30-year mark with the platform.

Yep. I agree.