Joe Malewicki Jr. own and operates Ceriello Fine Foods Online division. Ceriello Fine Foods is a specialty store for gourmet Italian cuisine based in New York. What started as a small, New York store has grown to be a national brand with five stores in the New York Metro area, as well as New Jersey, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Newport News (Virginia), and another store opening soon in Memphis. They also a have website, http://www.ceriellofinefoods.com/ which ships products nationwide. Joe and his team recently revamped their old Miva 4.22 website, and upgraded to the new, more flexible, Miva 5. Joe has been kind enough to share his story with us as he developed his new online store.

Ceriello Fine Foods was est. in 1973 & came online 6 years ago. We've been pretty much "stalled" on the Internet. We have a diverse product offering and the search engines were kind to us over the years, however the site needed a major overhaul. We launched our new site at the end of 10/07. We evaluated several other shopping carts but decided to stick with Miva & go from version 4.22 with OpenUI to Miva 5 - we're VERY pleased with the results!

We built it in-house without the assistance of any consulting/web developers - we just took a Photoshop layout & rebuilt it in Dreamweaver using the StoreMorph features of Miva 5. We've integrated several 3rd party modules to get the added functionality we needed, and I can now proudly say our traffic is up & sales are finally increasing!

I had built our original website with Miva 4.22 & OpenUI about 6 years ago. It "worked" but was never what I wanted.  I did it while working full time in Corporate America so I had only an hour or two here and there to work on it.  My background was originally Tech Support for financial software and then got into support systems, virtualization, etc. I used to support web based products but never learned HTML - I just learned to use tools like Dreamweaver to make websites.  I then went full time at this piece of our business in October 2006.

The new site started by layout/design.  We made a very LARGE list of the features and functionality we wanted to have in the new site.  I think I spent around 70-80 hours researching every fine foods and gift basket site on-line to get ideas.  Once we had our multiple page list we narrowed it down too the core functionality and then the "wish list" features.  I will be honest - I was developing the site in osCommerce for about a month before making the big change BACK to Miva 5.  Miva 4 was never as flexible as we wanted without purchasing a ton of modules.  I'm happy to say that Miva 5 took care of a lot of those concerns.

Once the feature set was decided, that whole process took about another week (so we're at around 60-70 hours total time put into this now) we started to talk to some graphic designers.  We thought a bit backwards this time which actually worked out well for us in the end.  I knew Miva 5 had StoreMorph built in but I didn't know anything about it or Miva 5 so we had our graphic designer start a layout.  We just gave her type of content we wanted to include on each page - no sketches, designs or pictures - just a list, and said go at it!  Throw us something new and fresh.

This worked out great!  She didn't' have anything but her creativity to work with and we honestly had no idea what she'd come back with.  The designs were great!  We only had to make a couple of changes too them to get the ball rolling.

The key for the "look" was the designer - by finding someone reliable and GOOD, she was able to provide us with a fresh look, the style-sheet (not CSS - design styles - fonts, colors, etc.) and PhotoShop layouts. Once we had those we started to learn how to use Dreamweaver (newest version) and PhotoShop to begin building our new site.

I started using CSS layouts in Dreamweaver but since I didn't know CSS at all I had to learn the basics.  I ran into a lot of browser compatibility issues trying to use DIV layouts and such so I ended up after about 3 days to do the home page alone - starting form scratch and using just old fashioned tables.  I know this will bite us in the butt in the long run but it worked and compatibility isn't an issue that we've seen for any platform or browsers 4.x or newer.  All of the colors, fonts styles are done using basic CSS.  The home page took about 70 hours total (much of that learning time for Dreamweaver and CSS.  I didn't plug any Miva stuff into it until the look was an exact match of the PhotoShop layouts.

I bought that book by Pam on Miva 5 (the one everyone buys) and it was a great start to learning Miva 5 but that too didn't do too much for us since I knew Miva 4 Admin pretty well.

I found the Miva 5 concept of Pages perfect.  I was able to quickly build my individual pages (we have 64 "Pages" in Miva total) based on the designer's layouts and then plug in the StoreMorph and template info as we went along.  The total time to design the rest of the pages was about 120-140 hours including adding the Miva technologies in.

The next step was all of the 3rd party module integration.  Since the 3rd party developers are very helpful and their docs pretty good this only took us about 60-70 hours from soup too nuts.

After everything "looked" good and the functionality we wanted was about 90% there (we never could get that last 10% in) we began loading data.

That took about another 24 hours because we had to re-think our category navigation and make sure it was logical too the end user as well as for future growth.  We also had to include some time for testing, etc.

Data clean-up came next (another good 24 hours) and I won't lie - we're still finding things we've missed along the way.  I should add our designer did a lot of the product pictures over as well, so that was an extra expense and time but it was worth paying her.

As you shop the site you'll see the pictures from the old site or ones we did in house and then those she did - big difference in the quality.  We'll be having her redo all of them after the Holiday is over.  The new pictures are HUGE for the new look - you need to have sharp pictures.

Finally there was testing and then the launch - another good solid 35-40 hours of testing went into it.  we luckily had spent so much time testing as we went along, so only minor changes had too be made for the final testing (typos, colors, etc.).

I'd say total time spent would break down as follows:

Pre-Design: Approx. 140 hours
Web Design & Miva integration: Approx. 200 hours
3rd Party Module integration: Approx. 65 hours
Data Load & Clean-up: Approx. 48 hours
Testing & Pre-launch: Approx. 37 hours

Total Time: Approx. 490 hours (about two months)

Graphic Designs/Layouts: Approx. $9,000
Product Photos: Approx. $2,800
Miva 3rd Party Modules: Approx. $1,100
Software: Approx. $900 (Adobe CS2 Suite)
Coffee: Approx. $400 (We like Green Mountain K-Cups and had to buy a new machine)

Total Cost: $14,200 ($13,800 if you don't count the coffee maker)

When we first priced out a soup to nuts ecommerce site we had estimates anywhere from $11,000 to $28,000.  We didn't have the budget for the higher end and you have to wonder why some folks are on the low side.  In retrospect we could've saved a good two months time building and had been getting prepared for the Holiday Season and/or marketing, but the dollars seemed more important to us back then.  I'd say now if I knew of a good web designer/Miva guru (like the folks on the forums) I probably would have paid one of them and my designer and slept for a few more nights during those two months.

Our big challenge now, and the area we need help with is how to market the site.  We have good Google search rankings for a lot of products and key words - but to be honest, terrible page ranking.  So now I'm reading up on PPC, Affiliates and how to improve page ranking.

The bottom line is that anyone can build a good website site with Miva - you just have to be willing to work at it.  No freebies

-- Joe Malewicki Jr., Ceriello Fine Foods

This is a great story from Joe, and it really shows what it actually takes to create a great looking, professional Miva website. As you can see from the finished product, all the time and money spent was well worth the effort. Joe now has a fantastic Miva website both from a design perspective and a functionality perspective. If you are interested, you can read an indepth review of Joe's new Miva website here.