Building an ecommerce site for my sister’s hobby: breeding cute shiba inu puppies!

How it all began!

Some years ago I started facilitating AD 648 Introduction to eCommerce online course. Students had to complete several valuable assignments, one of them was designing and building an ecommerce site with dreamweaver.

So I decided to make my own ecommerce site, I selected as project building a site for my sister’s hobby of breeding cute shiba inu puppies! This project would surely help me improve my work as facilitator for the AD 648 course!

Shiba Inu Saphie with three newborn puppies, one red male, a white male and a white female.

Diagnosing the old site:

My sister had an old site built by a friend, but it had not been updated for a long time, and using the tools taught  in AD 648 was a great learning opportunity, and also a big bussiness opportunity as well. No other shiba inu dog breeder had an interesting website in Argentina.

So I spent some time with Maria Rosa, my sister, drawing sketches on how the site should look like and which functionalities she needed. The overall purpose of the site was to sell cute shiba inu puppies in Buenos Aires, Argentina and if possible, also genetic exchange puppies with other breeders in neighbouring countries.

A new fresh look and “how do we want our customers to feel about what we sell?”:

The changes to the www.namikoshibas.com were a great improvement. The look and feel was much improved with the text much more easier to read. A css cascading style sheet file was created so that titles, headings, italics and the rest of the text was homogenous throughout the site.

Another important change came from answering these simple questions:

• 1) What are we selling?
• 2) What do our customers pay for?

These questions helped us a lot, because the first thing that you see when you open the  home page is obviously a shiba inu puppy, or the services that we offer: doggie day care in Buenos Aires and genetic exchange stud services for approved shiba inu females.

One of Saphie’s 2013 white shiba inu puppies looking a little tired and about to sleep! How could we wake him up?

Building a multilingual Spanish – English site

From the start with thought to achieve a worldwide audience for our new site. So we decided to build a multilingual Spanish – English site, so breeders from other countries could learn about us in order to exchange puppies with the purpose of improving our shiba inu bloodlines and stock.

Coding the new site Dreamweaver vs. Kompozer

I could not get hand to a dreamweaver html site edition tool, so I downloaded Kompozer open source html editing tool to start coding.  My computer was a dual booting Windows and Linux Ubuntu machine, and being familiar with open source free tools, I decided to try Kompozer. You may download it from Kompozer’s web authoring site.

Nowdays this kind of expertise is not so important for the ecommerce course because soon afterwards we started using blogger, and lately switched to wordpress, the same technology that drives this webpage that your are now reading. But every learning experience helps, and students frequently have issues with html so this html knowledge is always very handy.

Continuing with our little story, I must say that I am not a programmer, but I had learnt basic Fortran and Basic coding while studying engineering in the 80s. And I love to write, so on we go. I had to learn about hosting services, and using FTP tool to upload our newly designed pages! I decided to keep the webhosting service that my sister’s site had. After all, if something works, why change it? There should be a compelling reason.  At first I used the gFTP tool that Linux ubuntu has.

Hosting site linux style file permissions

When I first loaded my first html pages I had to learn about  hosting site file permissions. Typically, web hosting services use linux servers, so the files that you upload to the server adquire linux file system permissions. There are several linux file system permissions, but a safe one for beginners is 755, which permits visitors to browse your page but not to change it.  There are many tutorials and explanations on this issue available searching through the web!

Developing Content for namikoshibas.com!

Getting content from my sister was a big issue. She is an expert amateur photograph, but her picture files are so big that copying and hosting pictures needed much much thought.

Some of my sister’s pictures are so beautiful! We have shared some pictures and they were very well received. But the truth is that my sister never had enough time to produce content. So when months passed without new content, I started to develop content myself with my camera, taking pictures of my shiba inu female dog, beautiful Suko.

Suko’s story

Suko was born in Europe, she won enough points in Holland to achieve champion status, and then went to live to Canada, were she live with Katja, an experienced and well known shiba inu breeder who later exchanged Suko with my sister Maria Rosa. So Suko is a foreigner. Katja is a very strict dog breeder, and taught Suko to behave herself and and to follow my orders.

I love to teach, so I taught Suko some tricks. Here I share with you a video that I did myself for my sister’s namikoshibas.com site!

Obviously it is an amateur one person video filmed with one hand while the other sent small nice food tips to Suko! 🙂 But I enjoyed it very much. I added a youtube musical background of Italian Mandolin music playing “funiculi – funicula”.

Other content that I regularly include are pictures of our dogs during vacations, treks, and in shows where I go with my camera and use it to take pictures and videos.

More site content

We also added other interesting pages about the story of the shiba inu breed in Japan, searched through the web for the standard of the shiba inu breed, found and interesting and moving shiba inu movie similar to the famous “Hatchi” film by Richard Geere on an Akita Inu dog faithful to his owner after the owner passed away.  The shiba inu movie is called “A tale of Mari and Three puppies.”  It tells the story of Mari, a shiba inu female dog who helps his owners after a violent earthquake in Japan. The people are rescued, but the shiba inu is left behind. After 2 weeks the owners return looking for Mari and find her nurturing three newborn shiba inu puppies!

Going live with the new site

I was very very excited when the new namikoshibas.com site whent into action for the first time. The surprising thing that was that we had done things so well that our site turned first page in google searches in Argentina when you searched for “cachorritos shiba inu”, that is “shiba inu puppies” when translating it into English.

What I learnt and how it helped me while facilitating AD 648 Introduction to eCommerce!

• This learning experience changed the way I facilitate MET AD 648, I think that my skills and competencies were greatly improved.
• This project centered personal learning experience also opened me the way to help Prof. Kanabar with AD 737 Innovative Marketing Techniques, which relates to SEO, email marketing campaigns and other related and very powerful tools.

Finally, I think that everyone with the interest, courage, ingeniousness, curiosity, ability should enjoy building a site on a subject that he or she loves. “The heart speaks the true story”.

Enjoy!

Eduardo