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I had a chance to start the Labor Day holiday weekend by interviewing Lance Christen, a partner in Chrislands.com (http://www.chrislands.com), a service dedicated to developing fully functional Web site storefronts for booksellers. The service began in the summer of 2001 after Christen watching his wife Min.
"My wife dabbled with selling books online and I had a friend (James Sorbel) with a Masters degree in computer programming, so I decided we could build her a store." By formulating a simple way to create a fully functional store for her, they decided it was a process that could work for other sellers.
At present, a couple of hundred booksellers are successfully using Chrisland's product.
"We perceived the need," Christen explains, "and we searched Barnes & Noble and Amazon to see what we thought worked."
The goal, according to Christen, is "to let booksellers display themselves."
Once a customer submits the initial specs to Lance, the site is constructed. But it doesn't end there. The Chrisland's store allows individual users to shape and change the look at will by using a form-driven process. Only a rudimentary knowledge of html is necessary to make more dramatic alterations.
"I don't think anybody can break it," Christen said when asked about what can go wrong when people take matters into their own hands. "I guess if somebody added bad html it could result in a poor display, but that can be corrected by removing what was added."
As time passed and the customers sent in suggestions, an advanced features was added to the sites to enable users to improve their stores, freshening them up. Among the things you can do is add ads, change the colors, edit type face and size, add images.
"Some people change their site frequently," Christen says, "and some people don't." As for Chrislands, the changes they work on are more behind the scenes. Right now they are working on froogle uploads but Froogle is still in a beta stage and changes on their end haven't made that task easy. "It's a difficult process," he said.
Froogle may prove difficult for those trying to keep abreast of its changes, but Chrislands is simple to use for the average bookseller because the company does all the initial work.
Creating a Web site with them is easy. The best first start is to look at some of the sample stores and decide on a look that you want. To be up front with our readers, I tried Chrislands first hand, and was pleased. After deciding on what colors I preferred and a general layout of the site, I sent along the text about the shop, some pictures, and links that I wanted included. I made minor changes to the menu, wanting directions and hours to be prominently displayed.
The cost was a pittance compared to what my husband paid for a Web site a few years earlier. $199 will get you an online store with shopping cart capabilities (as long as you have the ability to process credit cards). Otherwise you must rely on Paypal (or a like system) or give information for how to pay by check or money order.
Knowing I would be doing a more in-depth article about Chrislands, I gave them a general overview. To be honest, I did have an idea of how I wanted the site to look, but I left the design up to the company to see how close or how far astray it was when I was asked to proof the work. They were right on the money.
Some changes had to be made, things I forgot or having new windows open rather than have a customer transported away from your site, but these were easily solved with a minimum of effort. Chrislands supplies each administrator with a login name and password. With that you can enter the form that controls each page. Changes are as simple as typing and are immediate.
Every shop is notified by email that an order has been placed, and these orders are retrieved through the administrator site. Chrislands provides a demo to try out.
Other companies provide similar services, but I had been hearing wonderful reports from booksellers for months and I decided it was a site worth sharing with our readers. I have been using the new Web site created for my shop for weeks now without a problem. When I do have a question, Lance is very responsive, and thankfully he is very patient.
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