MOYA supports the ECO-FRIENDLY

It’s been a while since I’ve posted so I’d thought I’d take a few moments to let you all know what we’ve been up to.  First off we had a great holiday season and we hope you all had the same.  We’ve added a ton of new designs to our collection and we’ve been blowing up in sales with both of our stores. 

Some more great news, Moya has licensed a handful of our design to the people behind Studio9Zero7 (www.studio9zero7.com).  These guys are all about getting involved in being eco-friendly which we think is very cool.  They use  water based ink in their printing process and organic cotton t-shirts.  Another great thing about what they do is they donate 15% of every sale to various charities.

All of us at MOYA were happy that Studio9Zero7 wanted to include some of our designs with their project and we’re already working up more designs that will be featured in their store as well as our stores.  When you have a moment, check those guys out and see what the great organization they got going for them.

Until Later.

Steve Westphal

www.moyatees.com

Short update.

Hey Guys,

Short blog.

Nothing really new to report this week.  The website is coming along slowly.  Our website designer took a few days off from the website project to work up a slew of new designs for our Obama swag.  It’s been a great month so far with our Obama designs, but our sales are starting to drop back down due to our designs getting buried in the search engine results.  This is the way the online t-shirt business works so we were expecting this.  Hopefully our new wave of designs will  spark back up the sales which wont surprise me since some of our new designs look great.  We’ll see.

O’ website, whereout thou?

What’s new with the website?  We’ve gone, yet again, another direction with it.  Yes, we’re still not done with the website (surprised? lol), but we have made significant headway with the project.  Originally I had taken upon myself to build a website for MOYA.  I am not a web developer by trade.  I have a basic understanding of html and have all the tools needed in order to build and launch a website.  Plus since I discovered Lynda.com, I was really starting to feel more comfortable with the project. 

What changed?

Ben Miller our graphic designer in Seattle that we contract with had recently been improving his skills in the flash side of web development.  He recently expressed his interest to continue his momentum and to build the new MOYA site.  Since this has been my original hope to have a more dynamic site then the static site I was willing to settle with, I gladly stepped aside and gave the reigns to Ben.  Ben’s plan is to use templates from flashden.net as the foundation and then manipulate the template to how we want it to reflect MOYA.  Basically about 80% of the work has been taken care of that way is how Ben described it.  We worked with Ben and purchased the templates we wanted to implicate and just left the rest for Ben to sort out. 

Ben has been sending us progress reports and we have also been following along with his progress from where the site is temporarily hosted.  This has been quite humorous actually.  From Ben’s report, the coding wasn’t in English which I was unaware until now that that could be a factor when it comes to coding.  Plus apparently one of the templates was not exactly coded in the way it was advertised to be.  Ben believes he has put those “inconveniences” behind him and so far the site is coming together and functioning well. 

Honestly, I am impressed on what Ben has accomplished so far. Not only is Ben working on the site and making good progress, he also sends us design concepts for new shirts/posters on a regular basis, contributes to our research and development team (Which sounds fancy, but it’s just the same guys that do everything else.  It’s just fun to put it that way),….he also has a fairly demanding day job.  Ben works for ArenaNet which is the developer of the MMO GuildWars and is currently busting out the next installment of the already award winning series.    Ben says their goal is to make the next classic game which he strongly believes they will achieve.  So for all you gamers out there (and I’m one as well), check out GuildWars II when it releases.  MOYA tees and MOYA Enterprises LLC are not affiliated with ArenaNet though.  We’re just throwing out props and a free plug for our good buddy Ben.  It’s the least we can do.

MOYA in OVERDRIVE

Greeting from MOYA.  What have we been up to?  Not blogging which I apologize about.  We’ve had a lot on our plates lately.  First off, we are doing great in sales which has been awesome for us.  We expected a little bit of a decline in sales due to the economy, but so far that has not happened.  In fact, as of the last few days, it has been much better then what we planned for.

We’ve launched some Obama presidential and inspirational t-shirts and gift items (posters, magnets, etc.) that have been selling like….well…hot cakes to borrow the expression.  How well have they been selling?  In one day, we out-sold our best month so far since we launched moya tees (formally known as Moya Apparel).  That’s how good.  We’re not millionaires or thousandaires or anything of that sort, but for the small operation that we are, we’ve earned a nice chunk of change to put back into MOYA in order to build it even further then before.  We have been progressively getting better sales for months now but we didn’t project this much of a jump in sales so  you could imagine how proud we are about all of this.

Another noteworthy achievement is we made a sale to whom we believe to be the actual Sheryl Swoopes of the WNBA fame.  Working with Cafepress, we do not have a lot of access to personal information regarding our customers and we completely understand why and accept it.  We do however know that the sale came from Washington State which is where she had played and resided.   It’s quite possible that the our customer and the women often called the female Michael Jordan are one in the same which is very cool to think about.   Sheryl Swoopes is the first woman to have a Nike shoe named after her and she’s also a three-time Olympic gold medalist.  Needless to say, we at MOYA are HUGE fans of her and her achievements.

Our New Social Media Site

I used this great app from Kickapps to build this great site for kicking back and uploading media for everyone’s enjoyment.  It’s one of the sites I threw together that will be part of the new website I’m building.  Check it out and sign up for free unlimited media uploads.

I think you’ll like it.

And here is where all that clickage takes place

Has it been a year?

This month marks one full year since we opened our first store on Cafepress.com.  Crazy.   Time did fly on us. 

To kind of celebrate this, we’re going to give away free shirts; your choice of design and style.  We’re thinking about using primarily zazzle.com/moya_apparel for the giveaway site.   We’re still hammering out the details. 

Zazzle doesn’t feature all of our designs, but we can easily upload any of our designs to that store anyways.  Plus zazzle has a much larger selection of shirt styles; especially for the ladies.

To become eligible for the giveaway will most likely be any of those that go to the site and throw up a comment on our comment wall.  We’ll just have to come up with a system to contact the winner(s); maybe by using our myspace.  Like I said, we’re still hammering out the details

I’m slacking too much on these updates.

Sorry for neglecting this blog.  I haven’t been idle, I promise : )

First for a update on the website.  Kind of wished that the site was behind me, but here I am still working on it.  The web designer we used really could not produce the site we were looking for and now he’s off in the Navy.  Kind of puts a damper on that.  Pretty much after that, we tried to find another designer but we were just not prepared to meet their prices.

I finally broke down and decided that I myself will design the site.  I first tried using a cheap little website development tool I found buried in my web-hosting apps.  That was a headache.  Ever have a program fight you every step of the way while you’re trying to use it?  The silly program just wasn’t user friendly.  The only reason I tried it was because it was simple and self explanatory on how to interact with it (so I thought).

I do have access to the mainstream industry standard Dream Weaver.  I have actually three Dream Weaver programs including the new Adobe Dream Weaver CS3 program; launched after Adobe bought out Macromedia.  The hump I had to get over was that I just didn’t know how to use it.  For anyone entering that program with no background in it, it can seem a little above the head.

About two weeks back I found the perfect solution to that dilemma.  That answer came in the form of Lynda.com.  If you never checked out that website, it really has become my all time favorite source of program tutorials.  There is none better in my opinion.  Here you have detailed tutorials for everyone from beginners (like myself) to professionals.  This site taught me a lot about how to use the new Dreamweaver CS3 program.

So I’m going to design my own website.  Kind of wish I knew all about this from the beginning, but this is my first time I have had a website built.  I’m allowing myself a little slack in attempts to maintain my sanity.

So I’m a web designer now in the begining stages.  I’ll keep you guys posted.

A rambling update

I’ll spare you a Website update.  We’ll get to it as soon as we get our day jobs off our back long enough.  Actually our web designer will be quitting his job at the end of the week so he’ll be freed up.  He leaves for the Navy in less then a month and he’s in need of a cool down period before that.  Makes sense.  The funny thing is that his job does not know about the Navy or him leaving his job.  What can we do?  He’s the only one I know that will work for the DVD box set of Battlestar Gallactica Season 3.  Go figure.

We’ve made headway with our new project that was put on hold due to budgeting conflicts.  We finally got a hold of Dr. Penelope Price with SCC (Scottsdale Community College), whose area of expertise goes along nicely with what we’re trying to accomplish.  She was in Africa working on a documentary on organic farming  (No, organic farming is not the expertise I was referring to either).  That’s her story anyways. 

If she was trying to avoid us, she wins the prize for the best excuse.  Without going into too much detail about the project (We got to keep a few aces up the sleeve until we need them), we were originally looking at a total cost of roughly $3000.00.  Now do you see why we were hesitant?  Dr. Price gave us a way to get our budget down to about $300.00.  One less zero!  While it would be nice to take even one more zero off that price, we would probably completely butcher the quality of the project so $300.00 is looking like our target range as of now. 

The other thing I want to mention for anyone who follows along with this blog, I am currently going to launch a new blog using the wordpress.org functions.  We’re going to use it for FAQs, updates, promotions, and whatever we feel like whether it’s some crazy observation or reviews or whatever.  With our new website and our plans to make it as popular as we can possible manage, we’ll need a blog forum that can handle more hits since it will be directly accessible from moyatees.com.  Also, I’d like a more simple direct URL to the blog then where it is here.  I’ll probably post a dozen links to the new blog so you’ll be able to check it out. 

That’s all I can think of right now (I’m at work and I’ve been writing this blog on and off for about four hours.  That;s why my blogs are usually all over the place, lol.)  More later.

 

Steve with MOYA

The website is up….sort of

Moyatees.com is officially up and functional at it’s most basic level.  The site is not nearly finished and we will be making dramatic changes to it very soon.

A list of the changes:

-The color scheme for the overall site will be changed.  We felt the way it looked when we uploaded it was too dark.  In the new version that hasn’t been uploaded yet, we changed the table color to a lighter tanish sand color that we borrowed from the moyatees myspace page.  It actually works really well as a neutral color with the reds and greys.

- The current model shot is not the final picture.  That would suck if it was.  Actually the picture was a quick 10 minute edit to be used as a place-holder.  Originally the model shot was smaller and we had an appropriate image already created.  We felt too much negative space was on the site so we tried a quick larger pic out.  We’ll get an edited picture up soon enough.  We actually have a total of seven model shots that will randomly pop in when you load the page when we’re done.  (We’re also aware that the image is backwards and we’ll fix that as well, lol.)

- I used a hostmonster application to adjust the table size for the site.  One of the cool things about moyatees is that you can visit cafepress, zazzle, our blog, and our myspace profile all within the site.  The problem I had with that was their was too much side scrolling.  Up and down scrolling is easy enough, but side scrolling just seems too poor for a design.  I did a rough edit with the table size to widen and I was able to minimize that problem but not completely get rid of it.  Still, it was an acceptable compromise.

- A lot of the text on the page is also temporary.  The mission statement currently is a mixture of three crazy missions statements I wrote one night in the middle of the night.  The idea is to have the statements on a rotation much like the images so you always get something new.  Our designs are primarily funny t-shirts so we’re implicating weird humor wherever.  I’ll also have to rewrite the about section to be more upbeat and humorous.

-The shirt designs in the bottom corner can be viewed in a larger screen and we’ll add an enlarge button above that table for easy use.  Right now, the home link brings you to that page when you’re on a different part of moyatees.  We’ll have to fix that too. 

- The load screen in the front is also just quickly thrown together.  We had a different load screen originally but when we were initially having trouble getting the website to load onto the hosting site, we thought that the coding on that page might of been an issue for why the site wasn’t loading right.  We just threw together a basic html-coded intro page to test that theory.  In the end, we discovered that the load screen wasn’t an issue, but I still saw potential in it.  We’re going to keep it simple, but flesh out that page a bit.  And of course we’ll replace that logo with a non pixelated image.

That’s where we are right now.  I apologize for the eye sore.  We uploaded the site primarily to test the apps and to get opinions for improvement.  We wish we could work around the clock to get everything polished, but our day jobs kind of get in the way.  The site is up though and mostly functional.  We’ll get the changes up and probably will be making adjustments over the next few weeks.  If you have any suggestions, please let us know.   We can use all the opinions we can get.  Thanks guys.

About the website.

We actually went a completely different direction with the website and gave it a completely new look.  That’s what we get when we use a website designer who changes his mind constantly.  Really the main reason why we don’t have the website up yet is because of a slight setback with the website program we used, Web Dwarf.  The program itself is easy enough to use, but the way it coded our webpage was not recognized by our web-hosting program through Hostmonster.com.  Our programmer Josh had to recode the entire website line for line the old school way manually with notepad.  Honestly I can’t complain because the new website we got out of it was better than the original one we initially green-lighted.

Now the site is up and from what I saw, the only step left is to prepare the new model pics to their larger scale.  Plus we will have to quickly change up the look of our cafepress store, zazzle store, and myspace store.  Also we will be launching a brand new blog page as well using the wordpress.org application.  All of this will tie in directly with the new website which the domain is now officially moyatees.com.  The hosting is purchased, the domain is claimed, and the website is mostly coded except for the seven model images that need touch-ups.  I swear we’re not slacking, lol.  We’ll get it done. 

We set our deadline to before the 30th of this month, so we have no choice but to launch it this weekend.  We will have a working website up in a day or two and keep adjusting it throughout the next several weeks.  We’ll be asking for opinions so to best help us hammer out the flaws.  Any ideas, comments, or concerns any of you wish to share with us, please let us know.

Until later.