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Well, I’m back in New Zealand now and all thawed out after the Internet Retailer Web Design conference – it was a well oiled machine again this year interesting speakers and many great ideas flowing. For World Wide Access it is a chance to set some high level goals for web development over the next 12 months.

In this post, more for myself than anyone, I’m going to set out 15 high level action items that I took away from the conference. This distills the key design and development points I noted over the 3 days of speakers and workshops. During the course of the year I’ll keep you updated with progress on these items and any benefits or issues that arise.

I’ll get straight into it, because we have a lot to cover in 3 broad areas; functionality, design and communication.
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I have recently put together a simple little Magento review and design showcase site called Magento Parade. It’s a chance for Magento designers and developers to check out stunning stores and get inspiration. For designers and developers with innovative ecommerce stores it’s a great chance to get some feedback on your stores and see how they are rated by your peers.

I’ll be periodically adding a review and seeking feedback from other developers and designers. If you have a magento store you think is pretty special then suggest your store for review in the showcase.

I’m also really keen to try and find some guest reviewers to offer their expert feedback on the showcase stores. If you have specialty knowledge in ecommerce SEO, or web marketing and would be keen to offer some tips or advice, please get in touch with me to discuss.

Long time, no post – busy time with Christmas and New years. I went to Mahia Beach on the east coast of New Zealand, amazing place – I was lucky enough to swim with a wild dolphin named Moko, he stole someones boogie board too!

Anyway, to more nerdy subject matter, I recently upgraded our Magento webstore to version 1.2.0.1 – it was relatively painless except for one major hiccup. There seems to be a bug with the configuration scopes in the new version of Magento that means the HTTPS URL is not propagating to the webstore from the default configuration scope.

The problem manifests itself as your Google Checkout merchant calculated shipping callback failing (and subsequently using the default amount). There is a message in the Google checkout integration console:

URL you are using for merchant calculations is not valid or is not https http://www.yourdomain.com/googlecheckout/api/ — the error we got is: An HTTPS URL is required.

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