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Welcome back to The New Niche Store Market!

From the flood of emails I constantly receive wanting to know what happened to Niche Store Market, where my templates and designs are and if I am even still alive, ha ha, I am glad to announce that the day we’ve all been waiting for is here! So let me be the first to say…. Welcome Back!

So, where to start? I know many people have questions and want to know where I’ve been and why. I’ll do my best to answer the most common questions I’ve received.

What happened to the site, it’s not there?

Well as many of you know we began experiencing many “technical difficulties” with our software on the site. This came from an incompatibility through an update of one of the programs we used. Which one, I honestly don’t know. Whatever it was it apparently overwrote some system core files which caused issues site wide across all programs in use.

After stumbling blindly through code after code and only being able to watch helplessly as sales orders were being unreported and missed by the system I decided to take the site offline completely. This was the only real choice I had. To me customer service was and still is the most important product I ever offered. When that started to fail due to the system I couldn’t let it continue any longer. NSM’s reputation was more important than our sales!

To those of you that suffered through some of this with us at the end I honestly and sincerely do apologize. You deserved better than I was able to provide and hopefully I can make it up now.

What was the problem, why did it crash?

Well as stated above, I don’t know what actually caused the crash in the site… but I do know the problem. The problem was me! That’s right, I take all the blame. It was my insatiable urge to have the biggest, best, most advanced web site possible that brought it all tumbling down.

I thought that is what it took to be the best but I was wrong. Being the best is simply being there for my friends and being able to help them when they need it. That is why I started all this in the first place. Unfortunately my illusions of grandeur caused me to lose focus on that. You’ll be able to read more about around the site as I make some more posts in this area.

All in all the old site had over 11 independent and third party programs integrated into it, not to mention the over 50 additional plugins. They were nicely integrated… in the beginning. One of those programs however, auto updated itself and reeked havoc on everything else. When I took the site down I knew I had done too much with it in the first place and even if I fixed it, which I know I could have, it would eventually just happen again. I am 99% sure of which program did the deed. I’m not going to say any names, but if using Joomla be very way of which SUPPORT CENTER software you use

Especially if the source code is encrypted keeping you from being able to figure out what’s going on behind the scenes. I decided it was time to find a more streamlined solution, a single platform with all the features I wanted built right in and just redo the site.

So what took so long just to switch software?

Well finding what I wanted, or what I thought I wanted anyway, is what took so much time. I still had the same backwards idea that being the biggest and most advanced was the only way to go for quite some time. I went through about every software out there, both open source and commercial, only to get in mid development and find something that didn’t work, wasn’t going to work or had the potential to either not work or cause problems later. Hence, putting us right back where we were with the old site. So I’d scrap the entire project and move on to the next software choice.

I have been through Zen-Cart, OS Commerce, Cube-Cart, X-Cart, Magento and a handful of CMS programs with cart plugins. It was only after working with the last, Magento, that I thought I had finally found the software to rebuild Niche Store Market with. Then, being about a week away from launching, an update crashed the site! That is when I knew for sure that I either had to redevelop my own thinking or choose to let NSM fade completely away and die. I chose to believe I had been going down the wrong path. I like to say I came to that realization myself, but that would not be the truth. Many of my friends and colleagues, whose sites I follow and who email me regularly helped me in coming to that conclusion. Thanks guys and gals.

So what platform are you using now?

After much soul searching and seeing that no one was asking me where was my directory or my link programs were. No one cared about my forum or my support center or anything like that at all. People just simply wanted my help or ideas and to give them that I decided simplicity and STABILITY was the best and only course of action. Well to be a hundred percent honest I should say I was also asked for my templates many, many times

As most of you internet savvy users have probably realized the new site is powered by WordPress. Yep, 100% free program used by millions, including my friends and competitors (who are all one in the same), lol. I do have a few necessary plugins added such as WP Cache, All In One SEO Pack, some Google Tools and a few others. I’ll be making some posts of the entire set of plugins I am using along with their purpose and links to them soon.

All together I spent about One Hundred Dollars on this setup and scrapped close to Two Grand in software and licenses. The only third party software installed at this time is iDev Affiliate 6 which is not integrated with the site. I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t use it with the cart on this new site, it only takes adding a snippet of code to the “return” page. If I can use it, great I’ll hook it up so you can make a little money while you’re here!

Why did you install iDev if you aren’t even sure if you will use it?

Jeesh! I threw away almost 2 grand in software already, I want to reuse something!!! Ha ha, Just kidding! The truth is I wasn’t saying above I didn’t plan on using it, I just planned on using it a little differently! Now I can’t go into details yet but just know I have some fun little ideas planned to reward the most loyal followers and that is where iDev comes in! If we can set it up to track sales through my carts and pay out some cash too then that is just another bonus! These ideas of mine will be coming as soon as I get most of my material and the products we’ll be offering now back online.

Just what products and services will you be offering now?

Well this really took some “constraint”! That lil demon inside me wants to go all out, offer everything and anything just like before, of course. Bad habits die hard as they say. So after fighting with myself and going back and forth over it I have decided we will be providing Templates, some other downloadable products and most importantly FREE INFORMATION.

What we will not be offering, as I am a one man show these days and want to stay entirely focused on being here for you, is any types of services. I am suggesting that any service needs be referred back to BANS Forum or the PhpBay Forum. There are plenty of experienced people in both those places to handle some one on one service. You can also use the contact form on this site to send me a suggestion of a post you’d like and if I can I’ll write it. Someday maybe I’ll slowly add some service work but it will more than likely be in the custom template and custom logo fields only, we’ll see when the time comes

I hope that brings everyone up to date on where we are and how we got here. I am sure there are more questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability if you ask. It’s a new day here at the ole Niche Store Market and I hope to be everything you wanted me to, this time!

Shane Isaacs