Little Star Prints (http://www.littlestarprints.com) harnesses the power of Drupal, Dojo, Ubercart and a proprietary editing software to allow users to browse, personalize and order custom birth announcements, invitations, seasonal cards and related stationery.
The purpose of our site is to provide a select line of premium quality stationery which is user-editable in terms of user-provided photo images and text content. Our focus is on children and family related content.
We are a small group of first-time entrepreneurs with ambitious ideas and no previous eCommerce experience, and as such we got very lucky in managing to assemble an exceptional team to help us bring our vision to life. Freelock Computing (http://www.freelock.com/) is the team of specialists behind the remarkable amount of development done on this project. They delivered above and beyond, and our site would probably not exist at this point were it not for them.
Jennifer Hodgdon (http://www.poplarware.com/) was our initial consultant, setting us on the Drupal/Ubercart path and providing the conceptual framework on which the site would be developed. Our UI was designed by Joy Worthen (http://www.joyworthen.com/).
We chose Drupal 5 due to various compatibility issues at the time of development. We launched Oct-29 2009 and to date the functionality of the site has exceeded our expectations. Customers tell us that the appearance and functionality of our site gives them the impression that we are established, dominate players in our highly competitive market. We hope someday that will be true! We credit Drupal as a powerful tool allowing us to easily implement good design.
Drupal has proven to be remarkably search engine friendly right out of the gate, and we just recently added the NodeWords module as well. At last count we have more than 90 module options enabled, including custom modules. One of our favorite little functions is the ability to automatically calculate, collect and report destination-based sales tax. Ubercart fits Drupal like a glove.
As small business owners, the best part about Drupal outside of its amazing flexibility and scalability is the fact that it is relatively easy as non-programmers to learn the basics. With tutorage from our developers we have been able to effectively take over most of the day-to-day site maintenance, although there are some high-level admin functions for which we will continue to rely on our developers for assistance with for the foreseeable future.
Our largest challenge by far was the integration of our photo editing software with the rest of the system. That was a huge hurdle on a highly technical level that I can not adequately describe in layman's terms. Suffice it to say it just didn't want to work for the longest time. I still feel bad about what the Freelock team had to go through, but they persevered and found a way. We also had severe font management problems until a font-specialist wizard (I didn't know there was such a thing) joined the Freelock team late in the game.
To fully appreciate the site, create a free no-strings user account and play with the photo editing section of the site. We would appreciate comments and would be pleased to answer any questions.