Porter Realty has been a pillar of the Richmond, Virginia business community since 1965. Forty-five years later, the family-owned company still embodies its founding principles of market knowledge, vision, creative thinking and an optimistic outlook toward the future. The Porter brothers deserved a website that reflects nearly a century of experience in the Richmond industrial and commercial real estate market.

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When we were approached by Virginia Urology, their web site had a dated, brochure-like look.

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Last week, we launched the newly re-designed Greater Richmond Partnership web site. The Greater Richmond Partnership is a smart group of people that are very important to the area economy and job market. Their purpose is to attract domestic and international businesses that are expanding or relocating. Once businesses relocate or expand here, the GRP has a great retention program to keep businesses thriving. They represent the City of Richmond and the surrounding counties of Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico.

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Last week, the new Monif C. Plus Sizes e-commerce site went live. Monif C. is a fashion designer in New York City, and her creations have been featured in Essence, TLC’s What Not To Wear, Ebony, Glamour and BET.com, just to name a few.

Completed in just about 6 short weeks, this e-commerce site runs on a customized Magento platform. Some of the best customer-facing features are the ability to browse the site in multiple currencies, a one-page AJAX checkout process, the ability to share your wishlist with others (so they buy you the right gift the first time) and cross-selling at the product level. Customers can create an account to store order history and track orders, manage an address book and check their gift certificate balance. To give customers the most options, they can either check out as a guest (without registering) or with their stored account information.

Behind the scenes, the site features the ability to process both web, store and phone transactions, full inventory control and much more.

See the site in action at http://www.monifc.com.

Back in January, we re-launched the Virginia Favorites web site. Virginia Favorites sells Virginia peanuts and other gourmet items from our wonderful state. I developed their first web site in 1997 — my first foray into e-commerce. It was redesigned again on the Yahoo Merchant Services platform in 2002, and the 2009 iteration is built on a new e-commerce system.

In addition to totally redesigning the visual appeal of the web site, we added many new features to improve functionality and customer service.

• Better coupon codes
  Virginia Favorites can now offer a variety of coupon codes and easily control expiration, overlapping codes and more.
• “My Account”
  Loyal customers no longer have to enter all of their information in at checkout — most personal information is stored securely on the site, including a catalog of commonly-used addresses for shipping.
• Order status and tracking
  After a customer places an order, they can instantly find out the status of their order, and if it has shipped, can get a direct link to track the package while in transit.
• Streamlined checkout flow
  Checking out is a 2-step process, and cleaning up the process and shortening it has led to big increases in conversion rate.
• Recently viewed items
  If a customer clicks away from a product and wants to go back, the site stores the three most recently viewed items for easy access.

You can see the new web site (and buy something) at VaPeanuts.com.