All About Designing Build A Niche Store Templates

Designer Niches has create a variety of customized themes for clients and our own use.  While we generally don’t advertise our work directly on the site I do feel a couple of sites bear mentioning:

Shelby Mustangs and Accessories - One of the early sites from Designer Niches.  Customized yet simple, the design works to present the feel of a Shelby.

Turbo Car Guide - A highly modified Build A Niche Store site, yet clean and easy to follow

Scale Models and Kits - A neat site that uses bright colors to define the space

Ink Pen Fan - I normally stay away from brown as a color but it seemed to fit this niche…

As you can see each of these sites is unique in appearance and is tied in some way to the theme.  It’s a great way to make your sites “sticky” and increase the number of recurring visitors.

I just added a new template/theme to Designer Niches: Monotheme!

It’s a minimalistic design geared towards showcasing the products in a clean and professional way without overpowering the site contents.

Custom Navigation

It has a special custom navigation bar at the upper-right corner of the page. If you edit the header.php of the template you can change the links in this custom menu, or even delete them. Since these links are at the top of the page they have a great SEO value! See the README file that comes with the theme for more information.

Well, today eBay officially launched their new affiliate system, and I have to say so far it looks good.  With the new launch comes the need to support the new system in BANS (and in phpBay Pro).  Fortunately a new version of BANS was released today as well that supports the new links required for EPN.  I’ve installed it on a low-traffic site to see how well it performs.  So far so good, but BANS 3 has been less than reliable (two patches so far) so we’ll wait a bit before rolling out the patches to all my BANS stores.

I received an email from the Build A Niche Store staff that Version 3 is finally available!  You can now upgrade for free for those who already own the product by going to their upgrade URL and entering in your Clickbank receipt number.  I’m very interested in seeing the final version, there are lots of new features to play with.  I’ll be releasing videos on it soon I hope.

None of the new templates are released with the new version yet, they aren’t finished and they didn’t want to delay the release waiting on them.  I’ll be releasing some new templates myself in celebration.

Kudos to the guys for releasing their updates for free to their current customers!

I’ve got my hands on it!  The new Build A Niche Store 3 beta is finally out.  Kelvin and Co. have done a fine job.  Once I’m able to I’ll give a hands on review, but I can say now it’s an improvement over BANS 2.  More of an evolution than revolution.

I’ve added a new free template to Designer Niches called “Formal Attire”.  Be sure to check it out in the templates section of the site.  Like all of the templates we offer it’s available for a limited amount of downloads.  Don’t miss out, our previous free template went like hotcakes and is no longer available!

Build A Niche Store (BANS) version 3 starts beta testing today.  I’ve been told by Kelvin, one of the authors, that their plan is to release BANS 3 in late January to early February.  There’s a seven day window that the beta testers get to look at the product and make their recommendations.  As one of the selected beta testers I’m real excited to see what’s new in this latest release.  I have a lot of confidence in Adam and Kelvin, and I know they’ve been sensitive to some of the new features their competition is offering.

No mention has been made of how the upgrade to version three will be handled for existing owners.  Upgrade from version 1.3 to version 2 was free, so I hope they continue in this tradition.

I’ll be shooting some videos of version 3 as soon as I’m able to, just to give people a feel for the product.

Designer Niches will of course be supplying quality templates to the new version of BANS.

There are some exciting things in the picture for Build A Niche Store in the next few weeks. Version 3 of the software is going to be entering beta testing and then finally release to the general public. The new version of the popular niche marketing software package will offer improvements in SEO design, new templates, more options for customizing store listings, and more! I’ve set up a Squidoo Lens on Build A Niche Store 3 that I’ll keep track of the announcements on this powerful new program. Visit http://www.squidoo.com/bans3 to follow along.

Thank you all for visiting designerniches.com.  Your interest in our templates has been wonderful, especially for the free “Ebon Storm Lite” template.  We limit the number of copies available for all of our templates, and at this point we’d like to announce that Ebon Storm Lite has reached it’s quota.  It’s being pulled from the store as of today.  I’d like to thank all of the downloaders and I hope you find good use for the free template.  I’ll be offering a new free template soon.  Keep an eye out for this space!

I’ve added a video to the site showing the steps required to install a Build A Niche Store (BANS) site up on a blank domain.  The BANS installation video is #1 in a series, check it out!