While most of the customers of Bike Shop Hub, are interested in hearing about what we are up to in the realm of our expertise in bike touring, bike commuting, family cycling and increasingly with electric bikes, the tools with which we are presenting this expert knowledge with are worth sharing from time to time as well. Recently we’ve been looking at upgrading two critical systems and have been investigating available open source tools as we like to do.

In the realm of our website CMS (content management system), we’ve been debating back and fourth about WordPress versus Drupal. We really like the robustness and extensibility of Drupal, however it does not offer the out of the box usability of WordPress. WordPress also has a thriving community of users that use it in very similar ways to us. Being able to share with this community is a great resource for us. And we are already WordPress users for our blogging here at CommuteByBike.com, UtilityCycling.org and BikeTrailerBlog.com as well as for supporting the womens bike racing community blog, WomensBikeTalk.com.

With WordPress, we’ve discovered a great interactive theme called Headway. This theme is very interesting because it allows for quite a bit of customization with very little experience in HTML or CSS. Of course if you want to go outside of the parameter that the tool offers, html, css and php programming come into play. From what I’ve seen in exploring quite a few themes for WordPress, there is no easier to use tool to build a custom look with on Headway. There is also a decent community using the tool when you are interested in doing more advanced customizations as well that offer up plenty of guides, tips and tricks. If you are WordPress user of any level, I highly recommend checking out what can be done with Headway. We are currently rebuilding this website in Headway working on adding in dynamic content from our 3 shops, adding sections to this blog, bringing in a forum and setting up a section for the products that we manufacture under the Wandertec brand.

Behind the website presentation, an online retail business like Bike Shop Hub requires a solid inventory accounting system. We’ve been pushing Quickbooks to its limits and really have had quite a bit of trouble with integrating its data with the online shops. We’ve decided to plunge into an upgraded system and began exploring the realm of open source ERPs.

xTuple came to the fore front for us as an accounting system that offered usability that seemed familiar with what was working for us in Quickbooks. xTuple really looks promising in its ability to integrate everything about it into our online shops as needed. And if it doesn’t offer tools we need, unlike Quickbooks, we can customize it as needed.

The usability of xTuple seems like it will allow us to get up and running with it fairly quickly. While xTuple is billed as Open Source, it is really a hybrid of commercial and open source. The basic version, Postbooks, is available for free download, while the more advanced Standard and Manufacturing versions come with a decent price tag. I like this aspect of it as the paid versions of it mean that there is good support for implementation and maintenance as we get underway. In the long term, xTuple seems to offer up alot of useful tools that we can grow into.

Were just getting started with these 2 interesting tools, but hopefully you’ll start to see the results of them here soon. I’ll try to post updates here on how things are going with these two new tools in a few months and please post your questions and/or experiences with Headway or xTuple in the comments below.

An interesting perspective through the shop window of Stuart grinding a railing, creating a bold plume of sparks.

And our demo A2B Metro E-Bike poised for an electric bike commute in the slushy spring conditions we are having this week in Flagstaff. The A2B Metro handled well in the slippery conditions though with how wet the roads were with slush and the forward position of the pedals, by the time I made it in to work my pants and shoes were soaked. I will need to test this more in regular rain conditions.

The Bar Mitts were definitely appreciated on this wet cold commute. My favorite combo of a commuting specific pannier on one side and a touring pannier on the other side (a RackTime WorkIt and a Lone Peak P-400) worked well on the A2B bike rack.

Yesterday Stu, Robin, Robert and Ted got to flex their muscles and install the railing for the staircase up to our showroom.

To get everything lined up for installation, they had to carry the massive unit out the big garage door and then walk it back down the small door up the isle. Fortunately, we’re having some great weather here in Flagstaff during this spring break week, a rare thing.

With the staircase in place, Robin is hard at work putting up all of our products on the displays. This was the last big task for Stu on the inside section and he will be now shifting his efforts to the outside tasks of the sign, extending the awning and building our customer bike rack with sculptural elements.

Everything seems on pace for our Flagstaff Bike-To-Work week launch of our retail space. We’ve signed up as Co-Sponsors of this year’s event with Flagstaff Biking and our excited to be launching our showroom at the end of the week which I’m pretty sure will be May 21st. Our line-up of electric bikes is coming together nicely as well as our retail offering of bicycle parts and accessories outside of the range offered on Bike Trailer, Bag and Kid Shop.

I enjoyed this post today by the Lazy Randonneur, Why dont I dress up like a trafficcone?

While I strongly agree with the sentiments to not dress up like a techno clown, I would argue that visibility is still quite an important thing to consider. I like to achieve visibility through bright front and rear lights installed on my bike that I run day and night, so that my clothing choice doesn’t matter and I’m visable even when I’m wearing street patterned camouflage.

Most of the time I wear dark colours cycling. Why dont I wear one of those traffic cone inspired bike outfits? This question has 3answers:

• I mostly ride for transportation so I wear the clothes I would wear if I walked, drove or took a bus.
• My risk assessment tells me street clothes are safe for cycling.
• I want to promote cycling as something beyond a sporting activity or transportation for a select group of geeks.

See the full post at the Lazy Radonneur.

2010 was quite the year for the Bike Shop Hub. We grew up and moved out of the shop behind my house into a 4000 square foot warehouse with offices and a metalworking shop. We reorganized all of our web stores into our shared site platform and launched our third shop, BikeKidShop.com. We took the reigns of the popular and active cycling blog, CommuteByBike.com. And we did this all with the help of some new additions to our team here at Bike Shop Hub. The year was both fruitful and challenging as we grew in many ways including in sales, though our sales growth wasn’t quite up to the level we anticipated in part due to some critical loss of search engine rankings with our website reorganization happening right at the start of the busy season in April. Since the drop off, we’ve recovered on the internet marketing front, deploying many new strategies as we charge optimistically into 2011.

Looking into the year ahead, we have quite a few goals that we are looking at. In comparison to entering 2010 where we had two major hurdles to clear in the website move and shop move, 2011 would appear to be offering a bounty of smaller more attainable objectives.

The first thing that we are looking at checking off the list is launching our local presence. Stu and Robin C have been working hard on putting together a show room in our front office and a section of the warehouse. We’re mostly done with the inside section, and then Stu will be looking at putting up a Bike Shop Hub sign, bike rack and extending our awning. Once our retail space is fully established, we’ll all be excited to have Stuart getting back into manufacturing mode with a focus on advancing the design of the Wandertec BONGO and related accessories and starting to look into some bicycle rack ideas that we’ve been mulling over.

On the website front, I’m continuing to focus on Pay-Per-Click marketing as well as some related Search Engine Marketing. I’m working on completing an overall report of Bike Shop Hub’s overall internet marketing success. With this in place, I will be pushing ahead into learning and implementing more advance PPC and SEO strategies. A critical part of our SEO strategy is the work that Megan and Robin C are focused on in improving the main category and brand pages on our three shops. Some excellent examples of this are the bike panniers and bike messenger bag pages. We are focusing on making these pages the most expert level resources of information on their given topic with thorough well-written content sprinkled with excellent, story telling photography. In addition to the category and brand level pages, we will be offering up expert articles on topics that aren’t covered in the category and brand pages. Megan and Robin C will be focusing on completing these pages for Bike Bag, Kid and Trailer Shops until they are completed. With the content on these pages completion, we’ll be ready to shift our focus toward launching our 4th specialty shop, Bike Tech Shop.

Further on the website front, after solidifying our advanced PPC and SEO strategies and working with Megan and Robin to get going with Bike Tech Shop, the next big objective will be to upgrade this site, BikeShopHub.com to be a better umbrella site, thoroughly representing the entire business. New features will be added to this site including a navigation system between all of our sites, a central page showing updates from all of our sites and a forum. It will also include a section for products we manufacture under the Wandertec brand.

Further down the list, but perhaps achievable in 2011 is the possibility that we will be continuing to push forward with integrating our websites into a shared platform and possibly updating the templates and other aspects of our blogs and maybe shops as well.

While its always easy to be overly ambitious at the start of a new year, I’m taking the cautious view in my goals and projections for 2011. With that, it seems like everything on this list is well within our sites. In fact on the less reserved side of things, I’m imagining we’ll be able to tackle a variety of other projects and directions either not mentioned here or not even yet imagined. One way or another it’s looking to be an exciting year ahead for Bike Shop Hub!