Attached Link: http://www.atharianmedia.com/shop

Hi folks,
This is incredibly long, so please bear with me. The first part is a post I've needed to make for close to 8 months now... :)

A lot of you have probably been observing my merchant endeavors this past year, wondering where the #@$! my head has been since I started getting active again in this community with the Comic Tools products in early 2006.

As you've no doubt noticed, I was seriously off my game in 2006, with several false-starts to sites, numerous issues with ecommerce platforms, hosts/server moves, and a lot of other technical and scheduling issues to overcome.

Sporadic marketing, disappearing for weeks, not making regular posts when I release products. Customer service was responded to in 2-3 days (and ocassionally even longer) rather than my normal 24-hrs or less response time - these are all things that I
advise against in my Marketing for Merchants book, and definitely not the modus operandi of my former self when I ran the Posertrax site.

And I'm sure the "organizational realignment" I've been doing with my product names, brands, and of course the vendor name change at Renderosity was confusing as well.

I'm happy to say that now, with re-branding the products and focusing again on unique, sometimes quirky items, mentor training, investment in the right commerce engine and hours and hours of coding and development time, I've got the site and store to a place I'm happy with, and I'm sure you all will be as well.

As many of you know, I took it down two weeks ago to do some maintenance, and after a long hard look at it, testing and testing and getting some focus group feedback, advice on checkout, and just plain out admitting that it really just sucked, I decided to give the code a serious tweaking, the design a facelift, and the product line some new life.

There's still a LOT of work to be done - 8 years worth of products can't easily be added overnight! :)

But it's a good start.

Here are some of the new/changed things you can find in the Atharian Media shop:

• A much nicer look-and-feel - out with old, dark look. The new store is bright and shiny. :)
• Streamlined categories and product placement
• Better navigation
• Simpler, faster checkout process
• Improved search
• Paypal payment option has finally been integrated
• Security improved
• Membership Levels revamped/simplified
• Bonus points system revamped
• Many products now at 99 cents to $1.99
• New Freebies in the Free Products category

New products and services:

Comic Toolbox - individual comic book sound fx, word balloons, backgrounds and page templates for .99 cents (a bunch of brand-new page templates are on the way to this category soon)

Comic Toolbox also has a membership option which is much cheaper than the individual products - at $49.05 per year or $4.95 per month, you get to download all products in the Comic Toolbox category for free, and there are a few other surprises included with memberships. At least 20 new files are added monthly. The one-year membership gives you two full months for FREE.

Posertrax Updates:

• Now you can choose your licensing (details below)
• Several Posertrax products available w/CD burn option.
• Posertrax Pricing revamped.

Speaking of Posertrax - your requests have been answered. I know a lot of you were sad to see it close in 2005.

Very, very stupid decision of mine.

I have reasons I won't go into, and at the time it seemed unavoidable. Live and learn, move on. Posertrax is one thing that I LOVE doing - I found that I absolutely cannot live without it. I love everything about it - the quirkiness in the product line, the irreverence and wit in the old site and articles, even the product names and song titles. Not to mention getting to play, compose, record, produce - it's just such a FUN thing to do!

If you were a customer of the old Posertrax store - contact me. I have a special freebie for you. I tried doing a mailing to the old list, but got a LOT of bouncebacks and blocks (expected).

While bringing back the "old" Posertrax.com site is still a ways off, the Posertrax category in the Atharian Media Shop is getting full - all the old products are almost back online, and there are even some "new" ones - unreleased Trax, sounds, and other goodies in the archives that were
begging to be finished. I also found a really nice DVD full of thunderstorms I recorded in 2005 that I don't think ever made it into edit mode.

Since this is Severe Weather Week in North Carolina, I'll be releasing a new Pak of thunderstorms this weekend. :)

Speaking of edit mode, I also gave the studio a bit of a facelift this month. Added a few gear upgrades, soundproofing, tweaking the room, stuff like that. And a few other suprises that are going to play a big part in a new product line this year...stay tuned.

I've made both hobby and pro/broadcast licensing available. That way you can use it in your personal projects without having to pay a commercial use license. But for those of you who DO need it for broadcast, that option is available, and it's still a little below industry standard pricing. So even the big studios save money on production music.

So with that, I'm going after a pint of long-overdue Guinness. And hey - what a great day for it! Check out the shop. Drop me a line with your feedback. And enjoy the freebies!

Thanks, and everyone have a GREAT weekend and St. Patrick's Day!
--Donnie Christianson
Atharian Media
web.film.comics.game.music.broadcast.
www.AtharianMedia.com

Atharian Media Brands:
Posertrax
Comic Tools
Silverwing3d
PoserMerchant

You're the guy that ran posermerchant.com, however briefly, right? Your stuff looks interesting, and you're a nice guy, but I'm a bit worried about buying that comic subscrption 'cos I worry that you'll disappear again!

The new site looks awesome Donnie!  Nice work buddy!

Thanks Clint! It's taken a lot of time, but in the end...worth it!

zulu, I completely understand your perspective - and you are right, that is something I'm going to have to overcome. I took so many hits with crappy servers, hosts, and sites last year a lot of folks are understandably gun-shy. When I exhausted options on a site or service, I pulled it and started building a new one - it's just what entrepeneurs do when something isn't working no matter how much time or money you throw at it. But I am moving forward and putting that behind me. I'm up to the challenge.

PoserMerchant.com is still running - after some technical issues with the store I had there (I originally was trying to do THIS store at that site), I removed it and switched over to a blog format which I update at least monthly.

What I found was, trying to mix the Comic Tools, Posertrax, Silverwing3d, and PoserMerchant marketing products just didn't work - it confused visitors, and the OS Commerce platform bugs just made it worse. By leaving out the marketing products, and doing the rebranding, I'm getting much more targeted visitors and buyers. And PoserMerchant.com is also getting its own targeted traffic.

I hope that explains what happened with the PoserMerchant site. I wasn't aware the downtime looked like I closed it. Let me know if you have any questions or anything,

Thanks!
--Donnie