This weekend (mere hours from now in fact) I'm heading down to CoffeeFest to hang out with lotsa CoffeeGeek types, lots of not-so-coffeegeek types, and enjoy the rain that is fall in Seattle. I'll have a report up at CoffeeGeek.com in a week or two.

New Tools for CoffeeGeek
In fact, this weekend's event will be my first chance to use and eventually showcase something new that I bought for the CoffeeGeek site - a Canon GL2 MiniDV camcorder.

With the 3 CCDs, one for green, one for red, one for blue, a 1.7mpixel image capture, 440,000 pixel CDs, and a raft of broadcast quality features and abilities, this baby ain't your daddy's handycam.

I should say that I didn't buy this, per se. WebMotif, the parent company of CoffeeGeek, bought it, and bought it as a company tool, for use in shooting promotional video work for our clients. But since CoffeeGeek is a part of WebMotif, well, you get the picture... er, video.

Speaking of WebMotif...
We took the wraps off a project this week at the WebMotif office - it is a client project we've been building for about 55 days. I'm actually really excited about it - because it's bleeding edge as far as our technology is concerned; it's a not-too-shabby design; and it's all about coffee and espresso.

Front Page The front page automatically refreshes content with selected (limited) products everytime you reload it.

Product Page A lot of automation built into these product pages to make it informative, fun, and easy to use.

Take a gander at the EspressoPeoplewebsite. It's brand new, but it's not a brand new company - the folks behind this venture are the good folks at Aabree Coffee long time vets of the online espresso and coffee machine reseller warz.

This website makes me proud as the Creative Director for WebMotif for a lot of reasons. I guess first and foremost is the WIPS content management system driving the site, and some seriously innovative things that may happen as you surf around. Everything you see is controlled automatically by WIPS. Take for example a typical full detail product page, like the one for Livia 90 Semi Auto Espresso Machine. If you visit that page, you'll note that some links are in blue, and some are in light green. The blue links are all standard hyperlinks, but the green links? Hover your mouse over one of them. See? It's a tooltip giving a definition of that linked word. Click it. A pop up window will load with a fuller definition of the word or phrase, and in many cases, a photo is included.

To do this kind of interactive work, this kind of deep linking within a site, would take literally a day per product or more if you were to use standard HTML when building this site. Thanks to WIPS, it's a matter of clicking a checkbox when adding a product.

Other sweet things (as far as I'm concerned) are the wish list and the way that works, the similar products section, and the way we handled features and benefits.

The site is designed to grow quite a bit with the thing I like most in an ecommerce site - CONTENT. Dan Hughes plans to add heaps of content down the road, and the site is ready for it in spades.