December 2007 News

In this issue of WebWidgets News, December 2007... 

  • Our Christmas Gift
  • Summer Holiday Hours Of Business
  • New Home Page
  • What a year it has been!
  • Updates to Shopping Carts
  • Website of the Month 


Our Christmas Gift

This year we have decided to do something a bit different.

On behalf of all our customers we will be making the following donation to Oxfam who will find a good home for these gifts.

  • 1 Baby Buffalo
  • 3 Donkeys
  • 3 Goats
  • 30 Ducks
  • 20 Chickens
  • Safe drinking water for 250 people
  • 10 Mosquito Nets
  • 1 set of tools
  • 4 lambs
  • and 40 school books

 

Summer Holiday Hours

Our office will be closed from 22nd December to the 6th January.

Our content management system and web hosting will function as per normal, but we will be unable to answer your emails and phone calls.

Some staff may take additional holidays in January and Febuary, so there may be some delays on design, development and SEO work.

If you have an emergency during our closed period, eg your website is offline or not functioning, or you have accidentally deleted significant content, please phone Reuben on 021 70 9996.

 

New Home Page

We've updated our Web Widgets home page. We'd welcome your feedback.
www.webwidgets.co.nz

 

What a year it has been!!!

Did you know Web Widgets has grown from around 300 customers at the start of the year to 500 customers at the end of the year? We are currently signing up approximately one live customer per business day.

We would like to thank all of you who have given such positive referrals to your friends. Please remember to tell us when you see your friends websites go live so that we can give you a referrer's discount off your own website hosting fee.

 

Updates to Shopping Carts

You may note a slight modification to the format of order notification emails and invoices. This new format makes the invoice number more obvious and now includes the date.

The editing area of products has been split up into several screens. We hope this will make the process more streamlined for adding and editing products more quickly. The new structure allows us to provide more helpful tips on each screen. If you want to add a photo to a product, you now do this after adding the initial basic product details.

 

Website of the Month

Ken Leech is the webmaster of www.numicon.co.nz and this month he shares his website and his experience of building the website himself using WebWidgets.
 
Numicon is a maths programme that helps children understand the basic concepts of numbers and arithmetic.  It works particularly well for children who are visual learners and is being used by many children with special needs, particularly Down syndrome, dyslexia and autism. The website (www.numicon.co.nz) makes it easy for us to support schools and parents with information about the programme, additional resources, and of course, an easy way to purchase the product range.  As an added bonus, we are now receiving orders from Australia even though we have no physical presence there.
 
We had been selling the product range for a while, but we needed to make sure that schools always had access to the latest product range and prices.  With the volatility of the NZ dollar against the pound, we need to update our prices every three months, so when we were doing everything manually, it was quite problematic receiving orders on old order forms using old prices. 
 
We were looking for a company that could easily establish a shopping cart without us having to have any technology at our end.  It soon became apparrent that it was very easy to create and maintain the site, add new products, change prices etc, without having to know any HTML.  We also wanted to know that when it comes time to accept payment by credit card, that this would be easy to integrate.
 
The website building process was really quite straight forward.  The most difficult part was getting the freight charges setup correctly, as our product range varies from small, inexpensive accessories that cost very little to send through to large kits that are relatively expensive.  To make the freight charges easy for the customer (and us) to understand has been quite a challenge, as we neither wanted to overcharge for a small order or undercharge for a large order. 
 
The best part is that it's so easy to change something or to link one part of the website to another part.  It has meant that other people in the business have been able to update the site without needing any technical knowledge.  
 
It does help if you have some technical experience and HTML knowledge.  I have found that if you want to do anything slightly complicated in terms of formatting (e.g. setting up multi-column layouts) then you really do need to get into the HTML to get exactly what you want.  It's worth learning enough to be able to fiddle at this level.  I have also found that the more experienced I get the more clever things I find are built into WebWidgets.


Have a great holiday and a happy new year!

Albie, Auvasa, Emma, Natasha, Phil and Reuben (The WebWidgets Team)

Posted: Mon 10 Dec 2007

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