December 2016 News

Hi [FIRSTNAME]

This edition of website.world news has lots of excellent news and updates.

  • SSL UPGRADES
  • Merry Christmas 
  • Over $20,000 pledged to charity
  • Holiday Support Hours
  • PHP Hosting plans now available
  • System updates
  • Professional website design - from only $100
  • 100% Up Time
  • Need training? 
  • Watch Training Videos 
  • Better Broadband & 0800 telephone numbers
  • 25% discount on hosting
  • Start your own business - reseller options
  • Cool links/system links
  • Websites of the month


SSL Upgrades

All premium hosting customers have been updated to SSL "https" hosting for free. Your old "http" website URL will be redirected to the preferred https protocol. 

This update will ensure your customers have a greater sense of trust in your website, and will ensure they are not scared off by Google Chrome updates coming in January 2017. 

SSL hosted websites also benefit from a SEO boost. However, to maximize that SEO boost, you should submit your updated sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. You can get that sitemap by clicking the SEO tab in the CMS. 

It is possible that during this change, your website could have some warning messages, including embedded iframe/scripts that are not SSL. We have fixed the vast majority of our customers websites already so that issue should not occur. Also, due to the redirect, it's possible that you may need to update your payment notification URLs depending on your payment gateway's use of a POST method to the old http url. It's possible that you may need to update the link in any other API's or systems where you refer to the old http version of the URL. We will redirect all GET requests, but we cannot redirect POST requests in the same way. 

Customers on our standard or basic hosting plan will need to upgrade to a premium plan. Our premium plans entitled to free SSL certificate hosting are the business plans or above.   


Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

We realize many of our merchants are busy selling in a mad rush up until Christmas. This is a busy time for our web servers, but a fairly quiet time for our support team. 

Many of our long term customers will be aware that we have a tradition of giving to charity rather than sending gifts to our customers. Last Christmas we donated $10000 to Oxfam. In the current tax year we have so far donated $4,000 to several NZ based children's charities, and we have a policy of continuing the same contributions each year. We have also pledged over $16,000 to the 2 main charities we support. This will make a total charity budget over over $20,000 per year moving forward.

$12,000 Pledged to Oxfam p/a

Once again we are making our major Christmas donation to Oxfam. They do such great work around the world to help people to help themselves out of poverty, and provide emergency relief during natural disasters. We are now pledging $1000 per month to Oxfam on a continuous basis. 

Oxfam

$4,800 Pledged to Fred Hallows Foundation p/a 

The Fred Hallows foundation offers the gift of sight. By restoring sight the world of possibilities can be changed for the better for the recipient. We have pledged a $400 monthly to this charity on a continuous basis. 

Fred Hallows


Summer Support Team Holiday Hours 

Some of our team have agreed to offer continued support through the holiday period, however, staff numbers and hours will be reduced. One person only will be available during the normal business hours, but not on bank holidays. They may be on another call, or dealing with another issue when you contact us, so our usual prompt support service may be reduced.  

You can help us achieve the best service for all by:

  • Please contact us by email rather than phone.
  • Please provide screenshots or URLs to help us understand your issues.
  • Please pay any outstanding bills before you go on holiday. If you forget to do this, please pay your bills by credit card to ensure prompt reinstatement of your website hosting automatically. This requires no human intervention.
  • Please learn how to use our web mail service before you go on holiday.  

Most importantly, enjoy your holidays! It's a magical time of year to look away from your screens. 


PHP / Wordpress Hosting Plans Now Available

We can now host PHP and Wordpress or Joomla websites on our new and improved PHP web server. The hosting fees are the same as websites built and hosted on our CMS powered platform. All PHP websites will get free SSL certificate and https web hosting, irrespective of the hosting plan. Our PHP hosting plans may not be as cheap as our competitors, but our plans offer a premium hosting service, with low contention for CPU or IO bandwidth. 

Learn more about our PHP Hosting 


System Updates

PayPal Updates 

All PayPal orders are now marked as paid (when paid), even if you forgot to setup the IPN. 

After making a payment via PayPal, customers will now be returned to your website.

PayPal is also requiring all business accounts to jump through a few regulatory hurdles, so get our your scanner and start signing all those documents. But please take care not to click links from emails that appear to be from Paypal. Even though some of these emails are legit, others that look similar are not. Always enter PayPal's web address into the browser manually, before completing any login steps. If you follow a phishing link, you could be giving up your PayPal login details to a scammer. 

Paymate Gateway Update 

All PayMate checkout fields are now pre-populated when you go to pay.

Xero Contact Data Syncing

We now record the Xero Contact ID when we submit an invoice to Xero, and we reuse that Contact ID in future for new invoices from the same contact. You can optionally request we sync all of the Xero contact data into our system. We only sync the name, phone and email. We don't sync any other data, and we don't override any other data. We don't post any contact data to Xero, excepting that which relates to an invoice. Please note that these updates may produce subtle difference in Xero's formatting of an invoice, and that would be a consideration for Xero to deal with. 

Product Returns

We are currently beta testing a new product returns feature in the "View Order" screen within the CMS. This will allow you to record returned or exchanged goods against an order, and have your inventory automatically adjusted. We welcome your feedback on this long requested feature. 

Email Auto Configurations

We have done a lot of work to make email auto configuration easier.  If we manage your domain DNS, then you should find it easier to setup new email clients where the mail server is either ours, gmail or microsoft 365. 

Caching Rules, Etags, Expires Headers

We have made updates to our web servers to set expires headers and ETags, in such a way as to keep google and other search engines happy. These settings should make your pages faster to download. However, now more than ever, you will need to clear your browser cache when looking at your web pages. Especially with images and scripts, you may need to change the filename to ensure the most recent version of a file is seen.


Need Professional Help?  

There are professional web designers all over New Zealand, and the World, who can help you customize your website design. Our in house team can offer a tidy up of your website for just $100+GST. Or contact any of our listed web designer for a full website design or makeover quote.  No matter who you use for your website design, your website remains powered by our awesome content management system, so you can easily make updates to your website long term.



Website Up Time and Speed

Websites: 99.99% up time 

CMS Uptime 99.98%

Uptime stats provided by Pingdom.com


Need one-on-one Website Builder Training?

If you require personalised training, please contact one of our consultants, who are based all over. Several consultants also provide over the phone and web based training at a scheduled time. 

We would encourage all customers to get at least one hour of training at the early stages of building their website, and one more review prior to going live, just to give your website that professional critique, and quick tidy up of the rough bits.

Training topics include:

  • How to use website builder and shopping cart

  • How to design websites

  • How to crop and tidy up photos

  • How to optimise to get your website higher on google and other search engines

  • How to setup a facebook page, or other social media account

  • How to send newsletters

  • How to use any other feature we offer.

Book personalised training here


All New Training Videos

Andrew has been busy making some awesome new training videos, to show you just how easy it is to do some amazing things. If you want him to make more great videos, please email support telling him what a great job he's doing, and what you would like to know more about. 


Clearing your Browser Cache and Publishing

Caching speeds up your computer, but it also causes confusion when viewing changes to your website.  Every web master needs to become familiar with this concept. Almost a third of all our support tickets relate to mis understandings about caching. We can't change the nature of the internet, we only educate.

  • Pressing publish button is neccesary even before you go live. Pressing the publish button allows you to navigate your trial website. When you navigate your trial website, you are actually navigating the published pages in many cases. Only the first page to preview in preview mode usually shows your recent changes. 
  • Your web browser is not aware that you are currently editing your website. The web browser does not undersstand any connection between our website builder CMS, and your website with a completely different URL. You typically need to press REFRESH on your browser to see recent updates. Or you may even need to clear your browser cache.

 Learn more about clearing your browser cache


Faster Broadband, Better Phone Support (NZ Customers)

We have teamed up with the awesome ISP's to offer you some great broadband options. If you have become disgruntled with your current isp, now is the time to get a great bundled broadband offering, including the following ISPs 

  • MyRepublic
  • 2Talk
  • BigPipe

View Awesome NZ Broadband Providers

0800 Numbers and Cheaper Tolls (NZ Customers)

Do you need an 0800 number for your business? We think 2talk provide a really awesome service, and it's who we use. For example, you have an 0800 number call your landline first, then your mobile, then your 2IC's mobile to ensure that somone will take the call. Their rates are cheap, and all the value added services can be managed via a web page control panel, so you don't need to wait on hold for any call centers. You can manage your lines fully yourself. 

View 2Talk Offer


Receive a 25% discount off your web hosting, by referring a friend 

Did you know that if you refer a friend to use our awesome website builder service, you get a 25% discount off your hosting? If you refer 4 friends, then you will essentially get your web hosting for free! Not only that, but your friends will also get their 2nd month web hosting absolutely free. That's a nice little encouragement for them to check our service out and gives us the opportunity to setup your discount. Both discounts apply for your  2nd and subsequent websites also. It doesn't matter if it is yours, a friend, family or a stranger. Discounts begin once both websites are live. Please make sure you or your friend communicates the referral at the earliest opportunity. 

More information about affiliates here


Reseller Options 

We have an awesome new offer for web designers and awesome business networkers. We can setup any web designer who is interested with all they need to get started as a web designer at no cost:

  • There are no setup fees, no contracts to sign.
  • You will earn $2+ on every domain name sold (based on RRP $19 per year). 
  • You will earn (25%-50%) commission on hosting 
  • You can manage all your customers content, domains, emails etc, easily from just 1 login.
  • We take care of all the billing arrangements, so no administrative hassle. 

If you know of anyone who might be interested, point them at our reseller page. We'll offer a $100 finders fee commission for any existing customer who finds us a new reseller who set's up 3+ live websites in the reseller's first 3 months. 

More information on reselling here


Need Help! is at hand...

There are several places you can find answers to questions about how to build your website and add features (which, there are a lot of) and its free for you to look:

If you can't find the answer you need - then get you can Contact - Web Designers or lodge a Support ticket


Cool links

All those links and more at our new toolbox page: 

More Cool Links


View more example websites

 

Please contact us for more information. 

From the Team @ Web Widgets Ltd

Website World - Free Website Builder

www.website.world

Posted: Thu 22 Dec 2016

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