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December 2014 News

A very merry Christmas to all. I hope you have had an awesome year, and look forward to a great holiday period.

In this issue of Website Builder news:

Our Christmas Gift to you
Recap of the year
Future focus
Ecommerce Upgrades
Security Upgrades
Holiday Hours and Holiday Time Support
Professional Web Design Services
Better Broadband
Affiliate discounts
Start your own business - reseller options
Cool links/system links
Websites of the month

Our Christmas Gift To You

Once again this year we have made donations to charity.

$10000 to Oxfam www.oxfam.org.nz
$4000 to Fred Hollows foundation (a new focus going forward) www.hollows.org.nz
And regular payments to various childrens charities.

Recap of the year

It's been a big year this year. To recap some of the key highlights

Shorter .nz domains launched. It's a worry that only 10% of PRR elligible domains have taken up this opportunity. In just a few months time, any domain name squatter will be able to take those shorter domains if not claimed.
POS - We launched our Point of Sale software, and have been quickly developing heaps more work flows around it, including split payments on orders, deposits, additional reporting etc.
Inventory Management - We now track inventory movements, and can now produce a historical stock balance report. This may help you with your next tax return, reducing the need to depend on a 3rd party inventory management system.
The combination of our POS, shopping cart and inventory management system, means all areas of your business will be in sync
Kiwibank Fetch payments and Poli Pay were added as payment options
I have a new baby girl who can now sleep through the night
Several upgrades to our CMS interface, with a focus on popups for various micro tasks, and "auto save" to minimise navigational stress.
we revamped our mobile version websites to use banner images, and a drop down menu,
all websites given "responsive" code base, that makes it easier to render the content in a different format for mobile devices.
New popup help form streamlines support tickets providing us summaries of key data.

Future Focus

Early next year we will be relocating our servers onto the AWS platform.. Disruption will be minor and this task will not completed until after 15th Feb
In February we will remove email services being used on any offline sites. Email services are now only available to customers on paid hosting plans.
We will be changing the way our database deals with products which exist in multiple categories. This will ensure that the ordering of different categories can be treated separately.
We will continue our focus on enhancing the ecommerce experience, including go live of the auto address feature.
We will add more user friendly form validation
we will continue our further development of drag and drop visual editing components.

Shopping Cart Upgrades

hide delivery address if customer chooses "pickup" as freight option
auto complete address fields (available for testing in cms demo mode)
split payments now available in POS
payment summary banking report now based on partial transaction date, and a detail history report for a given date and method is available.
purchase orders can now be created via the reports area. Purchase orders start with the out of stock report, and let you search for additional products by supplier name.
cubic weights are now supported by our shopping cart. You can load the dinmensions of large products, and our system will calculate the cubic weight, and use the heavier option of that or product weight when determining the freight option price.

Security Upgrades

All user passwords are now encrypted in our database, and no one, not even our system administrators can see them. It's important that passwords are stored encrypted, as often many users make the mistake of using their banking password on other websites. Although it has never happened, it is always possible that one day our security might be compromised, and you could imagine the danger of several million emails, names, addresses and passwords getting into the wrong hands.

A number of our merchants have historically enjoyed the ease of administering their customers passwords, but now this must be done with our standard workflows. You can change a customers password to anything you like, but if you send a password reminder, it will generate a temporary encrypted password.

Users are also required to enter their old password in order to change to a new password. This ensures that passwords can't be changed if someone left themselves logged in on a public computer.

We have added a special tag called AUTOLOGINLINK that you can add to autoresponders to make it easier for your customers to login with just 1 click, using a secure hash of their password. We have had this link on the bottom of our shopping cart orders for some time.

Holiday Hours and Holiday Time Support

This year we will only be closed on the main public holidays. A reduced staff roster will provide support on most days through the holiday period. If you don't get someone on the phone, i would really encourage you to email us, as we can then get to your ticket in order they come in, and support you from any device. The average wait time for a response to a support ticket has been about 15 minutes during most working days. After hours, your ticket may be answered within 2 hours, and answered from a mobile device, so be really helpful in providing a good description of your problem along with a screenshot.

Please make sure you have paid all your hosting fees before Christmas, you need to have paid the invoice received last week well before Christmas day. Cheques will not be noted between the 20th December and 5th January.

Need one-on-one Website Builder Training?

If you require personalised training, please contact one of our consultants, who are based all over NZ. Many of our Auckland team can also provide over the phone 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

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.

With the introduction of the international CDN hosting service, it's important that we highlight a few issues with regards to browser and proxy caching.

The importance of the publish button is even greater now. Once apon a time, product page and blog page updates might have published instantly, now you have to press the publish button to see changes.
If your site had errors, or was offline for a short period, you may need to press PUBLISH again to tell our CDN service to check for updates on your website. Publish will generally resolve most issues.
People in different parts of the globe, may now see different versions of your content. The CDN will cache your website in different locations based on the time content was first accesses. Pressing Publish will ensure every one gets the latest version.

Learn more about Clearing your browser cache

Professional Web Design Services and Training

If you require training or professional help getting started with your website, please review their portfolios, specials etc and contact a local consultant. We have authorised all our resellers and design consultants to engage with you directly, and bill you directly for their time.

You can see all the available consultants at the following link from all across NZ.

/webapps/d/21/347206/web-designers-specializing-in-our-cms

Better Broadband

We have teamed up with the awesome 2talk team 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.

/webapps/l/21/347206/nz-broadband-providers

Receive a 20% discount off your web hosting, for life, by referring a friend

Did you know that if you refer a friend to use our awesome website builder service, you get a 20% discount off your hosting? If you refer 5 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

Opciones de revendedor

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 (20%-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. Offer expires 28th Feb 2014.

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 professional help

Contact - Web Designers or lodge a Support ticket

In 99% of cases the answer to a problem is covered in one (or more) of these places. We always fix bugs fast, with all the users we have we get notified very fast of any real bug - they are not common, so if you are having an issue operating the CMS consider some online training with us - you'll always take something away worth value. In all other cases we are happy to do anything you are having trouble doing yourself for a small fee starting from $20 for 10 minutes.