August 2014 News

It's been a big month development wise, lots of new features to use... 

In this issue of Website Builder news:

  • Shorter .nz domain name.
  • Domain registant details
  • Fighting spammers and hackers
  • Inventory Management System Added 
  • VIP Pricing Option
  • Loyalty Points Program
  • Discount Pricing Display Engine
  • Kiwibank Fetch Payment Gateway
  • Usability Changes
  • Rewriting prompts and internationalisation
  • Professional Web Design Services
  • Better Broadband
  • Affiliate discounts
  • Start your own business - reseller options
  • Cool links/system links
  • Websites of the month

Shorter .nz domain names

From 1pm, 30 September 2014, ‘second level’ domains like the .co in ‘.co.nz’ and the .org in ‘.org.nz’ will become optional. You’ll be able to get .nz names with them, without them, or both.

Please use the following official website for checking if you can register the shorter version of your existing domain name. If you get a status of PPR, then registration is straighforward and you merely need to wait until 1pm 30th September to register your domain inside websitebuilder.  If however you have a conflicted name, then please follow the conflict process explained in the following URL.

http://anyname.nz/

IMPORTANT NOTE: if you bought your domain name in the last 2 years, the shorter version may show as "available". If your domain is in that status, then it is a strictly first come first served basis. I can't stress how important it is to secure your domain on the opening day. We have over 500 customers in this status, and we have built an auto registration system for those who want the shorter domain. We will attempt registration of your domain on a best effort. To setup your automatic registration, just login to website builder, locate your existing .co.nz domain name, then click on registry button or tab. You will see the option for the shorter domain registration there.   

Domain Registrant Name

It's very important that your domain is registered under your personal or company name. There are too many dodgy web designers (including well known cheap printing companies) out in the big bad world who use their own name to register your domain, then won't release it to you when you want to leave them.

Your domain is one of the most important intelectual property items you can own, and if you later have issues with your web designer, you need to be able to make a swift exit without arguing over ownership of the name.

Our team often suffers the pain when customers want to transfer names to us where they are not the current registrant of the domain. The actual transfer can take several weeks and involve hours of our support time. All we can do is encourage anyone who has their domain name registered with a 3rd party to update their contact details on a regular basis before  

For domains registered in our registries, you do not need to worry, we are pretty happy that 99% of our customers are setup correctly, with only a few exceptions for the occassional business sale or ownership transfer.

A great site to check your WHOIS data is here: http://www.who.is/  but please avoid buying anything from them ;-)  

If you need to change your domain registrant contact details, you can do it within the CMS, under domains, then your domain, then registry contacts. 

If you need to change the primary registrant name, then you need to print, sign, scan and email the form here: Change of Registrant

Fighting Spammers and Hackers

First, it's very important that you have good virus protection installed on your computer. We suggest: ESET - Antivirus Software

Second, it's important that you pick good passwords for your mailboxes. When a customer does not pick a good password, or they have a virus that let's their password be known, then a hacker can maliciously use our mailserver to send large amounts of email. This causes our mailserver to get black listed, and this in turn effects the ability for all customers to send emails. There is not solution for this except for us to be viligent in educating our users to use robust passwords. If we detect large email activity on an account, we are prone to immediately change the user password, so that the effects are limited to the first few thousand emails sent... Consider than 1000's of emails can be sent in a minute, so we need to act quickly... 

Third, you should also pick a good unique password for the CMS, and for other important websites you access. A good password is at least 8 characters long, with a mix of numbers and special characters included in the password. If you are using words in your password, try to use at least 2 words misspelled. 

Please install  ESET - Antivirus Software

Inventory Management System Added

We have added a new inventory management system into our product stock screens. We now record all inventory movements, so we will be able to produce historical stock reports. 

We are continuing to further refine our Inventory and POS systems to ensure you can manage your online and offline shops through one simple system, with no extra subscription fees.  

Inventory Management System

VIP Pricing 

We have now added a VIP pricing option, which will display the GST inclusive price of all products at RRP and the member price group A price too. The member price is only available once a user logs in, but displaying the price encourage users to become a more active customer via signing up for a newsletter. You need to manually authorise each member to have the VIP status, by changing their status to "authorised" and price group to "A"

Loyalty Points Program

We have made the loyalty points program live now.

You can control how fast customers earn points, and how fast they can redeem points. You can put minimum spends on both the earning and redeeming of points.

If a member has points, they need to login to redeem the points.  We have added a total points balance to all invoices where relevant, a handy login link to the end of customer invoices to speed up the process of repeat sales, 

Loyalty Points System

Discount Pricing Display Engine

We have modified the engine we use to display pricing. If a customer enters a promotional code, or you are running an open discount, or existing items added to the cart would produce a discounted price on new items, then we will now display the discounted price at the earliest opportunity in the catalogue. 

For example, if you have a promotion where you sell pears at 50% off when purchased with an apple, and each are $1 to begin with, then after you add a $1 apple to the cart, all pears will show as discounted to 50 cents even before they are added to the cart.

We believe this improvement will make it easier to run promotions, and enoucrage your customers to buy more.  

Kiwibank Fetch Payment Gateway 

We now support the Kiwibank Fetch Payment Gateway. We will continue to ensure our service supports the most popular NZ and international payment gateways.

Recent changes to the payment gateways area include a new transaction ID sequence for tracking each transaction attempt, as apposed to using the basket ID. Depending on the payment gateway you use, you will may need to look deeper to match an basket ID. This works makes it easier for us to debug issues and provide greater security around automated delivery of digital services.  

http://www.fetchpayments.co.nz/

Usability Changes

We have swapped the icons on the left menu in the CMS. You should now click the main menu button to edit your content, and only use the hover icons if you want faster access to view or manage settings for your page. After clicking the main button to edit your content, you can also use the page tabs top right to access other page features like layout. 

Rewriting Prompts and Internationalisation

Have you ever disliked the wording or a system generated heading or prompt? Or do you run a website in a different language? Now you can reword almost all prompts, headings and other system generated messages via a streamlined "prompt rewriting service".

Prompt rewriting is available in the design menu, and this service overrides some of the old custom prompts from the shopping cart setup area. 

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

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 (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. 

Cool links

All those links and more at our new toolbox page: More Toolbox / Links

Websites of the month

Here's a selection of some of our recent Go Lives.  

And view more examples of websites powered by website builder

Please contact us for more information. 

From the Team @ Web Widgets Ltd - Free Website Builder

www.websitebuilder.co.nz

Posted: Tue 02 Sep 2014

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