November 2014 news

An especially important note to check your spam folders, as some recent form posts or order notifications may have ended up in your spam folder.  

In this issue of Website Builder news:

  • A spammy month - system changes
  • Shorter .nz domain name updates
  • Ecommerce Upgrades
  • Need training? 
  • Professional Web Design Services
  • Better Broadband
  • Affiliate discounts
  • Start your own business - reseller options
  • Cool links/system links
  • Websites of the month

A Spammy Month

From time to time we get hit by spammers targeting web forms, and also ISPs and email providers like GMAIL change their rules on how they deal with incoming email, and deciding what messages are spam and what is not spam. And it can be hard to decide when the messages come via a trusted web form. 

In late October a large number of our customers reported 2 key issues,

  • bad emails in inbox, eg increased spam received via their enquiry forms and other web forms
  • good emails in spam, eg order notifications and real web form enquiry messages ending up in their spam folders. 

In all likelyhood, these 2 issues are actually related, with all web form emails (and system generated notifications) being considered spam due to the sudden increase in spam.

We have implimented the following solutions

  • we created some new rules to block form spam of a particular recipe, and block a few specific IP's who were the main culprits... 
  • we cleaned up about 113000 spam messages received in a short period of time. we also cleaned the related email addresses from your mailing lists... so they might seem a little smaller this month  
  • if anyone sends a URL in an enquiry message, they are now required to complete a captcha. Captcha forms are really good at blocking spam, but many people hate completing them. We believe that URLs in enquiry messages are typically spam, and therefore, this is the best rule to determine if a captcha is required. You can quickly block other spam by adding a captcha for all messages, via the page options tab of any enquiry form page in the CMS 
  • All web form enquiry messages now use the FROM address of your own primary email. Recent changes by Spark and Gmail, mean that we can no longer use the from address of your customers, as we are not permitted to send email on behalf of your customers. In doing so, the email is likely to be blocked as spam. We do however set the REPLYTO address of your notifications to the customers email, so that you can easily reply to them. We also include their email in the content of the notifications. 
  • All order notifications are now sent to your inbox using your own FROM address, as per the enquiry changes above. 

We understand these changes may not be optimal for all users, but we have to strike the right balance between ensuring good emails don't end up in spam folders, and bad emails don't end up in inboxes. 

In any case, you should review the last month of your spam folder and look for any missing notifications or messages. You should idealy do this daily or weekly in any case. 

Shorter .nz domain names update

Many of our customers have opted to purchase the shorter .nz domains. In many cases, the registration was only for 1 month, and those registrations have now expired. It is very important that you renew your shorter .nz domains if you want to keep them and stop others from registering them. 

We also heard some important messages at a recent .nz conference. 

  • If you have reserved your shorter .nz domain, you must not let your longer eligible domain expire. If your longer domain lapses, so will your shorter ,nz reservation. To be on the safe side, please just register and use the domains you want. 
  • If you have conflicted status domains, you must register your interest in your domain before March 2015. If you fail to do that, the conflict will be resolved by the domain going to the other interested parties. 
  • If you have recorded your interest in a conflicted status domain, you should not expect the mediation to be personable. The message that might not have been obvious to both you or us, is that you essentially need to contact the other interested parties and offer to buy the rights from the other parties. So a conflicted domain will remain in dispute until such time as one person gets the others to agree. No one will hear your case. No one will judge the matter. It is merely an issue of each interested party either agreeing to a financial settlement, or remaining in dispute. 

For more information on the shorter .nz domains, go to the official website: http://anyname.nz/

and if you need your UDAI, you need to login to the CMS and request it via DOMAINS tab, then your domain, then REGISTRY. 

Shopping Cart Upgrades

  • Shipping calculations now include optional cubic weights. Set your product dimensions for large products to make use of this feature. You will now see weights and dimensions shown on shipping dockets, and you can disable those via a tick box in the shopping setup, notification options area. 
  • We are currently developing a Purchase Orders section to streamline inwards stock management. A beta release should be available in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned for that. 
  • We will be limiting any further upgrades to the core shopping cart system until after the silly season is over. And that season continues through until February 14th to accommodate summer holidays and all the chocolate and florist websites we host. 

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.nz

Posted: Mon 10 Nov 2014

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