Updated Pages Dashboard

This new dashboard includes an AJAX content search, so that pages can be found extremely quickly from anywhere in the website. It is now also possible to see when the pages were last edited as well. You can sort pages by name, type, or date and they remain paginated. This subtle improvement will make websites much easier to manage for our clients.

The code behind the interface was completely rewritten using JSON so that the dashboard can be resorted without refreshing the entire web page. The improvements to the code make the page faster and more efficient as well. This is important because the dashboard of the CMS has a lot of code running and it is a popular interface in our systems.

Recent Updates

Since March we have been on the fast-track to execute our 2012 goals and we are making a lot of progress:

• Code for pushing ecommerce products to EBay has been overhauled and is live.
• Code for pushing product data to Google Products has been rebuilt and is live.
• A Git code control server installed and all of our production servers have their code synchronized with Git. This allows us to push out new feature updates MUCH faster, with less bugs and downtime.
• New backup systems put in place to backup code and data.
• Email newsletter system overhauled with a cloud-based SMTP for speed and higher delivery rate.
• Consolidation of our brands is underway and all of our web application products are starting to come together under one new brand name.
• Mobile website testing is underway to offer mobile websites to our customers. It works great!

What is next? Facebook!

This week we did some testing of tighter Facebook integration with ALL of our applications. We have this code running in our development environment now, and we are adding a few tweaks before we launch it next week. What I can say at this point is that it is VERY exciting! This integration will definitely give our customers another leap ahead of their competition.

Since Facebook is the worlds largest social network, it is imperative that all businesses utilize Facebook to reach customers. Unfortunately, most businesses setup a Facebook business page and then let it sit there and flounder. Perhaps they update it once a month, or once a week. But with Facebook, you have to update your page every couple of days, to a couple of times a day.  If you don’t, then your updates will get lost in the myriad of other updates that people sift through their Facebook accounts every day. We see this challenge as an opportunity to help our clients, and even help our own company with marketing.

This integration is far-reaching. It will be possible to basically place Facebook integration EVERYWHERE in your website. Now, I am not talking about a “Like” button in the footer of a website – any beginner web developer could do that. No, I am talking about comments, shares, recommendations, likes, the works! Think about how you will be able to syndicate your pages, news, calendar events, products, help files, and more with Facebook with one click. That is awesome! I think this will be more powerful that simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The End of WordPress Blogs

With the latest Facebook integration that we have been working on, it dawned on me that with this new technology and some easy tweaks to our content management system, we will be able to create a blogging platform in our CMS that will allow us to replace WordPress. I have had a love/hate relationship with WordPress every since we have used it for this blog. WordPress is a good blogging platform, and a marginal CMS (in my opinion), but has always been full of security holes. When GoDaddy has a large portion of their PHP/servers hacked last year, it shows you just how big the problem is. But blogs are great for SEO, and really necessary for content that needs to last longer than a timely Facebook post.

Blogs tend to get ignored by website owners after they go live because it is a hassle to log into three places to update web content (CMS, Blog, Facebook), and I am not even mentioning Twitter at this point. Other open-source CMS platforms offer a “Journal”, or internal blogging option within them, but we are going further than that with our managed CMS platform. Large organizations (think Municipalities) sometimes wish to have a blog for each of their departments. One centralized blog per website domain won’t work well in that situation.  A police department may want their own blog separate from the city blog, for example. And multiple sub domains are just clumsy (http://policeblog.citydomain.com – yuk).

“Facebook’s true power is not just its network, but the fact
that it is an application platform for integrating with customer identities.”

We have thought about replacing WordPress for blogs in the past, but one of the hangups have been how to best handle commenting integration. We looked at disqus.com as an option, but that seemed like a workaround. A noticeable trend in commenting has been how national newspaper websites have all started to move to Facebook’s API for comments. The main reason for this is that by forcing commenters to identify themselves (by using their Facebook account to post), it eliminates a lot of the hate messages that cost editors time and money to manage. It also eliminates the need to “create an account” and have yet another password to remember. Facebook’s true power is not just its network, but the fact that it is an application platform for integrating with customer identities. The downside is obviously that sometimes you want folks to be able to post their opinions anonymously so that they can share things they normally can’t. To this point, using Facebook’s API for comments hurts personal privacy and anonymity only. But business owners won’t care. The reality is that some businesses and organizations don’t want to have to deal with cleaning up the really nasty comments. And lastly businesses want to harness the power of syndication that happens when people respond to content using their Facebook accounts.

Blog applications are pretty easy to build. But building a blogging platform that is integrated with; CMS, ecommerce, CRM, customer portals, help systems, single sign-on security, department-based security, tight Facebook integration, RSS, categories, robust commenting, tagging, search engine safe URLs, and more is another matter entirely. That is exactly what we are doing. Once this is completed, we will stop using WordPress for our blog and we will stop recommending it as a blogging platform for our clients. We will build an import utility to pull WordPress posts and push them to our own blogging platform. Our customers will also benefit because they won’t have to pay for blog hosting any longer because it will come integrated with our other systems.

We’ve been busy during the first part of this year to improve our Email, DNS, and SMTP services for our systems. Now that these upgrades are in place, we are back to working on building great websites and executing our 2012 strategy. Right now we are rolling out new products, branding, and enhancements to our software to help our clients do more with their websites.

DNS and Email Outsourcing

In January, I shared our company goals for 2012 with our staff. These goals and strategy were full of lots of improvements to our website management systems, introduction of some new open-source systems into our offerings, updated pricing, new hosting solutions, new email solutions, and more. I also set goals and deadlines for each initiative for 2012. Part of that planning included outsourcing certain services (like hosted email accounts, bulk mail delivery with SMTP, and DNS services) that were costing us too much time and money to run in-house, and that could be run more reliably with specialized vendors.  Unfortunately in January, we also had a core server failure with one of our DNS servers, and also with one of our mail servers. Replacing those servers in our own datacenter was taking too long so this required us to front-burner the outsourcing of those services so that we can focus on doing what we are best at – building and managing high-performance websites. That is how we earn a living.

Managing email servers in-house is something that none of our competitors do any longer – they outsource it. So by running mail servers in our datacenter we were handicapping ourselves by being stupborn and keeping those services in-house. We would spend a lot of time keeping those servers from being blocked by major email providers (Comcast, Verizon, GMail) when a customer of ours would get a virus on their own computers that would send spam, or if we had a customer that was sending spam purposefully. We also could not get ahold of Postini (our spam filtering provider) to get support when we needed it. This was probably due to the fact that Google bought them and integrated their technology into GMail. So we found a new email provider that has the spam filtering built-in, and we never looked back. Microsoft and Google offer email accounts for $5 per month, per email account. Our new email solutions are $1 per month, per email account. We are including a number of free email accounts with most of our hosting packages, but there will now be limits on how many come with our packages.

While we would have liked to roll out this change in a more orderly fashion, the end result is exactly what we had intended – outsourcing email allows us to focus on building, hosting, managing, and marketing websites instead of fighting spam and babysitting servers. The lessons for us with the changes to email services are many, but one of the interesting takeaways is that in the hosting industry today, domain-based email accounts are no longer free or unlimited. If you want to use GMail for your business email it will cost you $5 per month, per email account. We don’t mind who a client uses for email. We can work with any other email provider and still run their website. Hosting email accounts takes significant resources for a hosting company, and I think you will see the “unlimited email accounts” go away from most hosting companies if it hasn’t already.

Google Products Update Completed

We have completed our ecommerce integration with Google’s product feed. This means that our customers that use our Ecommerce software can now push their products directly into Google’s shopping results. We have seen stores get 10-30% increases in sales by adding this feed to their ecommerce store. Our ecommerce software works well with search engines and produces millions of dollars in sales for our clients.

Mobile Websites Now Available 

We have had a lot of requests for mobile websites, and we are now building them. Any organization that is interested in a mobile-friendly website should contact us.

Product Rebranding Underway Now
We are  consolidating most of the brand names of our products in 2012. This will make it easier to shop for our solutions, easier for us to market the solutions we offer, and easier to train our customers to use our solutions without confusing them with too many formal brand names.

• Mail-Logic - Mail-Logic is our email newsletter system designed to compete with Constant Contact and other email newsletter systems. We have found that this system is most valuable to our customers that are either; membership-based, multi-tenant buildings, municipalities, or ecommerce related. This system is being merged with our other systems and new messaging capabilities (like mass SMS text messaging) will be added to it. It will be simply called  ”Messaging” and will be a component in our application dashboards. We will continue to develop it as a central location for managing communications throughout our systems. The system was recently upgraded with a cloud-based SMTP mail delivery engine that sends out email quickly and at a much higher delivery rate without getting blocked as spam. We will be adding more updates to this system to speed delivery even further.
• Team-Logic CRM – This is our sales lead management, project management, Intranet, time tracking, and ticketing system. This is a really great system that we use ourselves to manage our projects and customer requests. This system will be integrated and rebadged as part of our overall business management system. While many of our competitors as building template-based websites, where we are taking a different approach to build running online businesses instead of electronic brochures. The Team-Logic components are a big part of how we can help a customer to integrate their customer database with their online presence. What we found, however, was that by bundling all this advanced functionality behind an over-used but not well understood industry term like “CRM” was really under-selling what we have, and making it very hard to understand. So this brand name will go away, and the components will be called what they actually are; Request Tracking, Sales and Lead Management, Customer Database, Customer Portal, Account Management, and more.
• Store-Logic – Our flagship ecommerce product has undergone a recent re-write and has many new features. We will continue to invest in making our ecommerce product better, as we add mobile and social technologies to it. All of our ecommerce functionality will sit behind a new navigation button that says “Ecommerce” when a customer logs into their website administration area – simple! This will let us retire the Store-Logic brand from our interfaces and integrate ecommerce in new ways for the vertical markets we serve. The ecommerce system integrates with our other systems, and is never sold as a standalone product anyhow. For instance, when a customer purchases an ecommerce store platform with us, they also get a content management system and messaging. An online store that simply displays a product catalog will no longer be competitive without social media, product feeds, mobile, video, content management, and other technologies that we provide. So branding and selling “ecommerce” alone, is under-selling what we do.
• CMS-Logic – Our Content Management System has been a big success, and it is our most popular on-demand web solution. We are inventing new ways to make this system more intuitive to use, such as browsing to your website to edit pages directly. We can now offer mobile websites using our CMS. The name “CMS Logic” will be retired, but all of the functionality will be located within our on-demand website builder interface. Instead of clicking on a button that says “CMS Logic”, our customers will simply click a button that says “Website” to manage their website. This will be easier to understand and use.
• Content Engine (www.ce.net) – This was an experiment to see if we could profitably offer very low-cost websites using pre-designed templates. While we have had some success in this area, we have found that we will be able to accomplish the same goal by offering a “Lite” version of our applications without adding yet another brand name that would confuse our clients. We have much bigger plans for the CE.Net domain name, which we will reveal at a later date.

We took their old site look and rebuilt it on our CMS (Content Management System). We did make a few changes, adding a slide show and a new navigation to the site. Now they are in control of their site and as new yachts are built they can post the images immediately.

It is much easier to navigate and more user friendly for clients. They also have the ability to expand the site adding more pages and content as the company grows.

Preview the site here.

Visit the site

Sharp Energy has been providing reliable, dependable propane service on the Delmarva Peninsula for many years. That’s why more than 34,000 customers choose Sharp Energy as their propane energy provider.

View website here

Located in Northern Delaware within New Castle County, Middletown is home to more than 12,700 residents. Many affluent housing developments surround the town’s center. Current town growth town is a result of these such developments, which primarily attract high-income families relocating from Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York City. The Town of Middletown’s new website is located at www.middletownde.org.

Captain Social Security website

Captain Social Security came to us needing a basic website to help promote his business. We gave him a custom designed site that will help him with his scheduling seminars and training classes. He needed to grow his business and with using the CMS he will be able to manage his clients and keep in contact with them.

Using the CMS he will also have the ability to add pages and content as his business grows. He has control over all the content, images and an information that he may need to add in the future.