aaronsimmons, Author at Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

The Way Things Were For several years, our websites included a feature that allowed you to activate privacy features on PDFs that would automatically turn off your customers’ ability to print PDFs sent to them through your website. This way, printers could be confident that unscrupulous customers couldn’t take a PDF proof they receive and either print it themselves or bring it to another printshop to have it printed. This was a helpful feature in its time, but unfortunately appears to have run its course. It’s come to our attention that there is a conflict between newer versions of Adobe Acrobat and this site feature. The software we are currently using to do this can be upgraded, but at a cost that is prohibitive for our purposes. And frankly, it’s redundant, because Adobe Acrobat Professional has provided the ability to set printing restrictions for several years now. Going Forward Therefore, we are discontinuing this feature imminently. We have conducted an internal study and found this affects approximately 60 printshops, and we’ll be contacting those printshops over the following week. With this change, you will need to manually assign permissions for the files you send out. Adobe Acrobat Professional has the

Scheduled Maintenance We’ve received word from our technology partner that the DesignEdit system will be undergoing some significant updates to the database. They have managed to perform nearly all of the updates while still keeping the system active, but there are some processes that much be installed while the system is inaccessible. Therefore, the DesignEdit tool will be unavailable on Febrary 1st, beginning at 8 AM GMT (that’s 3 AM Eastern, 2 AM Central, 1 AM Mountain, Midnight Pacific). The technicians anticipate the updates will take around 6 hours. Thank You For Your Patience We know it can be an inconvenience to have software unavailable for any length of time, and would like to thank you in advance for your patience. Fortunately, these kinds of updates are a once-every-5-years kind of thing.

The Power of “Us” One of our favorite things about the DesignEdit product is that most of its content is crowdsourced. The images and template designs that you see are developed by a global team of content providers, all competing to produce the best designs for you and your customers. But here’s where the true power of crowdsourced content can be seen… Earlier this month, during a discussion with our DesignEdit technology partner, we mentioned that there was an unacceptably low number of templates available for banners. (By “low” we meant next to nothing!) And now, after only a few weeks, DesignEdit is flooded with new banner designs! There are already over 200 banner designs online, and the number continues to grow! Time To Dive In If you haven’t tested DesignEdit yet, now is the perfect time to give it a try. We have a Knowledgebase article that can help you start off on the right foot, and our helpful support team will be happy to work with you directly to answer any questions you might have, as always. Just call us at 1-800-736-0688, or send your question to Cu**********@***********************rs.com.

Ben Franklin’s 308th Birthday Today, we threw a surprise birthday party in our office in honor of the 308th birthday of printing legend Ben Franklin. You should have seen the look on his face! But seriously, as this new year begins to take shape, who better to turn to for inspiration than the industrious, witty and enormously successful Benjamin Franklin? So we thought it would be nice to take a moment to commemorate this day in honor of a printing hero and in anticipation of a successful year of printing. Be sure to join in on the fun — take a moment to wish Ben a happy birthday. And while you’re there, be sure to check out the photos of our photogenic crew celebrating. Happy birthday, Ben!

This week’s round of updates introduced an expansion to our implementation of Google’s Analytics code on WebsitesForPrinters.com websites. How It Used To Be Previously, our analytics settings were very simple: all you had to do was plug in the tracking ID provided by Google, and we take care of the rest. As Google makes ongoing programming changes, we would update your site accordingly. For most users, this is a very convenient approach and accomplishes all they need. How It Is Now But sometimes, you want to get down into it and get your hands dirty. If you are using Google Analytics for more than the basic tools most people use, Google will provide you with code that differs from the built-in code for your site. Now, you have the ability to paste that code directly into your website’s Analytics page, over-riding the simpler tracking-ID-based code. To do that, go to your Control Center and choose “My Website” from the main menu. Then choose “SEO” on the sidebar, and click Google Analytics. You’ll now find a blue “Advanced…” button to the right of the Google Tracking ID field. Clicking that will expand to show a large text box where you can

You’ve been hearing a lot about the weather in Fargo lately — it was 22 degrees below zero when we came into work yesterday! But in Fargo, the real news is the exciting three-peat FCS championship win of our local university’s football team, the North Dakota State University Bison. For the third year in a row, the NDSU Bison made the trek to Frisco, TX to claim the FCS Championship title, this time defeating Towson 35-7. This caps another incredible season that earned their head coach, Craig Bohl, the FCS Coach of the Year award. This has been an exciting season, as our Bison were undefeated, winning by an average of nearly 28 points per game. We’re very proud of our hometown team…Go Bison!

If you’re a WebsitesForPrinters.com subscriber, this one’s for you…if you’re not, we hope this will grab your attention! Make Public Order Forms Private And Vice Versa Ever go to the trouble of building a fully custom order form, only to discover that what you actually needed was a private order form? Or built a custom private order form, when what you actually needed was a public order form? Our latest round of updates now allows you to change a public document to a private one and back again, with only a single click! When you are editing a custom order form, there will now be a header telling you whether it is a public order form or a private order form, along with a button that allows you to change it. Just a heads-up, if you convert a public document into a private document, make sure you assign it to a company, branch or individual user so that it’s viewable by somebody. Delete Parts of an Order It is now possible to delete individual jobs within an order in the Control Center. So if a customer submits an order for business cards and brochures, but later decides against getting the

Is It Cold In Here? As you might know, MarketingIdeasForPrinters.com is based in Fargo, North Dakota. But one thing you may not know is that winter can get pretty harsh in Fargo! We’ve already been through a week of sub-zero weather this season, and that can sometimes make getting to work in the morning quite an adventure. Here are this year’s members of the Winter Blues Club*, as of 12/23/13: Carl: Furnace started to work intermittently, requiring several stop-gap measures to get it back up and running — including the tech-support stand-by, turning it off and then on again. At one time, the home temperature dipped as low as 50 degrees! Ultimately, it had to be replaced (the furnace, not the home). Dee: Dee went a whole night without the furnace when the North Dakota winds blew enough snow into the furnace’s intake pipe to block it up. But fortunately she was able to get the technicians out there in the morning, and had it fixed within the day. Jason: Winter has put Jason’s car in a headlock, and isn’t letting go. Once the temperature dipped below freezing, his car stopped working as often as he’d like it to. After

Recently, some of our customers may have had problems logging in to their email accounts. We know email is like oxygen these days, you just can’t survive without it, so we’re proactively working with our customers to resolve this issue. Here’s the rest of the story: a couple of days ago, our technology partner, Rackspace, detected a possible breach in their security. They emphasized that the likelihood of any critical information being exposed is very low. Here are their exact words: For security purposes the passwords have already been reset. Again, we’d like to mention that the data contained in the at risk files would more than likely be benign data. Rackspace is adamant about maintaining the best security possible. So, to protect you and your information, they have reset the passwords of the email accounts that have potentially been exposed, to prevent any potential threat of someone accessing your mail, or using your account for unauthorized activities. We have been provided with a list of the 176 affected email accounts, and are in the process of contacting account holders to assign new passwords. We apologize for this inconvenience…but we hope you agree that your online security is worth the inconvenience.

The One-click Way To Save Time We are pleased to announce that downloading the files your customers have provided with their orders just became a lot easier! Now, instead of clicking to download each individual file, you can click the folder icon with the down arrow (located next to the print-friendly icon) to download all files associated with an order in a single .zip file. Or perhaps you only want the files for a particular job within the order? We’ve added a download all button for that, too! In Other News… We made some other tweaks to the website this week as well: Complete all items in the Workflow: Download All isn’t the only bulk tool we added this week. Now you can mark several orders as “Completed” all at once. Just click any orders that you want to bulk-complete and click the Complete All Checked button. As an added bonus, if you select any invalid orders (like unsubmitted shopping cart orders), the process will just ignore those and notify you that some of your selections were not eligible. Perfect for that end-of-year housekeeping! Override Approvers settings: In the Approvers tabs for Companies and Branches, users now have the option

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