Websites For Printers Archives - Page 7 of 10 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

My family loves camping. We started camping nine years ago, back when our kids were two, four, and six years old. We drove a GMC Yukon, hooked the camper up to the hitch, shoved the kids in the back seat, and hit the road. Traveling was a blast! We’re getting ready for this year’s camping season and it’s pretty much the same formula, but with one important change. My family informed me that in order for us to have a successful (and by successful they mean “happy!”) camping season, we would need a tow vehicle with three rows of seating instead of two. You see, nine years later the kids were getting bigger, but the Yukon wasn’t. So a few weeks ago, with a certain amount of sentimentality, the Yukon left our family, and our driveway welcomed a new-to-us Chevy Suburban with three rows of seating. Let the camping season begin! Email is like that too. “The kids were getting bigger but the Yukon wasn’t,” is replaced by “The files are getting bigger, but the email capacity isn’t.” That’s changing, as of June 1, 2014! You’re about to get more email capacity, and unlike my purchase of the Suburban, this upgrade is pretty tame on

What You Don’t Need To Worry About, And What You Should Look Into You’ve probably been hearing quite a bit lately about a security flaw, called Heartbleed, that was recently discovered on the internet that impacted several big sites on the web. And we’ve started to get questions from you about it. We’ll keep it simple: Your website with WebsitesForPrinters.com was not vulnerable to this bug, and no action is required of you or your customers to protect your accounts. However, our email service partner was affected by this bug. They patched it within 24 hours of the bug being announced, leading to some down time earlier this week as they patched their server. As a result of that change, some of our customers had to update their server settings in their email clients. Meanwhile, several large internet sites were affected. Here’s a list of the biggest sites that were vulnerable as of April 8th: Vulnerable sites report If you use those sites, it’s advisable to change your password (after you’ve confirmed with them that they’ve patched this, that is). And, as usual, it’s always important to use a different password for each website you use.

On April 1st, we made some updates to the website’s notification system that sends email updates of website activity to you and your customers. (An example of such an email is the “Order Placed” email received when a customer places an order.) The updates were created to allow the system to function better with our growing portfolio of fully custom websites. Unfortunately, those changes also broke the functionality for all notification recipients except for the designated Customer Rep for printshops, companies, branches and individual contacts. If you’re waiting for the obligatory “April Fool’s”, we’re sorry to say it’s no joke. This file was in place for approximately 26 hours, beginning April 1st at about 8:30 AM CST. The good news is that your customers were unaffected by this error, and the system also delivered all notifications to the customer reps assigned to any printshop, company, branch or individual contact. However, any additional users (other than the customer rep, that is) assigned to the notifications lists in the Control Center did not get their notifications. The error was repaired April 2nd at approximately 10:00 AM CST. Now the notifications system works for our standard Level 2 and Level 3 sites as

Here’s some good news for our current Level 1 website customers looking to upgrade, as well as those who’ve upgraded from a Level 1 site in the past: All Orders Can Now Be Reordered On Level 2 and Level 3 websites, customers have always been able to place reorders for their document library items. However, orders placed using the Place an Order, Request Estimate, Send File and JobReady order forms on your Level 1 website could not be reordered because they were incompatible with the new system. But thanks to some updates to our system, it is now possible to allow your customers to reorder any orders that were placed on your Level 1 site, no matter what order form they used. This is just one more way to make it fun and easy for your customers to buy printing from you. By Request This process requires some heavy lifting, so it’s not automatically part of your upgrade. But if you’d like us to open up all of your previous orders for reordering, just let us know. There is no cost for doing so. Already upgraded your website? That’s not a problem. We can still convert your order history to

Scheduled Maintenance We’ve received word from our technology partner that the DesignEdit servers will be getting an operating system update. Therefore, the DesignEdit tool will be temporarily unavailable March 15th, beginning at 6 AM GMT (that’s 1 AM Eastern, Midnight Central, 11 PM Mountain, 10 PM Pacific). The technicians anticipate the updates will take around 4 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.

This is a special announcement for our Canadian customers: we’ve now added Canadian sales taxes to the Level 3 Website’s ecommerce suite! This update to the sales tax calculator is a major piece of the ecommerce puzzle for our Canadian customers, adding another tool to help make it easy for their customers to buy printing. This feature operates the same way as it does for sales taxes in the United States. All you need to do is go to the taxes section in your Control Center and click the Province that you are to charge sales taxes for, and the calculator will do the rest! For more information, please see the “Setting the Tax Rate section” of our Knowledgebase article, 08 – Pricing.

Printer@Work 2.0 Is On The Way When we introduced the Level 2 and Level 3 websites, we knew it was time for the Printer@Work newsletter to get a face-lift. Printer@Work has had the same basic design for…well, for as long as any of us can remember! It’s served us well, but it’s showing its age. Have you ever had one of those projects that you keep wanting to do, but can’t seem to get to because even more important projects keep springing up? In our case, that’s been the Printer@Work project. But the wait is almost over! In March, we’ll be releasing the new and improved Printer@Work. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak so you can see what’s coming: On The Road We’re going to be at the National Print Owners Association 2014 Annual Owners Conference next week in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Be sure to stop in and say “Hello” — it’s always a nice change of pace to speak to our customers in person!

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.

Every so often, I’ll hear one of our Websites For Printers customers get frustrated that their customers just don’t seem to want to embrace ecommerce. One of our customers was, in fact, very adamant in saying his main goal for using his website was simply to act as a tool to encourage customers to start telephone conversations. He was more than happy to accept business online, of course, but his primary objective was to use the website as a conversation-starter for phone calls. That’s how he wants to do business. It’s All About Selling Print There’s nothing wrong with doing business by phone. Orders over the phone turn into profits just as much as orders placed on a website do. Our goal is to make it fun and easy for print buyers to buy printing, and if that means printing is purchased through a phone call which was inspired by a visit to one of our customers’ websites, so be it. Mission accomplished. Landing a phone call that results in a print sale is a worthy goal, but it shouldn’t be considered the only goal. Please forgive me for stating the obvious, but these days website visitors expect to do business on the

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