Websites For Printers Archives - Page 9 of 10 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

DesignEdit’s Ready! Here Are Your Next Steps DesignEdit, the online design tool businesses and consumers love to use to create print-ready design online launches today! Now that DesignEdit is ready for use, here’s what you need to do to make it ready for your customers: Kick the tires on our demo site It wouldn’t hurt to know what the fuss is all about. So first, be sure to check out our own demo to see DesignEdit in action. Just scroll down to the middle of www.websitesforprinters.com/optional-features/designedit/ to view a live sample of what your customers can do with DesignEdit. Skim the documentation Now would be a good time to skim through our Knowledgebase document, How To Use DesignEdit. There are lots of step-by-step instructions in there that guide you through activating the DesignEdit functionality to an order form. No need to actually follow the steps yet (unless you’re feeling adventurous). For now, just get a sense of what the instructions cover. That way, you’ll know where to go if you need them later. Activate DesignEdit on a System order form Okay, now that you know the territory, it’s time to get started. Do you still have “How To Use DesignEdit” open?

The Marketing Ideas For Printers LinkedIn Group Our Chief Marketing Officer (and printing rock-star) Mike Stevens is moderating a marketing users group for print owners on LinkedIn.com. The group is called Marketing Ideas for Printers, and membership is free! All you have to do is go to the LinkedIn group page and click the yellow “Join” button. Get in on the conversation right away to discover fresh, new ideas that will help you sell more printing — or share your own time-tested success tips. DesignEdit Information Page Now Online On the DesignEdit front, the house is built, and we’re adding the final trim. We’ll be opening the doors imminently! In the meantime, we’ve added the DesignEdit information page to WebsitesForPrinters.com. If you’ve been following our DesignEdit news from day 1, it may just re-iterate what you already know. But if this is the first time you’ve heard of our DesignEdit product, be sure to check it out — it even includes a live demo!

Tech Support For Level 1 Sites To Continue Indefinitely Sometimes just a few words gets taken out of context and the rumors begin to fly. It has come to our attention that some of you have the impression that we’ll stop supporting Level 1 sites in 2014. We are happy to tell you that that’s not correct! We will continue to support the Level 1 websites, and have no plans in sight for discontinuing support anytime soon, and certainly not in 2014. This means that if you have a question about using your Level 1 site, or have a technical problem that crops up, we’ll help you resolve it just as we always have. New Development Of Level 1 Sites Ended January 2013 What may be causing the confusion is that new development on the Level 1 sites ended with the release of the Level 2 and Level 3 sites. All of our programming resources are now directed at the new websites, and have been all year long. This means that no new features will be developed for the Level 1 sites, but the sites will continue to run in their current state into the foreseeable future. We Won’t Push,

Out With The Old… It may be cliche, but it’s true all the same: all good things must come to an end. Our good friend Jay Nelson, publisher of Design Tools Monthly, has announced that after 21 years of producing the Design Tools Monthly newsletter he will now be taking an extended vacation. He’s definitely earned it, but we’ll be sorry to see it go. An online subscription to Design Tools Monthly was available as an add-on to Websites For Printers Level 2 websites, and bundled into Level 3 websites. So, where do we go from here? For the time being, we do not have a replacement for the Design Tools Monthly newsletter. (We tend to think that Jay is irreplaceable!) The existing issues that are currently on your site will remain there in the near term. But they’ll start aging pretty quickly since they do such a good job of providing current news, so we plan to remove them at the end of the year. …In With The New While we’re sad to see Design Tools Monthly drawing to a close, we are happy to showcase the recent release of an exciting new feature: Private Label Websites. More and more print buyers

New Text Editor Added To Level 2 And Level 3 Sites If you’ve done any customization work on your new Level 2 or Level 3 site in the past, you may have found that our WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor used to make some of your edits feel more like what we’ve been lovingly calling a WYSIKOWYG (What You See Is Kind-Of What You Get) editor. Especially when it came to adding links to your custom content, it could become…unpleasant. This past week, we changed that. We’ve added a more reliable, more robust text editor, and recently activated it. You’ll find it where the original editor tools were, at the top of any multi-line editor box: We hope you like using it as much as we do! Canada’s Greatest Treasures This week also saw the Canadian-ization of the “Our List of Greatest Treasures” page. Our Canadian customers called our attention to the distinctively American nature of the page, with links to the the U.S. Small Business Administration, The White House, Senators, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Post Office and much more! We’ve now completed an updated version of the page that links to Canadian resources. If

Today we learned that our good friend Jay Nelson is putting the Design Tools Monthly newsletter on hiatus, saying that the September/October 2013 issue is the last issue for the forseeable future. Along with his announcement he provided this history of Design Tools Monthly: A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF DESIGN TOOLS MONTHLY In 1988, I was managing one of the nation’s first service bureaus (RJL Graphics in Austin, Texas). Every day I witnessed the pain and frustration of graphic designers trying to keep up with changes in technology, so I decided to create a way to deliver the information they needed, in a way they would enjoy. I knew the market wasn’t yet ready to pay for that relief of suffering, so I moved to Boulder, Colorado, and waited for the swell of frustration to peak. By 1992, the frustration was palpable and widespread, so in September 1992 I introduced the world to Design Tools Monthly. I promoted DTM in every free or low-cost way possible — never spending more on promotion than I took in from subscriptions. A number of well-placed industry people assisted me in getting the word out, which helped tremendously. (I owe a

Every now and then, we like to give you a peek “behind the curtain”. This week, we made a simple update to one of the Control Center settings pages that we thought you might find interesting. Here’s the situation: we wanted to do a little something extra to help make the Browser Window Title Settings page easily communicate what the setting does (for those of you following along, that page is under “My Website”, in the “SEO” sidebar menu). In many ways, it was fine the way it was. It had on-page instructions, and even had a sample image of where page titles appear in a browser window. Pretty straight-forward. But we wanted to make it better. So, we replaced the sample image that shows where web page titles appear in web browsers with live-editable samples of how your title appears in browsers, even as you type it! See for yourself by playing the 8-second video below… http://youtu.be/m7gegJdY-ro It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not going to revolutionize the way you use the Control Center. In fact, some users may never even use the page. But we thought it was a good example of our continuing focus on making the websites the

No, not the end of DesignEdit … just the end of the the DesignEdit prepaid design promotion! It wraps up on Monday, September 30th, 2013. DesignEdit! is an online design tool featuring over 10,000 editable templates, many with industry specific text and imagery, with new templates being added each week. Almost all of the templates allow your customers to replace existing images either with their own images, or images from a library of over 14 million high-quality images. We’ll keep this short and sweet: You can get up to 20% more for your money when you pre-pay for your designs…just remember the promo is over on Monday. For more details, be sure to download the Money Multiplier order form.

Private Label Websites More and more, your corporate customers are asking to order their printing from a website that looks like their corporate website, even though you’ll be managing it. What’s a small commercial printer do? How can you afford to build a new website to serve only one client?! Delivering What Corporate Customers Want That’s where our new Private Label Websites feature comes in. With Private Label Websites, you are now only 15 minutes away from delivering the same full-featured ordering system you provide for all of your customers through your WebsitesForPrinters.com website, branded to your corporate clients! Not only do these new features make it easy for you to provide a full print ordering system that’s fully branded to any corporate client that asks for it, but you can do so quickly and easily with the user-friendly tools built right into your Control Center. A Strategic Decision Strategically, Private Label Websites also help you turn your corporate clients into permanent customers. Historically, custom-branded ordering sites have proven to be extremely difficult for a customer to walk away from. So this is a clear win-win: your customers get a branded website that makes it easy for them to buy

Say It With Video Each Level 2 and Level 3 home page has between four and six callout boxes designed to call special attention to other pages on your website that you wish to showcase, or to deliver a special marketing message. We offer several pre-built callout boxes for your convenience, but you also have the ability to use our easy editing tools to create your own. Previously, you could add text and images only — but now you can add videos to your callout boxes as well! And talk about a great presentation for the video! We built the page to play the video in full-page view for your visitors, rather than simply playing within the callout box. Be sure to watch this week’s Lightning Round Webinar, where we introduced this exciting new feature for our Level 2 and Level 3 sites. Always Busy in the Lab But that’s just the most recent update. We’ve made several other updates to the Level 2 and Level 3 websites, including major updates, bug fixes, and subtle usability tweaks in recent months. Two notable major changes are the ability to apply custom website colors, and the ability to customize home page “slider”

« Previous Page — Next Page »