Blog 
Mar
25
2010
New Datacenter, a Sneak Peek of InContext Editing and an Update on BC
Looking back it's been some time between updates from the Product Management team at BC. In that time our team has been working overtime with some great features to unveil soon. We've also experienced some unexpected snags including our new North American data center which is delayed from our scheduled March release to the first week of April. So what's new at BC?
New Data Center is Coming Online
Last Monday Business Catalyst reached an important milestone! Our new Adobe North American data center went online and after another week and a half of testing we anticipate it will be open for business to accept new sites.
What this means for you is starting from 2nd week of April, all new sites created in North America will be hosted on the new data center giving even better performance to meet your and your clients' needs. We also have new European and Asia-Pacific data centers coming online within the next 2 months.
InContext Editing Sneak Peek
In other exciting news, we're giving you a sneak peek of a new feature called InContext Editing. InContext Editing will eventually replace Sitewalk as the tool for giving your clients an intuitive WYSIWYG content editing experience.
To access the *pre-production version of InContext editing on any of your sites just replace '/admin/frameset.aspx' with '/admin/editing.aspx' in the address bar when you are logged in to the Admin Console for that site.
Business Catalyst is planning to formally release InContext Editing into public beta in the first week of April. We hope you enjoy your first look at InContext Editing and we're looking forward to your feedback.
*One known issue in pre-production: Empty tags are not being closed correctly e.g <br> is being published instead of <br /> - this will be fixed next week. The current pre-production version is not supported and should not be used for editing and saving content - it is meant as a preview for new functionality only.
New Knowledgebase to replace the Online Business Wiki
Although the trusty Online Business Wiki has served our community well as a source information on all things BC, we will be replacing it in the first week of April with a brand new Knowledgebase. The Knowledgebase will come with much improved search functionality and navigation to help you find what you need. We've migrated all the Online Business Wiki articles across and added a slew of new ones as well.
As an added bonus the new Knowledgebase will be contained entirely within the Support Central window so Premium Partners won't have to worry about rebranding issue that arose when they directed their clients to the Online Business Wiki.
A Preview of What's Coming in April
Unfortunately a couple of features promised for March are running behind schedule because of issues uncovered during the last stages of testing. These will be released towards the end of April. I want to share with you what happened, both features were in their advanced stages of implementation as you can see by their screen shots.
- DNS Management Tools has been delayed because we want to enhance the workflow for allowing users to redirect www domains to non-www domains before releasing to the public. The final version will allow you to add A, CNAME, MX and advanced DNS records as well as give you the ability to do domain redirects to domains hosted on BC.
- Automated Client Billing System for Premium Partners has also been pushed to the end of April.
More Regular Communication from BC
Last but not least while it's been hard during these initial months to predict (and consequently promise) when features are going to be released to the public, I'm going to keep everyone updated on what is happening more regularly. My next post will be on the high-level focus areas for the BC development team over the next 6 months. We've had some exciting discussions here and I aim to share that with you. Thanks everyone for your continued understanding and patience as we continue through this transition period.
Mar
16
2010
4 Quick Tips for Fine-Tuning Your Email Campaigns
Here at BC, we make extensive use of email campaigns to keep in touch with our community.
From fortnightly and monthly newsletters through to on-going loyalty campaigns for new users, email newsletters help us keep our 1,000s of Partners in the loop and up to date with helpful hints and tips for building Online Businesses with BC.
Combined with a range of other mediums, email marketing remains a crucial element of BC's online strategy, with our Business Success newsletter sending to our wider community of over 10,000 web designers and developers each month.
In this article, we'll share some tips we've picked up over time that we hope will help you fine-tune your own email campaigns and better communicate with your customers.
Where do I subscribe?
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Before you even get started: How do your visitors sign up to receive your newsletter? Having a healthy list of opted-in recipients is your first step to a successful email campaign, so make sure your subscribe box is easily found and takes no more than a few seconds to fill out. |
Another great way to encourage subscriptions is to add the option to any web forms your visitors may be using. This includes "Contact Us" forms through to the checkout form if you run an online shop.
Frequency vs. Value
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While it's always good to keep the flow of communication alive, it's also important that you endeavor to provide high value content to your readers. By all means send a weekly email to your customers, but ensure that it doesn't cross the line into "spam" territory. |
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The best way to test this is to ask yourself a simple question: "As a reader, why does this matter to me?" If you're stuck for an answer, then maybe you should go back to the drawing board and rethink your content strategy.
It's difficult to define "value", as it's all about your unique set of subscribers. If you're a web designer providing a weekly update to your clients however, this may include articles on effectively running an Online Business, guides to marketing through social media, or information on post-sales services you offer that will help them succeed online.
Penning a Potent Subject Line
Never underestimate the power of a killer subject line.
At the end of the day, without a clear understanding of what the email contains, it's unlikely that your readers will even open the campaign, let alone see your carefully crafted content.
Keep your subject line to-the-point and make sure that even on face value, it's easy to understand what your newsletter is all about.
If your campaign is part of a series, it's a good idea to include the series name and issue number in the subject line, so the reader has an idea of it's context.
Hint: If you have a customer database of a reasonable size, try your hand at A / B testing. Simply slice your list down the middle, then send each half the same campaign, but with different subject lines. Leave it a few days, then compare the open rates of the two subject lines to determine which was more effective.
Monitor, Review, Repeat
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Your best friend in improving the effectiveness of your email campaigns is performance monitoring. Figures to watch out for are your open rate, click rate, and if you're a BC user, your action rate. |
If you're aiming for increased visits to a page on your website, but are seeing poor click-through rates, perhaps rethink the placing of your calls to action. Again, A / B testing is a great way to test what works and what doesn't.
The next time you go to send a newsletter, you'll have a better understanding of what attracts your reader's attention and what they're clicking on.
What's Next?
Crafting a successful email campaign is all about finding that unique formula that works for you and your business.
The best way to fine-tune your newsletters is to constantly try, test and revise your methods, taking in knowledge from the wealth of resources available online. Here are some of our favorites to get you started:
- Email Newsletter Design: Guidelines And Examples - Smashing Magazine
- Rock Solid HTML Emails - 24 Ways
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Comments
1. Modules within Modules - we're going to allow one level of recursion with the first version of this
2. Customizable Workflow Notifications - as BC partners you'll need the ability to edit the workflow emails and welcome emails you send to your clients
3. Additional 'List Template' Layouts for Web-apps - we're first going to allow a dynamic number of layouts for Web-Apps and when this model is proven it will be applied to other modules and the Online Store as well
4. Increase the modules per page limit - system uptime and service reliability come first so we will be doing a lot of testing before we raise the limit, expect an incremental increase here
5. Web App URL Friendly - web apps will gain the same customizable URL system that blog posts currently have
6. Dynamic Menus Active/Inactive - a 'enabled' checkbox will be added for dynamic menus just as there is for web pages
8. Products URL Friendly - products will gain the same customizable URL system that blog posts currently with the addition of a special character 'eraser'
9. CRM Custom Fields updated via Webforms - this will allow your customers to update their own extended CRM details from the front-end.
Hey guys, thanks for reading and leaving comments. Those top 10 wishlist improvements are still on the table especially modules within modules and multiple list templates. We're going to be pushing the schedule back a bit though because some features especially multiple templates have turned out to be more pervasive (and complex) than originally thought.
Take multiple templates for example - if you have 2 types of templates for a product how do you decide which one to use. Do you make this decision at runtime or design time? If you use a URL parameter at run time to decide which template conflicts the customizable URL feature that we're also working on. We'll also have to modify the module 'language', module manager to make the multiple templates feature work.
We've had discussions and planning of this level on many of those wishlist items. I'm going to be following up with a 2nd blog post in a fortnight to address those and also what BC will be focusing on over the next 4 months.
We've slipped on these features already because we underestimated them as 'easy customer wishes', I don't want to be making any more predictions until we've got a concrete plan with a commitment from our engineering team to share with the BC partner community. Watch out for my next blog post.
Eddy... looking forward to the next update,
cheers
Sorry that partners had to push for this information again and I hope we do not have to I the future.
You know my opnions which echo Many of the longer partner base and developers from my prevous comments tickets and posts.
Are some if the delays in templating and modules etc due to comments about what is needed by partners like myself? Of which has been taken into account and being worked on? I hope so.
Again ask any of the ling term or most active partners for anything we are glad to help when needed to improve the system. I think I speak for such partners when I say how supprised I am at how little you use or tell us really. You got a good testing, feedback, helpful resource your nit tapping into at all really.
The same goes for Web Apps. Anything customized in your future customizable URL feature should override what is in the page.
Done. Decision made.
of structure and core functionality In a lot if ways. How a lot of us know the web know what a cms should do etc in a lot of areas many I them actually just small ones to you and me but make a big difference to what you can do abc early on just did not really seem to think of these things. Some of the obvious ones even missed. And development we all have made something so it works and not a modular and expandable as we should I ln our time. Bc is no different.
So.. Even what seems obviuos and minor to implement requires the abc system to be changed and updated much more then you would have thought.
They are doing this and cus there is so much that needs changing some of the delay issues etc are happening.
I got a number of cocerns as we all but a lot of issues can be solved and implementation sorted. This though has not been happening. I keep seeing things broken or fixed (incorectly) and updates rolled out that seem to have not een tested nor feedback on what they need to do made to any partner.
None of the last updated or new features you can talk about from bc since at lest October have rolled out working as they should. All with obvious bugs and missing obvious features.
Bugs happen but some of them seem silly to have been missed.
As I said though it is the obvious and most if the time simple and small thugs that matter greatly just seem to be missing all the time. The new 301 interface you would expect to have external ability, nope but it wa first labeled as the all in one solution which of course it isn't .
This cms is on the brink. This system needs not that many more things to allowed partners to do a he'll of a lot of cool things to make very good sites and I do see this being one of the top 3 or 5 cms's out there by the en of the year. If comunication, the right updates to the cms and just good output code of the system start happening.
I think many partners sense this and are just frustrated that it is so close, we can taste the gooyey goodness but it can easily slip away. The cms could also go belly up if partners leave it for other solutions :(
abc will and do I hope k ow this and it does seem they are trying so hard! Some key beta and parnter feature comunication should happen.
If I got an email asking - if you were about to update the web app system what small features does it lack and what big features?
If that part if the system u was working on partners seem mostly on the same wave length if not want the same implementation they want the same goal. Creative thinking can offer cool functionality with simple changes.
Anyway I feel a bit of the topic. Eddy, great to see the new enhancements rolling out, pity about the delays, but 'delays happen' - what you need to do is GET ON TOP OF IT, and reign the time line back in! Because if this creates a domino effect and expected enhancements get push back to 2011, there will be some unhappy campers. All the best Eddy, looking forward to the cool new stuff.
I'm going to check out the InContext Editing
"'delays happen' - what you need to do is GET ON TOP OF IT, and reign the time line back in! Because if this creates a domino effect"
I was hoping Adobe has the resources to act as such, as it would also accelerate their own ROI for their purchase of GB.
"As an added bonus the new Knowledgebase will be contained entirely within the Support Central window so Premium Partners won't have to worry about rebranding issue that arose when they directed their clients to the Online Business Wiki."
Are my customers going to be exposed to the public forum now? This is unacceptable as it undermines our whitelabeling strategy by exposing our clients at least indirectly to ABC, because there are TONS of posts that discuss ABC, it's business strategies, problems, pricing model, etc. We don't go to great lengths to hide the fact that we're partners with ABC, but we do make efforts to protect ourselves from the negativity that is a big part of the public forums. I hope our efforts in doing that aren't going to be undermined by ABC now...
Also, does this still use ICE tags ?
That was one of the things I really wanted to have so I could stop my customers from adding crap code into their system and calling me to fix it all the time.
Add ICE tags.
Overall, I think the Adobe BC team has had poor responses and arent support the developers anywhere near enough.
Their are so many quick wins that would make a big difference to the system and I dont see any of them in the list here.
My main ones are:
1. Breadcrubs - the code is a farce for them
2. Forcing tables in layouts
3. Not allowing lists in repeating region layouts
Modules in modules isnt a big deal either. Use dreamweaver with lbi's
Over all my biggest pain is when BC has some code it is spitting out that doesnt allow me to edit it. Thats it.
All your current videos in Adobe TV talk about "Total Creative control" - That is a straight out lie and is deceptive.
Give us total creative control and Im a happy camper.