New InstallCentral Interface (More Apps, Plus It's Now Free!)

So the blog has been dormant for a little while, due to a myriad of reasons. First, we've been busy developing. Secondly, it's been the holidays (Happy New Year!). Third, we've been busy doing more development and fixing the mail issue, which for the majority of customers has fortunately been fully restored. (We're still working diligently to recover a few customers' email -- eternal thanks for being patient!)

In any event, we've been hard at work here. And with that hard work comes some positive changes from time to time. Most recently, we've been busting our butts for a much-needed and overdue InstallCentral revamp/upgrade. InstallCentral, for customers who aren't familiar with the term, is our application installation center -- or, more plainly, the place where you can add cool thingys to your site like blogs, galleries, forums, etc. Best of all for you guys? It's now freeeeeee.

OK, as a product manager, the free stuff is great, but the best part for me is that we have a new interface that makes browsing the applications a breeze. Instead of listing every application on a single page, forcing you to scroll to find what you're looking for, our new design uses a tabbed interface that presents applications by category, i.e., blogs, content management systems, forums, photo galleries, etc. And not only that, our new interface now employs a "My Apps" tab that lists all of your installed applications, version and upgrade information, plus quick access to log into the admin page for your application.

Also, you may have noticed we removed the individual icons for each application you've installed from the "Scripting & Add-ons" section of your control panel. The goal was to unclutter that section of your control panel, and provide you one location from which to manage each of your applications. To access your apps, just click on the "InstallCentral" icon, and you'll be taken to your personal "My Apps" page.

Oh, and did we mention that we've added 13 new applications to our installation center? Check 'em out:

* b2evolution
* PixelPost
* Drupal
* e107
* Mambo
* ZenCart
* Simple Machines Forum (SMF)
* ZenPhoto
* MediaWiki
* Moodle
* OpenRealty
* phpFormGenerator
* SugarCRM

Online Sales Down So Far this Year? Don't Fret

comScore released a report today indicating that up until Cyber Monday (which was this past Monday, Dec. 1st), e-commerce sales had been down by about 2% compared to November last year. However, probably due to holiday sale prices many online retailers tout during the post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy, Monday yielded a 15% jump over last year's Cyber Monday sales.

Additional key findings from the report include:

* Overall, retailers appear to be giving more aggressive discounts this year in an effort to encourage consumer spending; 51% of consumers surveyed indicated that the number of discounts and promotions seem higher this year than last year (compared to 12% who thought discounts were fewer).

* 39% of those surveyed indicated they felt the crowds at retail stores were fewer this year than last year, whereas 7% felt the number had increased.

Of course this is great news for our e-commerce customers here at IPOWERWEB. We truly hope your online sales end up following the post-Thanksgiving trend reported by comScore! Check out today's press release for more details on the report.

And at the risk of irritating some of our readers with an upsell, if you haven't already, it might be a good time to take advantage of a couple of the discounts *we're* offering for e-commerce-izing your site .... If this annoys you, feel free to skip the following bullets ;)

* CM4all E-commerce is available for 1/2 price off your first term (month, quarter, year) through Dec. 18.

* Existing ShopSite customers can take advantage of 1/2 price off their first quarter or year for ShopSite Manager or Pro (call us for details: 888-511-4678).

* PowerPay (our preferred credit card processing partner) is now offering the Authorize.Net Fraud Detection Suite--included with your payment gateway solution.

Okay--you can open your eyes again.

Find Wikipedia (MediaWiki) a Pain to Edit?

If so, then good news for you! Looks like in the near future, MediaWiki, the free open source software used to create Wikipedia, will be bringing in some new software developers to determine some of the barriers to entry for first-time editors. The Wikimedia Foundation was been awarded a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation to make collaboration easier for those of us who have some great knowledge to share, but may not quite understand how to use the funky MediaWiki editor. Check out the full article on CNET >>

As you may or may not know, IPOWERWEB offers a bunch of open source applications through InstallCentral, our open source application installer. We don't have MediaWiki yet, but we're planning to add it (and a number of other applications) to our suite in the coming months. Keep an eye out--and hopefully by the time we add it, MediaWiki will have come out with a newer version of the software to make editing easier for everyone.

Want to Improve Search Engine Visibility? 15 Tips

If you use your website to get noticed--whether on a business-related or personal level--then chances are you're looking to increase your search engine visibility. I came across an article today in my Google Reader that outlines 15 solid tips for doing just that.

Written by social media marketer Mike Fruchter, this article is immensely helpful in outlining some key methods to getting search engines to "like" your site. And if you like what you read, I highly recommend following Mike's blog (or perhaps Louis Gray's, where the article was written) for more tips on social media marketing, or tech stuff in general.

So, without further ado:
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/11/15-tips-on-improving-search-engine.html

Who are you, Customers?? We want to know!

So I'm hoping that a few of you have had an opportunity to try out our QuickStart Wizard, which we launched a couple weeks ago. If not, I encourage you to log into your control panel and try it out. We want all the feedback we can get because it's important to us that we construct tools in a way that enables you to get your account set up easily.

As a starting point, last week we actually brought a few customers into our offices to record and test the usability of both the QuickStart Wizard and our registration process. We used Webex to record their entire experience--yes, we analyzed every mouse click--and stumbled upon some interesting findings. I won't get into specifics for these tools at this point, since it's too early to definitively say what's working and what's not, but I think it's fair to say that we can't always predict what our customers will do and think ...

Because we're not mind-readers, but we want to know what you're thinking, I'm happy to announce that, at the directive of our new Director of Customer Experience (yay!), we've started a few rounds of customer focus groups, aimed to help us dissect the diverse brains of our subjects--ahem--customers. The goal of these sessions is to figure out a few different things:

• who our customers are
• why our customers choose us
• what our customers want
• what our customers aren't getting from us that we can improve/provide to them

So far, I think we've validated our suspicion that the type of customer we attract runs the gamut--anywhere from those who are completely new to web hosting and are trying to get their business online for the first time, to people who have been doing this since 1998 and have about 15 accounts with us. In addition, we learned that many of our customers choose us based upon the price/quality balance, which we see as a pretty nice compliment. When it comes to what customers want, as you might have guessed, these answers vary based upon experience level. As many of our preliminary findings have shown, we need to dig into these responses a bit more to determine who, exactly, our different user personas are, and what we can do to help satisfy each type of need.

One overarching theme we've found so far is that we provide a lot of services our customers don't know about. For instance, if you're worried about knowing when your site and/or email might be experiencing a service interruption (yes, I am admitting that they *do* happen from time to time ...), did you know that you can get updates sent to your email account on file via our CAML? (Pronounced "Camel," CAML is our "Customer Alert Mailing List.") This email notification basically lets you know that we've posted an Important System Alert in our Support Center, and that your site and/or email may be affected. We update these alerts as changes occur to keep you informed about the state of your account. To sign up to receive CAMLs, visit our Support Center and click the link below our Important System Notices that says, "Receive System Alerts via e-mail."

Another request we got was for more simplicity in our control panel. (Of course, that was said on the heels of one customer, who was more familiar with our services, indicating that he found our control panel to be very easy to navigate.) I'm not advocating that our control panel is the simplest tool to use (in fact, we're currently devising a strategy to improve the functionality/simplicity of the layout--so stay tuned), but did you know that we offer different control panel interfaces? We have four different control panel "skins," which you can customize to a certain degree. Just click on the "Preferences" link at the top of the control panel, and you'll see that you have four different layout options from which to choose: icon, icon plus, text, and text plus. We've even created an animated tutorial to guide you through your options for layout and customization.

Which brings me to my final point for the evening. We have lots of tutorials. And lots of help information in our Knowledgebase. I'm not saying we'll have everything you need in there to assist you with your account, but I just wanted to call out the fact that we do have online resources to help, and they're probably worth at least a look-see.

The bottom line here is that we want you to "help us help you." We realize we need to do a better job communicating some of the resources we have to offer, but it's also important that customers fill out our surveys to let us know what is, and what isn't, working. We cherish your feedback--both the good and the bad. So please keep it coming.

Improving "Early Life" -- What's Your Take?

So we've got some shocking news here at IPOWERWEB.

We've been informed that some of our customers get confused when landing in the control panel for the first time. Yeah, apparently it's not intuitive that when you click on "POP Mail," it's the same as clicking on "MailCentral." And who knew that it wasn't obvious that the "Set Site Editor" page doesn't actually let you start creating your website.

These nuances, which we tech geeks at IPOWERWEB have come to know and love (okay, not really), present a bit of a problem for new customers coming on board. Our site essentially says, "Our hosting plans include great website building tools, unlimited email boxes and a free domain name! Go after it!" And I guess the process of signing up and logging into the control panel for the first time doesn't mean customers instantly know that clicking on the "WebSiteCreator by CM4all" icon is probably their best bet for starting a new site if they don't know any HTML.

So where does that leave us? With a bunch of somewhat confused customers calling our support team within their first 48 hours on IPOWERWEB. Our bad.

But, before you throw in the towel, let me say this: we are looking to make a change. We get it now. We realize it's not fun for you to employ the "hunt and peck" method to figure out just which of those little icons will actually be the key to creating your first mailbox. We want you to be happy with your IPOWERWEB account, not feel like you've just stepped into a 2 sq. mile corn maze with no iPhone serving Google Satellite View.

And without further ado, let me present the first step to our solution. Our support, product management and development teams have designed and developed a QuickStart Wizard to walk customers through the first three steps to setting up a hosting account (which, coincidentally, are the top three reasons customers call us): adding a domain to your account; setting up mailboxes; and getting a site started and learning what the heck your FTP settings are.

But the greatness doesn't stop there. After you've run through the QuickStart Wizard for the first time (and completed all the tasks), it turns into a QuickStart Manager, which will always be accessible from the top of the control panel (next to the "Preferences" icon), should you want to go back and manage your domains, email and website from the wizard. Same goes for existing customers: even if you've already set up your account, just click the icon and try the wizard on for size the next time you want to create another email box, etc.

Okay, so bottom line? We want your feedback. When this product launches next week (fingers crossed), we want to know -- is it intuitive? Does it make setting up a domain, email address and website easier? What do you like? What don't you like? Tell us by leaving a comment! With your input, we'll be able to improve the next release, and ultimately use this tool as a model off which to base revamps of other tools in our control panel.

Set Up a Holiday Store

It's not to early to begin thinking about the upcoming holidays. November and December are the busiest shopping months of the year online! Why not take advantage of this and get a holiday store set up on your site? Don't have time to do it yourself? IPOWERWEB can help!

A typical online store can take several weeks at best to develop, even months under the most ideal conditions. That kind of time isn’t available in the middle of October to be ready for the holiday season, and we’d like to offer our customers who don’t already have an online store, the opportunity to establish a presence for their products, begin selling, accepting credit cards, etc.

· This promotion will run from October 15^th, and orders will be accepted until November 7^th.

Here's what you'll get:

• A complete online store solution and installation
• Fully-integrated online payment gateway using PowerPay
• FREE osCommerce Application
• Ability to add up to 20 products to the store
• Store administration training
• For orders received and customer requirements satisfied by November 7th, we will GUARANTEE completion of the website on or before November 22nd. If you have completed all of your ‘to-do’ list activities and we’re still unable to complete the website by November 22nd, we’ll give you a 100% refund.
• Price: Only $499.00

Get started now!