Webtreepro Blog

As we near Thanksgiving, we at webtreepro have a lot to be thankful for–our colleagues, our families, and a truly wonderful cadre of clients.  Last week, we had the opportunity to attend the annual convention of one of our franchise customers, Cruise Holidays.  And not just any convention–this one was at sea!  We joined the group in San Diego (home of our headquarters) and boarded the Radiance of the Seas for a five-night cruise to Ensenada and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.  For the opportunity to be with a large group of our users and a great ship to sunny destinations is reason to be extra thankful.  As a Minnesotan, escaping the cold for a week was a huge bonus!

At the meeting, we were able to spend significant time chatting directly with our client’s customers–what a great opportunity to really learn what they like about webtreepro, as well as what they struggle with.  As business owners, they don’t have all day long to “play” with their websites, yet despite that time constraint, they’ve done some amazing work in short order.  We saw some excellent landing pages and even some online “sign-up-to-cruise’ forms that were comprehensive and friendly to site visitors.

For our part, we got to “show-off” a bit and introduce them to all the neat little SEO features that they can easily engage to improve their local search rankings.  In fact, we conducted five workshop sessions on that topic.  In fact, we’re doing a follow-up online meeting next week so we can spend a bit more time teaching the details as well as catch up with those folks that couldn’t make the meeting.

We also taught a number of them how to embed video and even some pretty cool photo-walls using albums on Flickr, and a slick plug-in from CoolIris.  It was truly wonderful to see the “wow, that was easy–I can’t believe I did that myself ” reaction.  Getting a customer excited about taking a cruise is a lot easier with pictures and widgets that put them “on the ship.”  One thing that was a big hit was the ability to put a weather widget on a landing page for a specific cruise, showing the current weather conditions.  I can tell you on this gloomy, chilly day in Minnesota, if I was looking a cruise to St. Thomas and saw that is was a sunny 84 Fahrenheit, I might be motivated to action!

Of course, everyone’s interested in video and whether they’ve posted to YouTube or a commercial service like Screencast, we were able to show them how it takes about a minute to embed videos into their site.

The best part of all is getting a handle on what we can do to further enhance webtreepro.  We have lots of our own ideas but hearing from day-to-day end users is invaluable.  Plus, selfishly, it’s nice to be valued for what we do, and to get that recognition first-hand is really engergizing.

This week we did a major release to webtreepro–a mixture of brand new “stuff” as well as some pretty significant improvements to existing functionality.  This got me thinking about our process of selecting what gets added, so I’ll use our new features to expand on that thinking.  

As we develop webtreepro, we get our inspiration for new features and enhancements from a number of sources:

Our Own Experience

We see things that are “no-brainers” in terms of “we should offer that in webtreepro.”  The most recent example is the integration of Keyword Research while logged in.  Sure, you can open another window or browser tab to look at Google Adwords, but if you’re at all like me, it’s a lot more convenient to have it right there inside the application.  Besides, if I end up using some of the alternative suggestions, I’m already in Edit Mode and can update my Page Titles, Descriptions, Keywords, URLs, paths and alt-text immediately.  Because it’s inevitable that I’ll get distracted and forget if I don’t handle it right away.

Our Users

Early on in webtreepro’s development cycle, we realized we had more ideas than time or money (and who doesn’t)!  So while we know what absolutely had to be ”in the box” to rollout wtp, we also knew we couldn’t predict what extras would be most desired and decided to let the users and market guide us. 

In many cases, suggestions from the user community were already in our enhancement list, and their request helped us prioritize.  In other cases, our users have identified things we hadn’t thought of yet.  Among those were a few head-smackers as in, “why didn’t we think of that!!“   Examples are how we’ve changed our onscreen directions, warning dialogs, page legends and user tips, so they are much clearer.

Make What’s There Better

Our new Library system is a vast improvement over the original. . .we realized the limitations of the original having used it ourselves.  While it was fully functional, some things weren’t very efficient or sophisticated.  But making a change like this is like knocking over dominos. . .not only do we need to update the app, but must also migrate all the existing assets into the new structure, make sure users can find them, and then change our online help and create new video lessons!  It’s a good bit of work, but ultimately worth it.  And making fundamental changes only get harder when we have more users! 

Other examples of recent improvements are the extensive stylers we’ve added to our Breadcrumb, Link List, Section List, Link Builder and Menu Builder.  Users can now create and save styles that both override their skin defaults, but can be applied consistently throughout the site.

So, now that you know how we pick-and-choose, we certainly welcome your input toward that process.  What we want to hear most is what you’d actually use vs. just adding to the list of ideas.

Next up. . .I have discovered the wide world of HTML Snippets and am excited to share how you can add stuff to your page that’s not in the list of Content Elements.

The most recent release of webtreepro provides enriched editing capability.  Always at the forefront is the desire to provide users of this franchise website builder with built-in content management, a robust, but user-friendly interface.  The augmented functions include:
Link List and Section List Styler–both the Link List and Section List tools have been enhanced to provide you with even more customization and control of these valuable navigation aids!  You can now add padding above and below your lists, set their overall width, control font attributes for mouse-over and active links and more. See the new Section List Video.
Highlighter–You can now add a highlighter to any text.  Just select the text to be highlighted, click the Highlighter icon and choose your color.

Improved Form Controls–we’ve upgraded the actions of the Radio Button and Checkbox form controls so they are both more functional and easier to use.  Now, when you add a series of radio buttons, you can build a relationship between them so that only one (1) can be selected at a time.

SEO Center Page Legend
In the SEO Center, the pages now have a legend that provides a quick reference to which are shared, which are part of a Split Test, and pages set for Redirect.

Improved Communication–we’ve tuned up some of the system messages to be clearer.  For example, if a child site user clicks the Restore Page button (which reverts a page they edited back to the parent version of the page), the new message has a much stronger and clearer warning about the consequences.
Likewise, we’ve improved the Delete messages when you right-click on any content element. . .now, they are contextual, as is “Delete Article” or “Delete Form” vs. “Delete.”

Looking to easily build and manage the websites for your franchise operation?  Look no further.  Webtreepro is the ultimate in simplicity, all while featuring a robust offering of functionality.  The benefits to the franchises and their franchisees?  Let me count the ways!  Stay tuned for Volume 2, and see yet another benefit of using webtreepro.

Benefit 1:

All websites have fresh, up-to-date content, that is instantly published (or delayed if you prefer), all while maintaining the franchise brand, style and content.  And, as if that wasn’t enough…the franchisees can easily add or update content as well.  To what extent?  It is entirely up to headquarters.  See what one customer had to say:

“From the franchise headquarters level, it is fantastic that we can easily publish style and certain content to our franchise offices, but that those local offices also have such an easy tool at their fingertips to exercise their own destination-specific marketing plan. Updates or changes to their local sites that used to take several days and had to be passed through multiple peoples’ hands can now be accomplished in a matter of minutes.  As a result of this ease of use, our local offices are updating their web content and creating additional marketing pieces much more frequently than in the past.” Celeste Pilkington, Manager of Franchise Performance, PRA Destination Management

• You can now upload and save articles in HTML file format to a local disk.  To access this feature, select Edit Mode, and then place the cursor in the article, followed by a right click of the mouse.

• Upload image files as large as 1.2 mb.  This is a whopping increase from 50o kb.  Basic instructions on how to upload your imagesinto webtreepro is available in the webtreepro Knowledge Center.

• Configure your expired page and content email notifications to be sent to any email address of your choice.  You are no longer limited to the owner of the page or content.  The webtreepro Knowledge Center provides detail instruction on the use of expiration notices for pages and content.

• All webtreepro sites now have the ability to display the latest items from any standard RSS feed, using the RSS Reader.  This feature is simply added to any page of your choosing, using the Add Content wizard in webtreepro.

• Lastly, webtreepro now features Advanced Site Grouping.  You can now create very deep groupings for your sites and manage the publishing of pages and content to those groups without having to manually select each local site.