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.

• 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.

Primero Systems announced that Alliance Cost Containment has selected their webtreepro platform to power their online presence.  Webtreepro’s franchise website builder and content management system allows headquarters to provide each of their franchisee’s sites with global content while enabling each franchisee to localize their site without compromising Alliance’s brand standards.

“We’re looking forward to giving our entire system a larger footprint on the Internet,” said Miles Lee, President of Alliance Cost Containment.  “Because our Principals serve a local market community, the ability for us to enhance our results in local search is an important part of each franchisee’s portfolio growth.  This not only applies to our customer acquisition, but also will help us sourcing local vendor partners as well,” added Lee.

Read more. . .

Primero Systems announced on Friday, June 19, 2009, that Cruise Holidays selected webtreepro as their franchise website builder and online content management system.  While webtreepro provides Cruise Holidays with numerous benefits, chief among these benefits was the ability for franchise headquarters to provide each of the franchisee’s websites with regionalized and specialized content.  In the case Cruise Holidays, their franchisees must be able to offer products that are regionally and lifestyle appropriate.  Webtreepro provides this flexibility, all while maitaining franchise brand management.  The complete press release is available on the webtreepro website.