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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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. . .

By way of introduction, webtreepro was designed and built by Primero Systems Inc.  We at Primero are dedicated to continually enhancing webtreepro to provide the most robust, but yet simple-to-use online website builder and website content management solution.  Since 1994, we have developed and delivered business-critical commercial software solutions to a number of Fortune 500 companies, as well as small and mid-sized businesses.  In addition, we are franchise industry veterans who saw an opportunity in the franchise community to solve the problem of how to manage franchise brands online.  We saw solutions that cost hundreds of thousand of dollars and were highly labor intensive to implement and maintain, requiring intervention from an IT group to change anything.  Others were little more than a handful of static pages with no ability to manage content in anything close to real time.  And, still others were chock full of promise, but lacking in delivery.  Our goals for webtreepro included:

• Build a fully web-based application that requires no locally installed software
• Ensure the instantaneous publishing of content on any number of sites, as desired
• Give users an interface that is familiar and very easy to use…no need for any IT involvement
• Price it so that the customer’s decision is easy

Have we succeeded?  Our customers tell us we have.  Come see for yourself what webtreepro has to offer you and your organization.  Better yet, contact us for a demo.  If you can spare 30 minutes, be prepared for us to knock your socks off!

Meanwhile, the local franchise can add and edit content of local interest to their individual site, all while inheriting franchise branding and maintaining the franchise brand standards.  Alternatively, the franchise headquarters can maintain control of the entry and editing of content on the local sites, should the franchise prefer to offer this as a service to their franchise network.

Webtreepro also supports delayed publishingand pre-set expiration of pages or content.  Using the built-in wizard, you can set the start and end dates as you add pages and content to the website.  This tool is perfect for promotions, holiday messages, limited time offers or any other time sensitive material. 

Yet another feature of this franchise website content management system is the ability to make certain pages and content viewable to special users.  For example, perhaps you would like to establish a section of your websites that contains added-value content for your best customers.  You can issue user names and passwords to those customers, giving them visibility and access to these areas once they have logged in.