January ’10 Newsletter
January flew by very quickly and I can’t believe it’s time for another newsletter. I hope that you have recovered from the December festivities and that you are all back blogging or running your websites with plenty of new ideas.
Coupon Code – 15% Off
During February we are offering a discount of 15% off on all Tribulant orders. Simply fill in 15OFF on the 2Checkout site when you checkout with your purchase and the discount will be applied to your order.
FAQs and the Ticket System
Recently some of you may have received a message that your open tickets have been closed while you are still waiting for a reply. We apologise for this misunderstanding and any inconvenience this may have caused. While doing maintenance, someone accidentally closed open tickets. We are busy resolving this as quickly as we can, however if you have a query and see that your ticket has not been reactivated within the next few days, please open a new ticket.
The good news is that as part of the cleanup we are sorting through the tickets and creating a Frequently Asked Questions list for each product. If you visit the documentation you will see that an FAQs tab has been added on the specific plugin documentation page. This will be continual work in progress as we hope to provide our users with a comprehensive FAQ list in order to make support better and quicker. Please submit your questions into the FAQs as well!
Get the most out of our plugins
We really want you to get the most from using our plugins. We are continually working on improvements to each plugin. This includes new features; a lot of ideas come from customer requests, bug fixes and our Monday morning development meetings with the development team. Support for customers is a very important part of this process as are our showcase sites.
Support
Support is still free and always has been! Now a few of you may jump up and down and say “that’s not true, I have been charged for support in the past”. On occasion a client does need to pay for programming support. This only occurs when we have to carry out maintenance on their site where a Theme or another plugin is causing a conflict with our plugin because a third party developer has not kept to WordPress standards or been programmed in such a way that the site or 3rd Party plugin is non-conventional. On several occasions we have sent a specific build of our plugin that is tailored or adapted to the client’s specific needs. Most of the time there is no charge. However when we have to do a lot of work, which is outside the scope of what we deem normal support, we will contact the client and discuss a charge. Recently a client was charged for one (1) hour labour but we actually spent three hours on the fix. So we really do try and keep the costs down for our clients as much as possible. We cannot absorb all of the costs on work that is more development or maintenance to a client’s site, all of the time. To do so would mean a price increase and we feel that increasing our prices would be unfair to clients who don’t have these types of problems.
Examples and Showcase sites
You may have noticed that our plugins each have their own showcase gallery. Showcasing your site is FREE! Simply send us a link to your site and a description (I’ll come back to this in a moment) and we will gladly put your site in the applicable gallery. Potential customers do visit these sites and browse around. Many of our showcase clients report an increase in traffic. One customer gave us feed back of a monthly increase in traffic of 40%. The only requirement is that you must use one of our products. If you use more than one plugin, for example Checkout and Newsletter your site will be featured twice. Just send a description because from next month, new sites will be featured in the monthly newsletter as an additional bonus. Send your requests to at our support site.
Upgrading or starting a new site?
The next logical step for us after plugin development, was to offer existing clients a web development service. This has been rather successful. We had a number of referrals so we have also acquired a few new clients from around the world. We haven’t designed a specific package which may restrict our web development service, as we prefer to provide a number of services which clients can pick and choose from:
- Web hosting and domain registration
- Adding functionality to fit in with you particular business requirements
- Porting your old content if you have an existing non-WordPress site
In addition to the above technical services, we provide creative and maintenance services also:
- Working with clients to develop a new or fresh look for their site. This includes logo development and the associated creative elements. We also work with clients to develop an Update Programme which suits your particular needs or regular business events such as sales or specials
- Monthly updates where we put up new content or images that you give us each month
If you are growing your business and are reliant on virtual customers, it is essential to refresh your site regularly so that your site doesn’t become stale or “heavy” over time. Simply giving your site a face lift, making it more user friendly or easier to navigate will definitely increase traffic to your site. People may not always like change, but people like to be stimulated so a site needs to be vibrant and exciting, for example, while many people get lots of traffic, their bounce rate (people leaving the site within 30 seconds) is often high so you may need to work out how to “hook” virtual clients to encourage them to stay longer.
For a new business, a well-designed and structured site that will support your business is as essential as start-up capital. Don’t underestimate your potential customers’ web savvy or browsing requirements.
Here’s a cross-selection of our recently updated or designed sites:
- Aran Veterinary Clinic
- Digi-Tech
- Forklifts NW
- Ebenhaézer Castle
- Gaea’s
- Willa Krause
Watch this space – upcoming Release
During February we will be releasing version 3.7.x of the Newsletter plugin with some exciting new features, but more about that in next months newsletter…
Articles and Snippets
As a reminder, we invite you to send in articles of interest, comments and feedback for our ‘Readers Column’. If you have a press release for your own products or website, please feel free to submit it for consideration in the next newsletter. Topics may be varied at this stage as this is a pilot project. All we ask is that the articles are related in some way to your business, field of interest or expertise and are non-political, may be considered of general interest and are suitably tasteful.
The Wrap up
Well that’s it for another month. I look forward to hearing from you and don’t forget to send us your site for inclusion in next month’s news letter. Be safe and be well.
I am the owner at Tribulant Software and I have a great passion for WordPress, development, blogging and the Internet in general. Building useful plugins to improve WordPress’ functionality is my goal.
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