InSBeC - Piece Builder Progress Log

	Progress Log
June 27, 2010	The release of dropdown menu integration is rescheduled to release on August 1, 2010. There are a lot of changes taking place to incorporate the new dropdown menus into Piece Builder™. Once integration activities are completed, full regression testing is required before the updates are released (see below for a preview of the added functionality). You can also see a functional example here: http://www.insbec.com/dd_menus/new_dd_menus.html
May 04, 2010	Great progress was made over the last few days in completing Item upgrades for "Item status", and "Quantity available" options. It is now possible to tell your customers about sale items, backorders, not for sale, pending sale, and sold items. Additionally, a cool new feature that supports selling one of a kind items (e.g. livestock, hand made goods, and other unique items). By selecting "only one" for the "Quantity available" option, visitors to your website will only be allowed to purchase one item of that kind. 1. The user adds the item to their cart. 2. The visitor is allowed to go to the Edit Cart page from that product page, but cannot add another item. The shopping cart displays a quantity of "1" and is readonly to prevent editing. This feature is great for one of a kind items like music equipment, handcrafted items, livestock, jewelry, and other unique items. The new features related to the "Item status" field allow users to tell their customer things about an item. There is no change in the cart behavior for "Back order" as seen below. The message is only informative. This has no impact on a visitors ability to order a product. We recommend that customers using this feature explain to their visitor when the product will be available for shipping in the "Description" field. The "On sale" behavior was requested from one of our customers. They wanted to be able to tell their visitors how much the visitor would save by purchasing the item while it is on sale. Thank you for your suggestion...As you will see below, we delivered their request. The "Item status" selections: "Sale pending", "Sold", and "Not for sale" all have similar behaviors. The options, quantity, and buttons that allow a visitor to add an item to their cart are removed. This is a great feature that will allow eCommerce subscribers to showcase products that were sold, where the sale is pending, and items that are no longer for sale. "Active" and "Inactive" options remain unchanged. "Active" is the default setting, without special behaviors. The "Inactive" option allows eCommerce customers to eliminate the product from their website without removing the product from their database. Enjoy these new features, and prosper!
May 01, 2010	Item options have been updated using JavaScript. When a visitor to your eCommerce hosted website selects an option, the price and image for the option selected are updated automatically. Any change in options, refreshes the page with the new information related to the active selections. This is a great benefit that allows you to more easily showcase your items with less user interaction. Visitors using browsers without JavaScript enabled can still select the "Update with selections" button to update the page manually.
April 18, 2010	Many new entries exist on the FAQ page that cover questions frequently asked by potential Piece Builder™ customers. Keep the questions coming, and we'll do our best to answer them all. Select the "Update with selections" button for eCommerce Website and Standard Website services to see how much you save by extending your Piece Builder subscription for longer periods. Each graphic also includes reminders of other offers that will save you time and money.
April 14, 2010	Added instructions for Ditch and Transport customers that use godaddy.com for their domain registration. This will help our customers make their transition to Piece Builder™ fast and easy.
March 22, 2010	An account login was added on our InSBeC.com site to make it easier for our customers to access their accounts. A FAQ page was also added in the submenu of our Home page. These FAQs are created from questions that customers frequently ask during the process of signing up for InSBeC services. We believe these FAQ entries will help you become a smart Internet consumer.
March 14, 2010	Today we are launching our Piece Builder™ Ditch service. Ditch the competition, and try Piece Builder™ for one month for 99 cents. We have also added a "Under a Dollar" submenu under our Products and Services menu. To give our customers confidence in doing business at InSBeC, we have added a "Buying from InSBeC" submenu under our Customer Service menu. This page will explain why we use PayPal, and how transactions are processed. Please read this page.
March 5, 2010	We released our preliminary favicon implementation. As you will notice the Piece Builder™ favicon appears in the address bar of all pages. This was the first step toward implementing favicons for our users. The next step will be to release support for our users to insert their own favicon. We're working on it.
February 23, 2010	Today we enabled free spell checking for our CKeditor fields. It works well, and we hope that it's helpful.
February 21, 2010	Many improvements have been made over the past week including the added support for contact forms. Now your Contact and Support pages can have new life and will allow your customers to send requests without you having to expose your email address in your web pages. This will prevent our customers (you) from being spammed by web crawlers that extract email addresses from "mailto" tags. We are also working on new documentation for our users. This documentation will be supplemental to our current flash help. When this documentation is available, we will make it available on our customer website.
February 15, 2010	Added a new service called Piece Builder™ Freedom. We will setup your website for you, when you purchase this package. New services to support our Freedom package will be added over the next week.
February 14, 2010	There were some errors in the eCommerce vs Standard demonstration video, so it was rebuilt and re-released today. Additionally, IE isn't displaying the "Loading..." message, when loading flash videos. This makes it appear that the videos are broken, so I have added a note at the top of each flash video page informing viewers that it may take up to 30 seconds to load a video. Video sizes range from 1.75 to 15.6 MB. For better viewing use Firefox.
February 13, 2010	Created and inserted an "Already Live" page for the test build location for eCommerce and Standard builders. The page replaces the pages in the test location. This will inform users that they have already made their new website layout active after selecting the Piece Builder™ "Make it Live" option.
February 12, 2010	After receiving customer feedback about the content on our checkout page, I updated the page to make it easier for visitors to read. This is the same cart that will appear on the Piece Builder™ eCommerce customer checkout pages. It's much nicer looking and has a PayPal checkout button. Thank you for the feedback for improvement!
February 7, 2010	Several administration upgrades were made this week in addition to the release of six new help videos. In the help page, new help items will appear as it does in the image below. The new help tag will remain as a marker for up to one week. This will make it easy to identify newly added information. Help for page color configurations, configuring items, configuring shipping charges, setting item options, and ordering items in pages have been added.
February 5, 2010	Today I've added a new video that shows users the purpose of Width and Row selections for the Product Layout page. This video is pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of how to effectively setup your product pages. I hope you like it. I enjoyed making it.
February 4, 2010	Some users noticed their computers slowing after watching some of the flash videos earlier. I did some research on the problem, and found that there is a virtual memory management issue with the conversion of the videos from .avi to .swf. The videos have been reproduced with the memory management feature enabled, and I watched all of the videos this morning without any notice of PC slowing. I don't believe you will have problems with the videos any longer. Please let us know if you do. You'll find the flash videos here.
February 2, 2010	Added functionality to create a site "urllist.txt" file that can be uploaded in Google Webmaster Tools. This will help robots easily locate the map for your website. When you upload this to Google, the location is http://www.mydomainname.com/urllist.txt, .net/urllist.txt, or whatever the extension. This helps simplify your responsibilities as a website owner. Each time you run the "Make it live" operation, this list is rebuilt dynamically... I am working on further improvements, and will post them as they become available.
January 31, 2010	It is official! Today is the official release of Piece Builder™. Our customers will find comprehensive flash help, so they can get started on their websites. I will continue posting updates to this log, so individuals can be informed about what's going on with our new content management and payment processing system. There is still more help to write for more complex features like item options. Much of what users will find is that they can figure things out on their own without much additional help. We're excited for this release!