miles design - graphic design & web design

As part of the R150 Release on May 11 which included new DNS tools, improved site search and partner consolidated billing, Business Catalyst engineers have worked on some minor improvements to BC including:

1. Enable/Disable Menu Items - there is now a checkbox at the bottom of each dynamic menu item that lets you choose whether a menu item is displayed live on your site. Toggling these on or off means that you don't have to delete a menu item to remove it from the live view anymore.
2. Recurring Billing now pays Affiliate Commissions - when affiliates refer customers who purchase products that have generated a recurring order the affiliate will now be paid commission each time instead of just paying on the initial order.
3. Allowing Recurring Billing for "Process Offline" Gateway - a much requested feature, you are now able to use 'Process Offline' as a payment gateway type for recurring billing. However, please keep your encrypted customers billing details handy as these are only sent once on the initial recurring order.
4. New Tags introduced for ECommerce (Shopping Cart) - for countries such as Australia where store owners are entering prices inclusive of sales tax we now have {tag_producttaxpercentage,percentage} and {tag_totaltaxpercentage,percentage} to use on the shopping cart and invoice layouts which will calculate and display tax based on the retail or sale price entered for the product

Thanks for reading, we hope you find these enhancements useful!

BC has recently launched a new and powerful set of DNS Management Tools for your BC sites.

In this post, we'll show you how to get started with the new DNS tools and point you towards the relevant articles and resources.

1. Check out the refreshed interface

Our new DNS tools give you full control over the DNS settings for your BC sites.

Simply navigate to Admin > Manage Your Domain to access the updated interface.

From here you can:

1. Setup Domain Names - add your own domain names choose whether you want to host your Domain name externally or re-delegate to your Business Catalyst sites.
2. Forward Domains - allowing you to forward your www records to your non-www records, solving canonical domain issues and helping your SEO.
3. Setup A records - create sub-domains for your site and choose the start page, country and culture for them.
4. Setup CNAME records - add any number of sub-domains and point them to externally hosted websites and services, or to another A record that you've created on your site
5. Setup MX Records - quickly and easily set up external hosted mail services
6. Setup Advanced records - add your own TXT, SPF, SRV or AAAA records

2. Read the brand new DNS tutorial

As with all new feature releases, BC has updated our documentation to provide clients with a detailed run-through of how to use the new DNS management features.

To familiarise yourself with the new DNS setup process, it's important you refer to the following article:

• Setting up DNS and Re-delegating Domain Names

The article will explain the process for adding new domain names, all the way through to setting up sub-domains and externally hosted mail services with MX Records.

3. Issues? Check the troubleshooting guide

To help you troubleshoot DNS issues yourself without waiting on a Support ticket, BC has put together a handy troubleshooting guide, sharing their own personal tips for diagnosing DNS-related issues.

• Troubleshooting DNS Issues

Please note that DNS re-delegation is not an instant process - you may need to wait for the changes to propagate before the domain name update becomes effective. If the changes are not visible within 48 hours, please follow the steps outlined in the troubleshooting guide prior to submitting a Support ticket.

You can now delete blog tags from Business Catalyst when you aren't using them anymore. You just need to click the little 'delete' icon next to each tag to remove the tag permanently from the system. This is a welcome update... thanks BC!

On May 15, Business Catalyst engineers 'flicked the switch' to enable the new site search engine for all BC sites. Both the site search (which searches forums, blog posts, web-app items, products etc) and product search (which searches products only) are powered by the same upgraded engine.

The Result:

• Speed: The new site search is exponentially faster period. Where we used to measure site search result generation in seconds, we are now measuring in milliseconds in the latest performance tests. Even on large sites like businesscatalyst.com, search results are being returned almost instantaneously for commonly occurring keywords.
• Search Terms Highlighted in Results: In the text blurb displayed below the result link the search will now display the text fragment that surrounds the search terms to give a better context for the result. The search terms themselves will be highlighted. In the past the system would display the first paragraph of the item description.

1. Synchronisation

With an online CMS such as Business Catalyst, the website files exist only online therefore you don't need to worry about who's got the latest version of the website locally on their computer. Without a CMS, if we were to make any changes to your website, we would need to download the latest version of the website from the web, make any changes and then upload those changes. After we do this, if you don't download the latest version from the web to replace your local copies, then any changes you make and upload will be using outdated pages (and vice versa).

2. Convenience

Updates can be made from any computer at any time, you just need a web browser. The Business Catalyst basic plan comes with 1 admin user login, however multiple logins can be purchased if simultaneous logins are preferred.

3. Advanced built-in analytics

As well as a weekly summary email, advanced analytics similar to Google Analytics are built-in to Business Catalyst. It also includes detailed reporting of every type of content including most popular pages, news announcements, downloadable items, etc. No separate login is required for a 3rd party website and you receive a weekly summary email.

4. Ease of updates

The Microsoft Word style WYSIWYG editor in Business Catalyst is really easy to use. And there's an Archive & Rollback feature for every webpage and template just in case. Adding pictures is easy and you can even resize images to the right size using the built-in image manager.

5. Trackable downloads

The literature module in Business Catalyst allows you to upload PDF, MS Word, Audio and other files and make those files available for users to download. Download rates of each literature item is recorded and can be reported on.

I hope you found this article useful. To find out more about Business Catalyst, please visit this page or contact us for an obligation-free quote.

Today I'd like to share with you some tips for creating a Google-friendly website taken from Google's own Webmaster guidelines. You can access the original article here. I hope you find these useful.

things to do

Give visitors the information they're looking for

Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

Make sure that other sites link to yours

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

Make your site easily accessible

Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Adobe Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.

things to avoid

Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.

Don't feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.

Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.

Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders using a robots.txt file. For information about using a robots.txt file, please visit our information on blocking Googlebot.

I've just uploaded a number of business catalyst step-by-step tutorials covering some of the most common tasks I get asked about. These have been developed by miles design for our clients. They are to be used as a general guide only and are not official tutorials from Business Catalyst. I hope you find them useful and welcome any feedback. For further information, see our Business Catalyst downloads & support page.

• Adding PDF Files (PDF: 536 kb)
• Creating Hyperlinks (PDF: 90 kb)
• Uploading Files and Resizing Images (PDF: 164 kb)
• Creating a Photo Gallery (PDF: 44 kb)
• Adding a Blog Post (PDF: 163 kb)
• Create and Grow an Email List (PDF: 65 kb)
• Sending an Email Newsletter (PDF: 329 kb)

Miles Design is proud to announce the recent launch of 4 new websites, all of which have been developed with Business Catalyst CMS. More information on each will be available in our projects section shortly.

1. Carpark King website

Client: Carpark-King Pty Ltd
Tasks: Template customisation, website development, Business Catalyst CMS
Link: http://www.carparkking.com.au

2. Marymead website

Client: Sam Behr Design, Canberra
Tasks: Website development, Business Catalyst CMS
Link: http://www.marymead.org.au

3. JV Holt website

Client: J.V. Holt & Company
Tasks: Website design, website development, Business Catalyst CMS
Link: http://www.jvholt.com.au

4. Gymea Bay Public School website

Client: Gymea Bay Public School
Tasks: Template customisation, website development, Business Catalyst CMS
Link: http://www.gymeabaypublicschool.com.au

I recently received a glowing testimonial from one of my new clients that I couldn't help but share with you. It's fantastic to receive such positive feedback and makes it all worthwhile when you do. Thank you Jule for your business and generous comments... it's been a pleasure working with you!

View the ThinkRight work here

I have been extremely impressed with the work that Rob has completed on my logo, marketing flyer, business cards, document template and PowerPoint presentation template.

Originally I was only going to get Rob to design my logo but I was so impressed with his work that I got him to design my business cards. I continue to be impressed with Rob’s work and hence all my document and marketing design requirements are now being undertaken by Rob.

Rob’s work impresses me on several levels. Firstly he always offers me a number of options to choose from. Those options include traditional, semi traditional and very creative way outside the square designs. Rob also completes all jobs in a very impressive turn around time. Rob’s greatest asset is his creative flair and his ability to come up with designs that meet my business needs.

I would have no hesitation in recommending Rob Miles as a talented graphic designer who knows how to brand a company for success.

– Jule Fuller, Director
ThinkRight – Thinkology

If you login to your BC sites and click on Support Central in the top right corner, you'll notice that it's been redesigned. That's because BC have moved all the content from the Online Business Wiki into a Knowledgebase that now forms the centre of Support Central. For all things BC this is the place to go for answers. The new Knowledgebase brings a bunch of benefits including:

• Improved Navigation - with articles sorted by topic or by where they belong on the user interface it's much easier to browse what you're looking for
• Improved Search - don't want to browse? The new search in the Knowledgebase completely knocks the socks off the Online Business Wiki search with a much more complete set of results for any term

As with Sitewalk, the Online Business Wiki will stick around for another 12 weeks while the Knowledgebase is in Beta as BC iron out any small kinks. Additionally the BC Support team will be busy adding new articles to the Knowledgebase and editing current ones to make them easier to understand.