Articles - Page 180

Agentic AI for Agencies in 2026

bmckeiver

Created out of a need for a more intuitive, powerful sysadmin tool, we have created a portal through which site owners, developers and the admins who support them can monitor and adjust their site hosting, at the click of a button.
Are you ready to change the way you see high-speed website hosting?
Let’s not waste any more time, then!
<h2 style="margin-left:0cm;margin-right:0cm">About Us</h2>
First things first, we’d like to introduce ourselves.
Our company, Soft Dreams, began as a web agency in 2004. Motivated by the early successes of our clients, and the massive traffic called for by their sites, as a result, we branched our services out into the realm of high-speed website hosting, early on.
This was the defining moment in the creation of ClusterCS, our cloud-based control platform, in 2010. Created as a response to the increased need for comprehensive hosting tools in an ever expanding market, we released in 2016 after extensive internal testing.
Since then, it has undergone two feature releases since going public.
<h2 style="margin-left:0cm;margin-right:0cm">About ClusterCS</h2>
Cluster CS is a no-mess cloud-based control panel that automates and customises your entire VPS and dedicated server process.
Consolidated software packages are nothing new. Centralised management of important business or admin activities has become commonplace and, honestly, essential to the modern working environment.
ClusterCS takes that idea and runs with it, allowing you to:
<ul>
<li>Speed up your deployment 	In just a few clicks, you can create and deploy a stable, high availability cluster. Not only this, but you’ll be able to ensure the safety of the client’s setup through the use of automatic backups, and even test drive different architectures, easily and quickly.</li>
<li>Manage all the elements of your websites 	Bring together the management of your website’s emails, databases, backups, DNS, and cronjob services. What’s more, you’ll be able to do this for an unlimited number of websites. Finally, customizable setups with multiple PHP versions give you the kind of control you need for your unique website setup.</li>
</ul>
More so than these standard offerings, though, are two distinctive features we’ve introduced that set us apart.
<ul>
<li>Speed 	Our graphical user interface (GUI), known as Speed, helps you streamline the process of creating complex serving conditions. These can include inputs from URLS, assets, and cookies, in various combinations. This is also a useful GUI in that it improves security, intelligently blocking specific paths according to the IP of the user. With this, you’re bringing in an added layer of security to your website, with an interface that’s as intuitive as you need it to be.</li>
<li>Improved Clustering Setup 	This service allows designers to spread services across multiple servers, increasing speed for those all-important processes. Using this tool, we’ve been able to set up complex clusters, spread out over as many as thirty dedicated servers. Separate databases, central sites, and more, easily, and you’re well on your way to making slow processing times a thing of the past.</li>
</ul>
Version 1.3 is now live <a href="https://blog.clustercs.com/2017/07/03/clustercs-1-3-lets-encrypt-masses/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://blog.clustercs.com/2017/07/03/clustercs-1-3-lets-encrypt-masses/</a>and we have automated SSL setup including Let’s Encrypt.
Interested in finding out more? <a href="https://www.clustercs.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Get in touch with us</a>, today, to find out more about our products and award-winning services.
This article was contributed by the ClusterCS team.

ClusterCS is a comprehensive, cloud-based VPS and server processing control panel

mike-johnston

Static site generators have always been popular amongst developers and those who prefer to work via the command line. It's no surprise, therefore, that tons of them exist and are used regularly for blogs and websites. Here is a list of the most popular static site generators out there.
<h2>Jekyll</h2>
Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator that can be used for personal, project, or organization sites. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and provides you with a complete, static website. Jekyll is also the engine behind <a href="https://pages.github.com/">GitHub Pages</a>, which you can use to host sites for free right from your GitHub repositories.
Language: <a href="http://rubyonrails.org/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ruby</a>
Website: <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://jekyllrb.com/</a>
<h2>Hugo</h2>
Hugo is another static site generator programmed in Go. Hugo is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. It works by taking a directory with content and templates and rendering them into a full, HTML website. Like Jekyll, Hugo uses Markdown as well. According to the developers, Hugo can render a typical website of moderate size in a fraction of a second.
Language: <a href="https://golang.org/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Go</a>
Website: <a href="http://gohugo.io/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://gohugo.io/</a>
<h2>Hexo</h2>
Hexo is programmed in Node.js, similar to the popular Ghost blogging platform. You write posts in Markdown (or other languages) and Hexo generates static files with a beautiful theme in seconds. Hexo has a powerful plugin system as well, allowing it to use Octopress plugins as well as others. It can also be deployed to Github Pages, Heroku and other sites in seconds.
Language: <a href="https://nodejs.org/en/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Node.js</a> (Javascript)
Website: <a href="https://hexo.io/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://hexo.io/</a>
<h2>GitBook</h2>
GitBook is a static site generator that was developed in order to provide an elegant way to build beautiful books using GitHub/Git and Markdown. There is a desktop editor as well for GitBook that is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. You can also easily host your created books on GitBook.com
Language: <a href="https://nodejs.org/en/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Node.js</a> (Javascript)
Website: <a href="https://www.gitbook.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.gitbook.com/</a>
<h2>Gatsby</h2>
Gatsby is a super fast React.js static site generator that supports pages written in Markdown, HTML, and React.js by default. It's also very simple to add additional file types. Gatsby loads an HTML file that’s a server rendered version of your React.js page then makes it live with JavaScript. Code and data for your other pages gets preloaded to ensure that everything loads instantly.
Language: <a href="https://facebook.github.io/react/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">React.js</a> (Javascript)
Website: <a href="https://www.gatsbyjs.org/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.gatsbyjs.org/</a>
<h2>Pelican</h2>
Pelican is a static site generator powered by Python. It allows you to write your content in <a href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">r</a>eStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats. Pelican uses <a href="http://jinja.pocoo.org/">Jinja</a> templates which means developing themes is quick and easy as well. Pelican also allows the importing of data from WordPress, Dotclear, RSS feeds, and other services. Pelican has a pretty impressive plugin library as well which you can check out here: <a href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Pelican plugins</a>.
Language: <a href="https://www.python.org/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Python</a>
Website: <a href="https://blog.getpelican.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://blog.getpelican.com/</a>
There you have it, these are the most popular and most active static site generators that we are aware of, what do you use? Do you have a favourite? Let us know in the comments below.

The 2017 CMS Critic Web Awards are now open for nominations

<a href="https://rallymind.com/?utm_source=cmscritic&amp;utm_medium=cmscritic&amp;utm_campaign=June19post">RallyMind</a> was designed to address the age-old nightmare of how to deploy unique landing pages by the 10s if not 100s while keeping brand consistency, messaging and conversion metrics in check.
RallyMind offers a solution to help make marketers more efficient.
Think…multivariable landing pages that allow marketers to create, edit and optimize thousands of landing pages from a single spreadsheet or API. How? It all lies in the structure.
Most companies build their landing pages one-off, as needed, similar to a city building new streets as the population grows. A good solution in the present, but the future is likely to have its fair share of traffic jams. RallyMind’s landing page structure is the equivalent of clever city planning. With a bit of foresight, RallyMind offers a landing page infrastructure that allows for exponential growth and expansion.
It starts with a single spreadsheet. With direction from the client or a website example, RallyMind creates one or more highly dynamic landing page templates. The template’s text, images, phone numbers and links are substituted with “variables”, rather than static content. Each variable is linked to a field in a spreadsheet or using RallyMind’s API mapping. Content specific to each landing page is dynamically inserted via the variable. For example, 100 business pages can be created with unique URLs, each showing a custom phone number, logo, business description and branding color. These sites can be created in minutes with a spreadsheet, rather than days. Updating site content is as easy as making an edit to a spreadsheet.
As more digital marketing companies move towards automation, we’re proud to offer the final piece in the puzzle.
About RallyMind: RallyMind offers automated landing page management software for Brand to Local, Channel Marketing, and Co-op advertising campaigns. RallyMind is a product of DevHub, a Seattle-based web startup.

How to Deploy Dynamic Mobile Landing Pages with Just a Spreadsheet

Qualtrics has announced enhancements to its award-winning customer experience (CX) management platform, <a href="https://www.qualtrics.com/customer-experience/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Qualtrics Customer Experience</a>. The enhanced capabilities include a sophisticated diagnostic assessment and proven methodology to help companies significantly elevate and mature their CX programs, leading to greater customer satisfaction results and higher returns on CX program investment.
“Qualtrics is helping us create a culture of customer centricity within our organization. True customer centricity is not a project—it's a culture and a way of doing business that will help us grow and be successful for decades to come,” said Michael Maicher, Global Head, Allianz Global Broker Management, Allianz SE &amp; Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty (AGCS) SE. “Our goal over the long term is to have 75% of AGCS countries benchmark against peers in either above market or loyalty leadership status.”
Organizations understand the importance of listening to customers, but often do not know which steps to take to create world-class CX programs that deliver business results. Qualtrics not only delivers the required technology, but also the step-by-step framework to help companies design and implement an end-to-end CX program. 
“Customer experience management is a business imperative. Companies that prioritize customer experience outperform customer experience laggards in stock returns by an average of nearly 80%1,” said Luke Williams, Head of CX at Qualtrics. “Done right, customer experience management drives financial results through better customer acquisition, improved customer retention and loyalty, reduced costs to serve, increased share of wallet, and higher brand awareness.”
Qualtrics offers a <a href="https://www.qualtrics.com/customer-experience/diagnostic/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CX diagnostic</a> that assesses CX program maturity against the Five Competencies of CX Success—Qualtrics' proven methodology for CX program success. As part of this diagnostic evaluation, companies receive an immediate, personalized report with a full description of what they can do to improve their CX program to achieve better customer and financial results. The report also includes a maturity score in relation to each of the five CX competencies and an overall company rating compared to state-of-the-art CX program standards.
Qualtrics' Five Competencies of CX Success provides a framework for companies to manage their customer experience programs and achieve improved financial results. Based on years of experience with the world's leading brands, the methodology provides practical guidance on five core domains:
<ol>
<li>Culture and Leadership: How to gain executive sponsorship, publish CX values, align departments on common customer objectives, and benchmark against competitors.</li>
<li>Customer Experience Management System: How to capture feedback at each customer touchpoint, close the loop with customers, and drive operational improvement.</li>
<li>Customer Intelligence: How to gather holistic, authoritative views of customers and drive systematic, strategic initiatives to improve customer outcomes.</li>
<li>Connected Employees: How to measure and act on employee engagement and instill customer-centricity across the ranks.</li>
<li>Continuous Innovation: How to build programs that scale quickly and test continuously to drive continuous customer experience improvement.</li>
</ol>
Qualtrics Customer Experience is a pillar of Qualtrics' leading XM Platform™, the industry standard for experience management. The XM Platform allows companies to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, employee, product and brand experience—on a single platform. Experience data from the platform tells companies why things are happening across the organization, and helps predict what customers and employees want most.
Used by CX leaders like adidas, Allianz, American Express, and Intuit, the Qualtrics Customer Experience platform was recently awarded the Temkin Group's fifth annual Customer Experience Vendor Excellence (CxVE) Award and was named a leader in customer feedback management by independent research firm, Forrester, as part of The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2017 report.
The Qualtrics Customer Experience platform is available now. For more information on how to build and expand a CX program, visit <a href="http://cxweek.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CXweek.com</a> to hear what CX leaders from Patagonia, Zappos, Twitter, Universal Orlando, BBC, MasterCard, McKinsey, Northwestern Mutual, and many more, had to say regarding today's best practices in CX management.
About Qualtrics: Qualtrics is a single system of record for all experience data, also called X-data™, allowing organizations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee and brand experiences—on one platform. Over 8,500 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools rely on Qualtrics. To learn more, and for a free account, please visit <a href="https://www.qualtrics.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.qualtrics.com</a>.

Qualtrics Launches Innovative Customer Experience Enhancements

Visual Data Media Services (Visual Data) is launching a TV and film content-management platform that delivers major efficiencies for users, along with the ability to react swiftly, flexibly and effectively to the fast-changing global content market.
To be unveiled at this month’s Media Production Show, VIDA is a super-secure platform for finished masters offering version management, metadata and associated assets held in an EBU Core database structure. Used as a stand-alone system or in conjunction with Visual Data’s suite of media management services, the platform is fully integrated with industry leading tools including Aspera, Telestream and Vidchecker.
Among the first clients to be on-boarded to the new platform is digital fulfillment pioneer all3Media international, which will use VIDA to manage its global content supply pipeline.
Designed with long term TV &amp; Film intellectual property management in mind VIDA is aware of the hierarchies and workflows that exist between production, distribution, rights management, broadcasters and platforms. Its key benefits include the ability to smartly store media components and manage unlimited related versions of content, operate multiple content-delivery workflows, including IMF and 4K, and deliver significant cost savings by reducing the complexity and duplication involved in storing, reversioning and localizing master assets.
The new platform is a SaaS (software as a service) solution, which removes the need for companies to run complex applications on their own servers in their own data centers. This not only eliminates the expense of hardware acquisition, security provisioning, software licensing, installation and support, but also enables flexible payments and high scalability.
Claire Feeney, head of content operations at all3Media international, said: “building on our long standing relationship with Visual Data, VIDA is the perfect platform to help All3 manage the International delivery of our ever growing master assets and supporting versions, particularly as we move into delivering more 4K and IMF packages globally.”
Symon Roue, managing director of Visual Data, said: “It has taken us several years of investment to configure, integrate and build a SaaS platform highly customized to the needs of the global digital media supply-chain. The result is VIDA — and we are confident it will become the gold standard for TV and film content management.”
Visual Data Media Services (Visual Data) was recently awarded the prestigious Apple Preferred Plus status for video delivery — one of only four companies in the world to have achieved the US technology giant’s highest partner accolade. This followed the award in 2013 of Netflix Preferred Vendor (NPV) status, which is accorded only to those companies able to meet the global streaming giant’s rigorous standards for converting, localizing and delivering massive volumes of content.
About Visual Data Media Services: <a href="http://www.visualdatamedia.com/">www.visualdatamedia.com</a>
Visual Data Media Services, located in London and Los Angeles, has 20 years of experience in the repurposing and distribution of content for all media outlets, including domestic syndication, network broadcast, international distribution and VOD for studios, distributors and platforms.

Visual Data Launches Content Management Platform

CMS Summit 26

Find out at CMS Summit 26, May 12 - 13 in Frankfurt, Germany

What's ahead for CMS in the agentic era?

#ffffff

Every business is different. The one thing they all share, though, is the Internet.
As a designer, agency or freelancer, getting your clients online can account for most, if not all, of what you do. Anything you can do to make the process easier is always worth your time.
Enter <a href="https://www.ucraft.com/whitelabel#/">White Label</a> website building, from Ucraft.
This powerful builder solution offers dynamic website creation, right out the box. And the best part?
You’ll be able to put your name on it, and use the platform as your own, with their blessing. Let’s take a closer look.
Build Smarter, With White Label Solutions
White label solutions are a simple concept: imagine buying a soda to give to someone else. Only, instead of Coke or Pepsi, you bought a drink with a plain white label on it. You could put anything you want on that label, right?
The same goes for white label solutions such as Ucraft White Label website builder.
The trick, though, is finding a product that can do enough that you’ll want to put your name on it.
Ucraft’s white label website builder solution offers the kind of versatility you’re looking for:
<ul>
<li>Drag and drop editing, for no fuss design 	Not everybody’s a coder. With visual design controls, though, anybody can put together a site that looks great, and works without any problems.	 </li>
<li>Fifteen unique third-party integrations, for more features 	Looking for something out of the ordinary, design wise? With these comprehensive design packages, you’ll find that special something you’re looking for.	 </li>
<li><a href="https://cloud.google.com/">Google Cloud</a> hosting 	As one of the most famous hosting platforms in the world, with future-proof infrastructure and serverless computing, your site’s in good hands on Google Cloud. And concerns about capacity are a thing of the past.</li>
</ul>
There’s actually a large cross section of software companies who make use of website builders like this. It makes sense, from a business perspective.
Customers get rich, responsive websites that look as good as anything else on the market and you don’t have to bring a fulltime web developer.
Which isn’t to say developers can’t get just as much out of Ucraft’s White Label solution.
As more people make use of this web development tool, they’ll be able to use that to bring gorgeous web platforms to clients, faster than ever before.
Their white label admin dashboard, for example, puts you and your client at the wheel of your website’s design and metrics information. And, with the option to incorporate ecommerce into your website, you’ll have everything you need to bring on local businesses as clients.
Payment options including Paypal, Bitcoin, Braintree and Apple Pay make this perfect for setting up an ecommerce site, as well.
A White Label Solution That Works For You
Ucraft’s new White Label web design platform is an unbranded website builder with a lot to offer. Easy-to-use design elements and a huge array of features make this the perfect solution for your web building project.
Want to know more? Why not <a href="https://www.ucraft.com/whitelabel" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">get in touch</a> with them, today, to find out about using White Label for yourself?

A White Label Website Builder That Works for You

Remember your 21st birthday? OK… maybe it’s a little fuzzy. You can blame the fancy shots for that. But turning 21 is more than an excuse to party – it’s a major milestone and a rite of passage to the next chapter in life.
Well, this year marks the 21st birthday of the web <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Content Management System</a> (CMS), and there’s plenty of reason to celebrate this groundbreaking innovation.
If you’re still unfamiliar with this three-lettered acronym, “CMS” is a fancy term used to describe the software that organizations around the globe use to build, deploy, manage, and host websites. The advent of the web CMS gave unprecedented new powers and capabilities to advertising agencies, helping them evolve into a new breed of “digital agencies.” CMS unlocked a world of control, providing firms – both small and large – with the kind of software needed to offer web solutions to their advertising clients. This revolutionary technology propelled the advertising industry into the 21st century and transformed the agency model forever.
However, not all web CMS platforms are created equal – and that couldn’t be more apparent than it is for the modern advertising agency.
Although many point to 1996 as the official “birthdate” of the web CMS, the origins of Solodev date back to the early 2000s – so we were just in time for the party. It was a different world back then; the software was calling all the shots, and CMS might have more accurately stood for “Compromise Management System.” It was a bleak landscape, one where almost every aspect of how users could design and build websites was limited by the solution.
This immediately struck us as odd. Why wasn’t there a single platform on the market that gave users the space to create on their own terms? Wasn’t the web supposed to be about “freedom?”
When we set out to build the Solodev Web Experience Platform, our goal was simple: to be a truly unique voice in the CMS industry, and deliver on the promise of total freedom across design, functionality, scalability, and security. We wanted to build a web CMS that enabled users to dictate to the software how they would design and build their websites – not the other way around.
We then took things a step further, re-architecting Solodev for Amazon Web Services in a SaaS delivery model – the first enterprise web CMS to do so. Without even knowing it, this one decision would ultimately revolutionize the business model for the entire industry; Solodev made procuring an enterprise web CMS easier for agencies while lowering the cost, freeing more funds for the creative process, and providing a platform that was infinitely more focused on the overall “web experience.” Finally, agencies had a secure, scalable, Cloud-based platform that was uniquely designed around their industry needs.
While most enterprise CMS platforms provide a singular web experience (in other words, a website interaction that doesn’t change whether you’re a programmer in Brooklyn or a retailer in Spain) Solodev aimed to be different – and we truly hit our mark.
In recent years, there’s been a dramatic shift in our industry, focusing more on the holistic “web experience” as a reflection of design and functionality. But thus far, the effort has been composed of “polishing up” the singular user’s experience. Unlike other solutions, Solodev gives agencies the power to craft unique web experiences for different customer segments – from geographic regions to demographics to behavioral mechanics. This strategic agility not only helps agencies cater to a vast array of clients and their respective customer segments, but ultimately provides a more well rounded experience to the end user. Simply put, the Solodev Web Experience Platform is the next evolution in web content management – and in the coming years, the notion of a singular web experience will become a thing of the past.
At its core, Solodev was built for digital agencies, helping them achieve greater control and flexibility over their website services than ever before. Multi-site management continues to be a major factor for agencies when considering web CMS platforms, so we focused on building the most robust, multi-site management capabilities on the market. With one login to manage all of your clients’ websites, Solodev gives agencies the ability to create credentials for internal personnel as well as clients, using a permission-based system where agencies control who has access to what on the most granular of levels.
Thanks to our SaaS delivery model, agencies can also sign up for Solodev and be up and running in minutes rather than months – all at a reasonable price point that frees up dollars for creative. Agencies no longer have to worry about hosting fees, long-term contracts, and managing multiple web CMS platforms with different contracts and hosting configurations. Simply put, we wanted agencies to have total freedom when it comes to design, functionality, scalability, and security; no compromises, just the power to create whatever they imagined for their clients.
To deliver on this promise, we rebuilt our software layer by layer and optimized our platform to take full advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its entire product suite. Agencies can now craft custom websites without their web CMS telling them what to do and how to do it. Instead, Solodev serves as a true “blank canvas” for agencies to bring digital brands to life.
Solodev gives agencies a strategic agility they’ve never had before. If a client needs a project done quickly – or specifies that they want their website deployed in a cloud environment – agencies can respond with lightning speed using Solodev’s On-Demand model. Deployed in 45 minutes or less, Solodev is one of the fastest platforms on the planet, giving you the ability to create re-usable templates to speed up development time.
Because of our SaaS and Cloud-based configuration, Solodev doesn’t come with the baggage that most competitors do. There’s no $500,000 price tag with our software; in fact, our entry-level plan is only $99/month. There are no licensing fees, no need for IT maintenance, no manual updates and none of the expensive and often unexpected add-ons that come with traditional enterprise web CMS deployments. In essence, Solodev delivers one of the best Total Costs of Ownership (TCO) on the market while enhancing agency productivity on multiple levels.
Solodev’s advanced templating system empowers designers to create the core layouts of any <a href="https://www.solodev.com/blog/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">web design</a> on a virtual “blank canvas” – one that web developers can easily transform into re-usable templates. This allows agencies to write minimal code that delivers maximum impact, and focus more on their creative process. And with Solodev, agencies can even build evergreen template “packages” that replicate a given style or design scheme, providing a foundation on which to develop future websites.
When it comes to content, Solodev gives agency writers and content creators more control than ever. Imagine writing copy while watching your web page update in real-time (working in draft mode and eventually publishing). Now imagine doing it all without any laborious training or deep technical knowledge. With Solodev, it’s all possible – and agencies now have a key advantage in managing and growing their overall content strategy.
Turning 21 is a major milestone for the web CMS. But when the party’s over, how does the industry continue to mature? And for digital agencies, how does it answer the need for greater freedom and control? The answer, in a word, is “experience” – and at Solodev, we’ve always focused on making the best web experience platform on the market. A key part of that is simplicity; that’s why we’ve intentionally left E-Commerce, Marketing Automation, and other enterprise software out of the mix. We wanted our CMS to be the best at what it does – and not another “jack of all trades.” And while most competitive platforms have recently begun to package their CMS with their own nascent enterprise software applications, we decided to give more freedom to the users – and made integrating with your favorite “best of breed” software vendors, from CRM to ERP, extremely easy.
When we say “total freedom” in all aspects of your web presence, we mean it. Solodev forces nothing on you – just the power to create your most imaginative ideas online. It’s the only platform that simply and elegantly delivers a blank canvas where you have complete freedom to design, build, and deploy your websites and applications – without compromises or limitations.
And after 21 years of waiting, there’s no better birthday gift than that.
<h3>About the Author</h3>
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mooreshawn/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Shawn Moore</a> is the founder &amp; CTO of Solodev and the driving force behind the Solodev Web Experience Platform. A visionary leader, Shawn has strategically grown Solodev from its inception as a small <a href="https://www.solodev.com/blog/">web design</a> company to a successful software company that services clients across the nation and has been named to the Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies for the past two years in a row.
Winner of several industry awards for Best CTO and CIO, Shawn Moore is changing the content management landscape with Solodev. With over a decade of executive experience serving as CEO of Solodev and COO for software company Helium Flash, Shawn has the industry knowledge and product passion that continues to drive the development of the Solodev Platform. He is a graduate of Stetson University and often speaks on IT related trends and topics at conferences and universities across the state.

A Web CMS for the Modern Advertising Agency

Whether you are a traditional business owner or run an eCommerce store, it can be challenging to fulfill orders and keep customers happy as your business grows.
Improving fulfillment operations as much as possible will help your business to handle large order volumes and meet customer expectations. 
Here are three key fulfillment tactics that will help you boost the efficiency of your business and improve customer satisfaction: 
<h2 style="margin-left:36.0pt">1. Offer Free Product</h2>
Do you have a new product you’re trying to push sales for?
Include free samples in your next shipment to customers who bought related products. Not only is this a great way to surprise your customers, but it will also encourage them to buy your new product after they try it.
It will also give you some feedback, so you can gauge how well your target audience will receive your new product.
Example: A customer purchased a laptop from you, and was happily surprised to find the free laptop sleeve included in the shipment. They loved using it and, when they wanted a new laptop accessory later on, they made sure to come to you before looking at other retailers. The best part? When people asked the customer about their laptop sleeve, the customer always referred people to you.
Throwing in something extra in your product shipments like that goes a long way toward building customer loyalty and gaining referrals. <a href="https://www.getambassador.com/blog/word-of-mouth-marketing-statistics">Word-of-mouth advertising IS the most valuable form of advertising</a>, after all.
<h2 style="margin-left:36.0pt">2. Cross-Train and Outsource </h2>
People get sick. People have their slow days, where they’re just dragging through.
Don’t let days like this affect your business’ efficiency and customer satisfaction – make sure all of your employees have been cross-trained, and that some of the work is outsourced.
By cross-training all of the people on your team, you can ensure all of the orders will be able to be fulfilled in meet throughput demand.
Sure, those that were cross-trained may not be as efficient as seasoned order fillers, but they do help boost your company’s overall throughput. It also helps boost morale, as everyone feels part of a team that teaches its staff the different aspects of the business.
In addition to cross-training, you may also want to consider outsourcing some of the work. Have an independent contractor send out those purchase confirmation emails or make those calls, contract with a graphic designer for your package inserts, or <a href="http://www.getwhiplash.com/">contract with an experienced fulfillment service for the storage and shipment of your products</a>.
<h2 style="margin-left:36.0pt">3. Have a Personal Touch</h2>
Part of giving customers a better experience is taking strides toward building the consumer-brand trust that helps keep your products flying off the shelves.
Consumers tend to purchase from brands they feel they know, connect with, and can trust. By adding a personal touch to all the packages you send out, you make your customers feel validated in their purchasing decisions. You also give a sense of authenticity, showing your customers there is a real person (or team of people) on the other side of that logo.
Having a custom-made box for your brand will help you stand out from the rest, and will make a long-lasting impression on your customers. It will create an association for your customers, just like the way most consumers can pick out <a href="http://www.tiffany.com/">the specific blue of a Tiffany box</a>. 
Include a hand-written, personalized note in each package as a way to become more memorable for your customer. 
Have you spoken with them before? Great! Make a reference to those previous conversations in the hand-written note. Maybe you helped them pick out a product. Mention that. 
Have they bought things from you before? Excellent! Tell them how happy you are to have such loyal customers.
<h2>Final Thoughts</h2>
Many business owners make the mistake of pouring all of their efforts, time, and money into generating new leads and getting people to buy their products.
The customer is excited to finally get the product they’ve been anxiously awaiting – only to receive a shoddy, boring package with a lack of personal touch or even persuasive copywriting.
Put these 3 fulfillment tactics into play, and you’ll start seeing a definite growth in both brand efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Do you have any fulfillment tactics you recommend? Let me know in the comments below and, while you’re here, don’t forget to share this post!

3 Fulfillment Tactics That Boost Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction

“Alexa, is it supposed to rain today?”
Alexa, Siri, Google Home, and other smart devices have shifted how people consume content. It’s no longer enough to just have your information available in a visual presentation on a web page or mobile app. Users want to interact with content; to ask questions, get information quickly, and ask follow up questions.
The Internet of Things (IoT), while not a new concept, is still a relatively new industry. Brands are continuing to learn how to get their content onto the latest device while consumers are ready to get their hands on whatever device comes out next. This usually leads to marketing and IT teams scrambling to keep up with customer demands while also trying to ensure the quality of their digital experience stays intact.
The Shift: Content is Now a Conversation
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What does shifting the way we think about content actually mean? When creating content for the IoT it’s important to remember that your users won’t be reading your information off a screen and clicking on what they want to learn more about, they’ll be asking questions, sometimes multiple questions, to get the information they’re looking for. They’ll also only be able to digest a certain amount of information at a time – your content needs to reflect this new type of interaction.
Your Content is Only as Good as the Platform
You can build out all the amazing content you want, but if you don’t have a platform that can deliver it to the IoT, your customers won’t be able to consume it. This is why many brands are turning to Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) as a way to meet the content needs of their customers without bogging down their IT departments with constant demands for device compatibility.
CaaS, or Headless CMS as some call it, is a way to separate your content from your presentation layer, using APIs to connect to various devices; therefore, future-proofing your content. This means your content can be pushed to devices like Alexa, Siri, and other IoT devices via APIs. 
“Alexa, what’s for lunch?” | Building Alexa Skills for Gettysburg College
When students started to request the ability to ask Alexa about the campus dining menu, Rod Tosten, VP of Information Technology at Gettysburg College, and his team took the request to heart and starting to think about building out an IoT strategy for Gettysburg College, starting with Amazon’s Alexa.
As the most visited page on the website, Gettysburg campus dining seemed to be the most logical place to start. Tosten and his team created an Alexa Skill to allow students to ask about campus dining – what’s on the menu, hours of operation for each location, and more. Building off of this first Skill, they continued to create Skills for both the campus phone directory and campus news.
Gettysburg College uses dotCMS as their content management system in order to feed content into their Alexa Skills using various methods, depending on the information needed. For example, the campus dining Skill uses a JSON call request to get a JSON object and parse the response to pull out the content needed. The college’s news Skill, which reports on sports news, mentions in the media and more, hits RSS Feeds from the CMS in order to report headlines, summaries, and more detailed story information. Though Gettysburg College Alexa Skills use different methods to pull information from their CMS, all content is stored in dotCMS so it only has to be added one time and in one location.
Tosten’s Considerations When Developing for Alexa
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Developing for Alexa and other smart devices requires a shift in how you think about content and how it will be consumed. Tosten and his team noted four main considerations when designing and developing an Alexa Skill that both marketers and developers need to keep in mind.
<ol>
<li>The content: What information are you trying to share with the user and where is it? How much processing does it take to form the content into speech? How should the content be formed to work easily with a web browser, speech, and mobile display? This is related to the CMS or information/web service.</li>
<li>The conversation and flow: How will the user interact with Alexa and the content? This results in an intention and utterance, or sentence structure, model for Alexa to follow to help it know what words are important and what types of words might be in each question. Think about what the user is going to need in regards to help or guidance to get the correct information.</li>
<li>The speech and card presentation: What sentence format is desired? What language issues are there? For example, should 123 be pronounced as “one two three” or “one hundred twenty-three”? How should the content be displayed for the Alexa App card on the mobile phone?</li>
<li>Implementation Strategy: How are the issues or considerations in the above going to be implemented or translated into a Speechlet that will handle the requests by the user?</li>
</ol>
Tosten on the Future of IoT
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We’ve come a long way with smart devices and the platforms to support them, but looking to the future of IoT, Tosten feels it’s not hard to see that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a key part of what comes next. The future will require smart devices to be even smarter – they’ll need to not only be able to know how to retrieve content and go back and forth with the user in conversation, but they’ll need to learn who the user is and their habits in order to make the experience more seamless. AI integrated into IoT devices, like Alexa, will better anticipate the user’s needs when they seek information and be able to converse with the user on a more personal level.
For more on what the future of IoT holds as well as an in-depth look at how Gettysburg College is using Alexa Skills, <a href="https://dotcms.com/clients/dotcms-and-content-as-a-service">check out these videos</a>.

How the Internet of Things is Shifting the Way We Think about Content

<a href="http://www.progress.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Progress</a> (NASDAQ: PRGS) today announced the release of Progress® Sitefinity™ 10, the latest edition of its web content management system, popular for its ease-of-use and rapid time to delivery. With today’s release, Progress delivers new user authentication and security capabilities making social authentication on websites a capability available to any organization.
Enabling visitors to log into websites using their existing social and email IDs including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Github and LinkedIn has been proven to increase website registrations and conversions. And when marketers have access to the rich customer data associated with these third-party sites, they can offer customers a more personalized, dramatically enriched digital experience. But the complexity of building these capabilities has made it extremely time and labor-intensive, forcing many organizations without the requisite resources or developer skillsets to forgo using this valuable tactic.
With the Sitefinity 10 content management system (CMS), Progress has radically simplified the authentication process. With out-of-the-box capabilities for third-party authentication for major social and email accounts, Progress now makes it easy for any organization to use social logins to drive the success of their digital marketing initiatives. 
Progress has also added significant new security capabilities to the Sitefinity 10 CMS, with a standards-based implementation layered on top of OpenID Connect and IdentityServer3, making enterprise-grade identity management and security accessible to small and large organizations alike. IT administrators can rely on Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS) or LDAP to automatically authorize website users by mapping active directory roles to Sitefinity content management roles. In addition, Progress Sitefinity 10 CMS is the first solution to empower digital marketers to work with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images, without the inherent security concerns associated with embedded malware.
Additional features new in the Sitefinity 10 CMS include:
<ul>
<li>Sitefinity Site Shield: Website managers can invite stakeholders to secure websites that are under development, without having to grant back-end permissions. This feature is ideal for product managers and web agencies that need to secure approval from end clients, legal and PR teams that are not active CMS users.</li>
<li>Export / Import Site Data: Developers can streamline the development of new websites by easily creating starter kits and moving website components, together with their data, from one Sitefinity CMS instance to another. </li>
<li>CDN Support Improvements: Businesses can now serve the latest content to their visitors by implementing a cache-control header strategy with full control over the cache settings for site images and pages delivered by their CDN.</li>
<li>Azure Cloud Support Improvements: Progress Sitefinity 10 CMS enables developers to take advantage of the latest Azure SDK to deploy Sitefinity websites in the cloud. </li>
</ul>
According to Gartner, “People generate valuable information about themselves each time they consume a service or make a purchase. An identity economy has emerged, and consumer identity information is the new gold. Consumer identity data is a powerful sales and marketing tool that allows organizations to better know their customers and deliver personalized services. It improves customer service and helps build customer loyalty.”<a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_-7971989814454064102__ftn1" name="m_-7971989814454064102__ftnref1">[1]</a>
“Our customers choose Progress Sitefinity CMS because it is easy-to-use, can scale and is affordable. The release of the Sitefinity 10 CMS bolsters those differentiators by adding out-of-the-box capabilities for user identity management for reduced time to market and total cost of ownership of sites,” said Anton Hristov, Director Product Marketing, Progress Sitefinity. “Additional Sitefinity and Digital Experience Cloud features further the enablement of digital marketers to optimize the user experience and improve conversions across sites and devices without costly custom implementations.”
Progress Sitefinity 10 CMS is available immediately. For more details, please visit <a href="http://www.sitefinity.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://www.sitefinity.com</a>.

Progress Sitefinity 10 Delivers Cutting Edge User Authentication, Security, Management and Productivity

<a href="http://www.volusion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Volusion</a>, an all-in-one website builder for retailers and brands, today unveiled Volusion 2, a new and significantly upgraded version of its software platform, underscoring the company’s refocus on the needs of small to medium sized businesses by helping them start selling on their websites faster. As part of this launch, Volusion also unveiled a new website, complete with an updated logo, branding and an improved UI, designed to engage with more founders in the SMB target market. These upgrades were driven by Volusion founder and CEO, Kevin Sproles, who recently returned to the helm of the company and helped it reach a new milestone, more than $25 billion in total transactions.
“Small and medium businesses deserve the same robust website features and level of service as the established enterprise,” said Kevin Sproles, Volusion CEO. “Since returning as CEO, my number one goal has been to get Volusion refocused to help these entrepreneurs succeed.”
Volusion 2, unveiled today, and currently in use with select Volusion clients in beta, represents a significant upgrade to the company’s core technology, which provides faster development cycles for Volusion clients (e.g.. adding new features and responding to demands at record speed), far surpassing what is currently available in the market. At launch, Volusion 2 integrates with Shippo, Paypal, Stripe and soon Zapier, Yopto, Square, Xero, and Amazon. Key features include:
<ul>
<li>Quick &amp; intuitive store setup to start selling immediately: Storefront editing is displayed in real time and visible across multiple view-ports for easy changes to any font, text, or product – no code required. Accelerated onboarding with PayPal and Stripe enables merchants to take payment before buyers have completed their site registration processes.</li>
<li>Secure checkout, free SSL, and full-site HTTPS: Merchants can now host checkout on their own secure domain/URL so shoppers never leave their site. Included free on all Volusion plans, while other market players provide this feature for an added fee per month. And with full-site HTTPS merchants get an SEO boost from Google, resulting in more traffic and sales.</li>
<li>Mobile-optimized all around: With more shoppers on mobile than desktop, Volusion 2 is optimized for mobile conversion. Merchants can manage their entire store on-the-go, anytime.</li>
</ul>
Volusion’s Vow: Making Success Accessible With Volusion, merchants can access everything they need to create a business, and sell products online, in one solution:
<ul>
<li>Easy to use DIY: Store set-up in minutes and customize with drag and drop ease – no coding required.</li>
<li>Experts to do it for you: Volusion offers experts on-demand to help with custom design, marketing, SEO, and social media – either a la carte or in an ongoing plan.</li>
<li>Uptime upends industry standard: 99.9% uptime is guaranteed – and if it’s not met, money is issued back to merchants.</li>
<li>24/7, 365…100 percent of the time: That means Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day… there is a live person at Volusion to answer questions and provide support for founders.</li>
</ul>
New Volusion Branding and Website
The new Volusion website is geared toward helping customers – new and existing – more easily find help and learn how to start and grow their businesses.
<ul>
<li>A bigger spotlight on customers: Volusion has put greater emphasis on the customer, with tips to help start or grow their business, and features more real life customer successes and results. Sproles regularly talks with and visits customers, and invites them to Volusion’s headquarters, to stay connected on the features and support they find most valuable.</li>
<li>Revamped Resources section: The resources section includes a revamped Help Center with expert written support articles and tutorials, a blog with fresh e-commerce insights, and guides that share online business resources.</li>
<li>Ask Us Anything: The right help is on the way with the “Ask Us Anything” feature enabled across the entire website. Questions are answered typically in under 10 minutes and from the right commerce consultant within the company based on the customer’s request.</li>
</ul>
As part of its focused strategy, Volusion sold its cloud-based enterprise solution, Mozu, in October, 2016. Each Volusion employee and product are now 100% focused on SMB, which has resulted in increased revenues for the e-commerce company. Since Sproles’ return, Volusion has increased the average store revenue by over 8%, and processed more than 23M orders in 2016, generating over $3.6B in sales for Volusion merchants. Because Volusion doesn’t charge transaction fees, merchants keep more of that revenue. On average, a Volusion active merchant generates over $216k in revenue, more than 5x that of our leading competitor. 
To learn more or to start creating your business on Volusion, visit <a href="http://www.volusion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">www.volusion.com</a>.

Volusion 2: Revamped and Refocused on SMB Market

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If you’re a business targeting visitors in non-English-speaking countries, providing multi-lingual sites is probably a necessity. Or, you may just see it as a nice-to-have that could potentially bring additional leads or revenue. Either way, building multi-lingual sites comes with its own set of challenges and considerations; it’s not as simple as clicking “translate”.
In this article we go through the main multi-lingual website best practices you should keep in mind when building foreign-language sites, to ensure that they are as optimal as possible. The most important aspect? To provide your foreign-language visitors with the same user experience as your English-speaking ones. Here are our top 7 tips:
1. Always have translations reviewed by a professional
Although using Google Translation may seem like a convenient idea, you could really alienate your visitors if your content doesn’t make sense or if it’s confusing. So even if you decide to largely translate content through a software, always make sure you get a language professional to review it before publishing it on your site. Only in this way will foreign-language visitors get the same understanding of your conent as English-speaking ones.
2. Pay attention to international SEO practices
Simply translating your content is not going to deliver the same SEO results as on your English site. Why? Because often different SEO rules apply to different countries.
There are several things you can pay attention to when adjusting your SEO:
<ul>
<li>Keyword: a simple keyword translation won’t do if that keyword isn’t actually going to be effective in that language. Make sure you do keyword research for every language site to ensure keywords have an appropriate volume of monthly searches and that they are relevant.</li>
<li>URL: think about whether your multi-lingual sites will be built completely separately or if you will build them as subdomains of your main site. Whether you choose one or the other will depend on how independent you want these sites to be of each other.</li>
<li>Search engines: Believe it or not, not every country counts Google as their most popular search engine. For example, <a href="http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2015-search-engine-market-share-by-country/">the most popular search engines in China, Russia and South Korea respectively are Baidu, Yandex and Naver</a>. So if you’re building a site for users in any of these countries, make sure that your SEO practices are in line with the major search engines there.</li>
</ul>
3. Keep all sites consistent
One of the most common mistakes when building multi-lingual sites is not providing the same user experience across them. This can lead visitors to feel like they’re missing out on key information if they’re using a non-English site.
It’s therefore very important to ensure that different sites look consistent and give visitors confidence that they are all reliable. A way of doing this is to use global templates across all sites, ensuring that they all have the same look and content. Global templates can also help you reduce your design efforts and costs significantly, and make it a lot easier to maintain web updates across sites.
The most important part is that all sites provide the same features and functionality, so all your visitors get the user experience they expect and require.
4. Use content that is culturally appropriate and contextually relevant
Just like it’s necessary to have a translator to ensure your translations make sense in whatever language, the same applies to images and icons. Are they relevant, appropriate and respectful to the culture in question?
This will require a level of knowledge or research on your part to ensure that you avoid images that could be offensive or uncomfortable to your audience. The aim is to connect with your visitors and provide them with an online experience that makes them feel positive about your brand.
5. Make multi-lingual site access easy and convenient
There is nothing more annoying than trying to find the functionality to change a site’s language and being unable to locate it. And believe me, if it’s too hard to find it, your visitors will just leave.
Access to multi-lingual sites should be clearly available in the locations where your visitors expect to find it: the top right of your global navigation bar and the site’s footer.
If you are only offering one language other than English, for example Spanish, you could simply include a button saying “En español”. If you are providing multiple foreign-language sites, a drop-down box is a more intuitive solution.
6. Make your checkout process familiar to the relevant countries
The checkout process is an often overlooked aspect of multi-lingual sites that requires attention too. Some eCommerce providers already provide country-relevant checkout functionality, but even if yours does, always ensure that it includes:
<ul>
<li>Appropriate shipping address formats according to the country (eg. different countries will have different zip/postal code formats)</li>
<li>Appropriate currencies that are automatically assigned according to the country the site is being accessed from. Bonus point if these can be adjusted by the visitor from a drop-down menu</li>
<li>Appropriate date and time formats (eg. the correct date format in the US is mm/dd/yyyy, whereas in Japan it’s yyyy/mm/dd).</li>
</ul>
7. Keep in mind text expansion
Finally, a challenge that many companies experience when translating sites is text expansion. Text translated from English into foreign languages often expands because of different grammar and syntax rules. For example, English text translated into Spanish expands by approximately 25%.
What this means is that, especially when using global templates, you may encounter difficulties fitting all content in on your foreign-language sites, so it’s important to plan ahead for this. Cutting down copy may seem appealing, but it should never mean that less information is available to your visitors. Ultimately, dealing with text expansion will involve a combination of trying to cut down your content and tweaking your design without making any major changes to the users' experience.
Do you know of any multi-lingual website best practices we forgot to mention? Let us know in the comments!
If you would like to find out more about how Agility CMS can help you, <a href="http://agilitycms.com/#demo-link">request a free demo</a> now.

7 Multi-Lingual Website Best Practices To Keep In Mind

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