News

We are thrilled to announce the release of webNetwork 2.0! All of the features were based on your requests, and we thank you for being so helpful in building the best social networking software available. A full list of features is included below. The latest version is available to download from the customers area. For existing customers, an upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 will be made available within 2 weeks.

New Features

• Address book importers (for Gmail, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail)
• Privacy settings
• Newsletter and mass mailing
• Convert all videos to Flash
• Groups improved
• Group music uploads
• Group video uploads
• Group events
• Group comments
• Custom themes for groups
• Revamped videos section
• Free trial periods
• Simple Windows-based installer
• Easily create new pages through the admin area
• Short profile URLs
• Easily upload profile photo
• Improved profile creation process

We hope you enjoy these great new features, and we look forward to your feedback!

We’ve added a bunch of new WebBoxes that make it simple to add new interactive elements to your site. For those not familiar with our WebBox system, a WebBox is a simple widget that you can place anywhere on your site with a simple tag. For example, simply insert a tag called {WEBBOX_COOLPEOPLE} and the software will replace the tag with the table below. It’s as simple as that, and with all of the different WebBoxes we have, you should be able to make your site even more interactive in minutes!

Here’s a complete listing of all the new WebBoxes:

We’ve added many smaller features that are a great addition to the software. A small portion is included below.

Creating new pages

Creating additional pages to the software can now be done right through the administrative area. You can select which section each page is associated with, and flag if the page requires member registration for viewing. This allows you to adding new pages to your site a breeze!

Short profile URLs

We have no added support for short profile URLs. Members can now go to something like http://www.yoursite.com/customer_username to access a profile. No more long and messy URLs!

Default Photo

When members upload a photo in a photo album, and don’t currently have a profile photo, that uploaded photo will automatically be added as their profile photo. This removes the extra step of forcing members to manually associate an uploaded photo as the profile photo.

Profile Creation Process

The profile creation process has been improved. Customers were facing confusion when clicking the “Next” button didn’t automatically change their settings. This has been modified to save any changes made to the profile.

We’ve been looking for a way to make the installation and upgrade process of webNetwork even easier than it already is, and have found a great solution. In webNetwork 2.0, we will be introducing a Windows based installer that will remove the need to use an FTP client to upload your files. With a few simple clicks, this installer will take care of uploading your files, setting the permissions, and getting your software up and running in no time!

For those of you who are charging for the site (or parts of it), we’ve had a feature to allow a trial period being requested many times.

In version 2.0, you’ll be able to set how many days you’d like to offer the trial period for, and associate a trial with a specific membership level that you’ve already defined. This is a great feature to allow your members to test drive your site, and convert them to paying members afterwards!

We thought that the Videos Home page looked a little dated, and didn’t offer enough user interaction, so our developers threw in a nice fresh look, along with 4 categories of videos that your members can quickly browse. The Videos Home page now lets members view Featured, Most Recent, Most Viewed, and Top Rated videos with the click of a button!

For this new version of webNetwork, we’ve totally revamped the Groups sections. In 1.0, groups could only have photos uploaded. We’ve expanded this to include music, videos, events, comments and themes.

• Music uploads allow members to upload a music clip, and embed it into the group page.

• Video uploads allow the same functionality as the videos, with our new Flash player embedded as well.

• Group events allow the moderator to alert members of new group related events about to happen.

• Comments allow members to post comments to the group, just like they do now within profiles.

• Groups can also have their own custom themes, just like members can have custom profiles.

This should make the Groups section a much more attractive part of your site that your members will love!

Converting videos to Flash, and playing them back in a Flash video player has been one of our most requested features. This new addition allows your members to upload a video clip in virtually any format supported by FFMPEG (required for the video conversions), and automatically convert the video to a Flash format. In addition, our software will also automatically grab a frame from the video which will be used as the video thumbnail. This removes the step of having to upload a thumbnail for each video. Included below is a screenshot of the converted video, embedded in our new Flash video player. Let us know what you think!

Staying in touch with your members is important. That’s why we’ve added a News feature to the new version of webDate. The News feature allows you to easily post announcements or news articles with the click of a button.

If you’re running the multilanguage version of the software, you can select the language the article is written in. Pick a title for the news post, along with a date to publish it, and use the WYSIWYG editor to write the body of the article. It’s as simple as that! Post as often as you’d like, and manage your postings any time.

We’ve received frequent requests from customers on how to promote their site and if we could help. We didn’t have the resources at the time to undertake website promotion - until now.

I am happy to announce that our newest service for Search Engine Promotion/Optimization has launched. We’ve started off slow with a few clients, and the initial results have been extremely positive. We’ll be putting up case studies in the future to showcase the success. In the meantime, the results we’ve achieved for our own site speak to our abilities. We rank in the top 10 search results for all of our targeted keywords, and many of those rank in the top 3.

We’re excited to offer this new service to our customers. From our experience, the cost of search engine promotion and optimization is orders of magnitude less than you would be spending on advertising campaigns through Google Adwords, banner ads, or other pay-per-click services. We’re confident that we can improve your ranks in the search engine, and drive more traffic to your website.

For more information, please check out our consulting page.