You are welcome to get more info about our Christmas and New Year Offer. Don’t forget to share the great news with your friends and partners!
WorksForWeb wishes you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
After several months of development, we are proud to release our long awaited totally redesigned corporate website. This redesigned website provides more detailed information about our company activity and services, and features in-depth information about our classifieds products: iRealty, iAuto and iLIster. So why did we decide to make the changes and what did we do to improve the site?We created our classifieds products from scratch. It was a long way from simple PHP script to sophisticated yet easy-to-use classifieds engine capable to run large classifieds portals. Our old product sites grew up with the products step by step, from enhancement to enhancement. And one day we realized that our old product sites cannot serve the needs of our top-notched products and it does not reflect our organisation’s current market position. We know that we have to evolve to ensure we can deliver what customers need today. A web site redesign was a great opportunity to evaluate where we are today and where we want to be in the future.
At the beginning of the redesign we outlined the main purposes of the site as follows:
Enhance customer perception of our classifieds products and WorksForWeb services
Ensure an online presence in the face of similar moves by competitors
Provide customers with the ability to view the product demo on-line
Provide an opportunity to inform people about classifieds scripts in which they may be interested, thus enhancing customer service and increasing sales.
Several months of hard work of designers and developers allow us to present you our new redesigned site. So what’s the value?
We tried to make the web site well presented and provide it a professional appearance. Now the site appears to contain most of the information a customer would require. We use the language and visual cues in a manner that is both internally consistent and consistent with general practice, so our customers do not have to learn any new techniques in order to use the site successfully.
One of the most important challenges was the necessity to consolidate four sites in one (three products sites and one company site) and retain the navigation through the site clear and user-friendly. We worked hard to design 4-level menu. The 1-st level menu presents our company, products and services, the 2-nd level menu navigates you through the scripts and addons available. The 3-d level menu guides you through the information about each product: iAuto, iRealty and iLister, product features, portfolio, demos, documentation, etc. And finally the 4-th level menu (it’s displayed in the right block of the site unlike the previous three menu levels which are located under the site header) invites you to look deeper into the detailed info about product editions and detailed functionality descriptions. If necessary, a site map is available.
We designed the site with our valued customers in mind so we did our best to provide all necessary means of communication. We encourage you to contact us through the contact forms specially designed for pre-sales questions, submitting testimonials and feature requests and general suggestions, besides you can call us or chat via Skype.
We created the site with love and desire to make your surfing through our site and searching for the information smooth and problemless. Our designers tried to make the site attractive and pleasant to look at. You are our most severe judges and the best usability consultants. We are eager to listen to your opinion about our efforts regarding the site redesign. We would like to offer you to fill in a short survey on the site redesign. Your feedback is highly appreciated!
We live in the world where people are mostly skeptical and need a good reason to listen to you, or choose your product or use your services. Previously we discussed the reasons for writing success stories and today we will learn how to write a success story that makes people believe.
There are a lot of ways to write an interesting and persuasive story and you can easily google them. Today we offer you the CARP-model for wring success stories, the model which is easy to understand and follow and flexible enough to be changed giving you much space for self-expression. Finally it’s quite effective.
The structure consists of four parts:
1.Challenge
2.Action
3.Result
4.Perspective
We call this structure CARP-model. it’s easy to remember even if you are not a fishing lover, isn’t it?
So the CARP-model provides you with the structure for your success story. Let’s dive deeper into the details.
Challenge
The main purpose is to make readers identify with the challenge.
Who had the challenge? Who cares?
What problem, issue or concern needed addressing?
Why was it important?
What was the cost of addressing or not addressing it
Action
The main purpose is to demonstrate how you responded to the challenge and how our product and services can impact the business challenge.
What did you do to address your challenge?
How big was the project? Include inputs (staff, funding, volunteers, research, expertise) and outputs - activities (teaching, facilitation, product development and people (number of people and demographics).
Which product or services by WorksForWeb did you use?
How did our products and services help?
Why do you choose this product?
Result
The main purpose is to show that the benefits are real, quantifiable and compelling
What resulted? Use quantitative and qualitative data to describe important outcomes (changes and benefits) achieved as a result of the actions described earlier.
Who benefited and how? Help the reader understand the meaning behind the change.
Describe the benefits you achieved (including benefits like increased customer satisfaction or reduced stuff turnover) in most-important-to-least-important order.
Perspective
The main purpose is to show that achieved excellent results are the part of continuous growth and you are full of plans and perspectives.
What is the perspective for the future?
Is there a next stage that you now plan to implement?
How do you plan to change your business in future?
What are your goals and intentions?
You just need to follow the CARP-model and it will keep you from becoming confused while writing your success story. Answer all questions and you will get well-structured and clear success story.
And some more tips:
·Don’t forget about the appealing lead to the story
·Use attractive pictures
·Proofread the text
·Use active vs. passive voice
·Read it aloud before submitting somewhere
·If the story seems too long, delete one or more of the least important facts from the story .
·Try to follow the classic structure for writing a success story: Problem and Solution, Before and After, Then and Now.
·Focus on the reader's interest (usually in terms of how clients benefit).
Just imagine that your classifieds site is one of the most successful in the on-line classifieds industry, but no one knows about this fact. The both sides - you and your prospect clients - suffer. You are not properly rewarded for your efforts because nobody knows about your excellence and your clientsdon’t know what good services are available for them to use and how they can be benefitted.
You should do something to make the public to get to know about your accomplishments. How?
We’ve got the answer! Write a success story! Success story, case study, customer testimonial - whatever you call them they are a valuable sales and marketing tool, as their main goal is to impact public and make them visit your site and use your products or services. Almost everybody loves to read about success stories. They are always about a challenge, new experience and looking for solutions.
What Is a Success Story?
In general, success story is an example of a successful practice when a company has achieved documented successful results.Success stories can be as short as 3-4 paragraphs or as long as 20 pages. It can be distributed in print, as PDFs, in the company newsletter, it also can be posted on the Web site, distributed at conferences, packaged and tailored to particular audiences for customer meetings, and sent in direct mail packages.
Why to write success stories?
·To give your readers an example of real successful project. Examples will help to understand difficult concepts and complex business issues. And solutions that can solve the issues.
·To generate empathy to enable readers to empathize with the challenge that you faced in the success story, in case your readers face a similar problem. The goal is make readers to closely identify with the author of the relevant success story.
·To add credibility. People believe success stories because such case studies usually relate a factual situations, besides they are full of real facts. A good success story full with facts and figures can also demonstrate ROI (if the documentation of a return on investment is possible).
·To share your ideas and to learn what works and what doesn’t work.
·To let the public know that you do good work that positively impacts the lives of people
Anyway writing a success story about your business can not only provide the competitive advantage that your business need, but give you additional reason to be proud of yourself which is also important for a successful businessman like you.
WorksForWeb, a well-known worldwide provider of efficient online classifieds solutions for small and medium businesses, launches a one-month long “Classifieds in Your Language” discount campaign to support further development of language files for iAuto, iLister and iRealty.
The 'Classifieds in Your Language' campaign launches on 7 September 2009 and will last for one month.
Every participant can get up to $100 of discount off any Standard Edition license in exchange for a new lang file for iAuto, iLIster, or iRealty from the Top Wanted list of languages needed (all other promotions are not applicable as part of this offer).
Participants can also get up to $50 of discount off any Standard Edition license (iAuto, iLister, or iRealty) for updating or improving an existing lang file.
In addition to that, five lucky participants selected randomly will each get a Banner Management Addon (BMA) as an extra bonus.
As an example, let’s add our site to the bookmarks at Google.com. First of all you need to create an account (if you have no account). Ready? Now you are able to store additional bookmarks, tag your bookmarks, and share with anyone interested in your bookmarks.
Adding a bookmark
1. Go to your iGoogle page 2. Find “Google Bookmarks” module. 3. Enter the URL, Name and Labels for your site. Name should be appealing for other people who may be interested in the bookmark. Include the keyword phrase into your title as well.
4. Click “Add” button and your site is bookmarked!
And remember that now you have one more external link to your site. Congratulations!
If you haven't tried a Bookmarking site, join one, and use it for a few months before you make a judgment on how useful it is. And surely useShare Your Site feature provided with our classified software to encourage your visitors to add your site to their bookmarks.
Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. It's a tool for personal knowledge management (Wikipedia.org).
In other words, social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks (web addresses) to a public Web site so you can access these bookmarks from any computer connected to the web. Having your site bookmarked in a number of popular social bookmarking sites you drive more traffic to the content at your site. So if you create a piece of content and title it with the keyword phrase you need, you will get a free external link with the required anchor text.
If you wish to create your own social bookmarks, you must register with a social bookmarking site. The part that takes the longest is probably setting up an account for each site, which includes email confirmations. But remember, no pain, no gain, right?
What you need to continue: - keyword-rich content that provides value at the page of your site - an appealing title with selected keywords within the title - time to monitor your accounts at social bookmarking sites - regular analysis of how long each link pops up in search engines. At some point you will reach a place where you are no longer drawing significant traffic from your older bookmarks, but that’s OK.
Beware of spamming these sites and making your list of bookmarks appear unattractive or an obvious marketing ploy which will net you very little. The biggest problem with this method is time and the relative effectiveness of the links. You have to make sure the content is good and the title passes spam detection else it will simply be deleted. Don’t abuse this by submitting every page of your site, try to be judicious and think about what pages of your site may be helpful and of interest to other web surfers.
There is an opinion that social bookmarking has limited appeal for a SEO professional. The reason is that you cannot count on it to increase site rankings directly, but indirectly it can increase awareness which may eventually provide additional natural linking. Besides many social bookmarking sites do not allow crawlers to follow links, thus the links do not help the page rank. However social bookmarking is still one of the cheapest and the most effective ways to get sites deep crawled and indexed and attract more visitors.
Even if you are not going to base the SEO campaign for your site on this technique it should be in your SEO toolbox of tasks anyway. And don’t’ forget that having great page content accurate meta tags with a solid web design combined with quality links from other pages of similar content contribute best to the end users experience.
WorksForWeb is proud to come up with a new version of its classifieds software: iLister 4.6.0, iRealty 4.7.0and iAuto 4.6.0. As of this version, we're offering ability to display video from YouTube, brand new search among users, ability to include a slideshow to listings. You will now have a wonderful opportunity to use WYSIWYG editor in text-fields and make the listings highlighted. Several bug fixes and existing features enhancements have been also added. Along with amazing performance, customizability and speed you can now enjoy the expanded functionality aimed at the providing you as a classifieds site owner with new reliable revenue streams to earn more and more money offering your visitors and clients new options to make their listings stay out of the crowd.
Now users can easily add a vivid and informative slideshow to their listings. Users simply pay for this option to be enabled by the administrator and get access to the opportunity to create an attractive slide show. The slide show includes all necessary elements for comfortable viewing of the slides uploaded for the listing (start/stop/pause buttons, customizing slide changing intervals, etc.)
Another great feature - displaying video from YouTube in listings - will allow you to add a block displaying videos directly from YouTube and similar video sites. This option can be provided by the administrator for any listing on paid basis. The administrator can turn on this function for all listings making this option absolutely free to use for all registered users or this function can be enabled for only several user groups and few listings paid by your clients. Sometimes a short video clip can say much more than words or even a number of pictures, so it’s a good reason for your users to pay for the video in listing and a great chance for them to present the listing in the best way.
The administrator can now create a page with the ability to perform search among the registered users of the site. Users will be able to specify search criteria and view the results which will include the list of the users from the selected group. So you can now enjoy the search among the registered users having all the search opportunities you are used to have with previous versions of iLister, iRealty and iAuto classifieds software. Besides the search results are generated and displayed as a separate page with specific URL where user information is presented (including logo, contacts, links to full user profile and all listings by this user). This feature is a great chance for those dealers who has no their own web-site. The generated web-page can be presented by the dealer to clients and provide on-line presence at minimum costs.
The new version of the classifieds software also offers powerful formatting capabilities for text-fields in listings with WYSIWYG editor to visually improve content and make it more attractive and readable.
New version of iLister, iRealty and iAuto classifieds software provides the ability to highlight the selected listings. It will surely play its positive role in attracting attention of the prospective clients. The administrator of the classifieds site can enable highlight feature and set the price for using the feature. Listing owner can activate highlighting simply by pressing on "Make Highlighted" button and enjoy this additional opportunity to make listings visibly outstanding.
You are welcome to find more information on the changes and improvements implemented to iAuto, iRealty, and iLister on the official WFW website at www.worksforweb.com. Alternatively, you can contact, email or chat with our Sales Team. Please send your requests to sales@iautosoftware.com, sales@irealtysoft.com and sales@ilistersoft.com and we'll be happy to address your inquiries.
WorksForWeb (WFW), a software development team specialized in the classifieds solutions announces a new release of its top classifieds products: iAuto, iRealty and iLister.
WFW introduces a number of new features to enhance the overall user experience with the classifieds scripts. In response to customer demand and recently collected feature requests, iAuto v.4.5.0, iRealty v.4.6.0 and iLister v.4.5.0 now include a host of serious improvements in usability, functionality and performance dictated by the advanced industry standards and requirements.
The listing comparison mechanism is introduced in the latest software release. It provides advanced field-by-field comparison algorithms for multiple listings. Unlike some of the industry's market leader portals, all WFW product-based websites now offer unlimited listing comparison capability. Users browsing listings in one category can simply click the “Compare Ad” button and all pre-selected listings will be displayed in the Comparison Results table. Users can also remove some listings from the table to focus closer on the ones that best match the request. Now the eternal problem of choosing among similar products is elegantly resolved in a couple of mouse clicks.
Among the newly added features there is one that performs import and export of user data in both CSV and XLS formats. Those formats are the most typical and widely-used user account formats. This feature is instrumental for backing up and sharing of the customer account base with third party applications (internal corporate db, newsletter scripts, billing software) fast, easily and conveniently.
The latest release also features CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) protection added to block form submissions from spam bots and prevent abuse. Ad ranking system, a great social networking tool, is a great tool to encourage customer participation and sharing of experience.
Now images uploaded to listings on websites powered by WorksForWeb classifieds software can be copyright protected with watermarks. As a site administrator, you can easily add a custom watermark (image or text) to be automatically merged with all images uploaded by your users. As TechFAQ.com points out, using watermarks for copyright protection and security reasons is equally beneficial to the Web site owners as using watermarks as a marketing/branding tool for additional exposure.
In addition to the above features, the new release of iAuto, iRealty and iLister classifieds solutions includes a number of enhancements such as indicators of the max number of symbols allowed for text input fields, and a new and greatly improved availability calendar interface. You are welcome to find more information on the changes and improvements implemented to iAuto, iRealty, and iLIster on the official WFW website at www.worksforweb.com. Alternatively, you can contact, email or chat with our Sales Team. Please send your requests to sales@iautosoftware.com , sales@irealtysoft.com and sales@ilistersoft.com and we'll be happy to address your inquiries.
We at WorksForWeb wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! We look forward to bringing you new products, functions and features and see your business prosper and grow because of that.
We have several great news. First, we are glad to announce the release of new versions of all our classified software: iAuto, iRealty, and iLister. We added new cool and exciting features, and made a few important fixes.
Special attention was paid to improving usability, enhancing script performance and implementing features most requested by current and potential users.
For additional information on features and fixes that are part of the new release please refer to the iAuto www.iautosoftware.com, iRealty www.irealtysoft.com and iLister www.ilistersoft.com websites, as well as to our official website at www.worksforweb.com. Alternatively, start an online chat when operators are available or send us an email to sales@worksforweb.com with your questions.
We are also happy to introduce another iLister mod, this time, iLister Career, a job board software. iLister Career employment/job classifieds software is the best tool to create your own SEO-friendly employment website. Recruiters and Career Builders are bound to find the best candidate for the job and the best job for every candidate respectively.
Completely customizable code and look and feel, awesome built-in WYSIWYG CMS, instant switch multi-language support, and a list of capabilities too long to display here – are you still looking? Give it a try with a 15-day free trial and an online demo at http://www.ilistersoft.com/demo_jobs/!
During the upcoming winter holidays we will offer limited availability of our Sales and Support staff to address your issues. Particularly, our offices will be closed between 31 Dec 2008 and 5 Jan 2008.
However, we will be able to resolve support-related issues (the wait time may increase) and will have someone on duty to respond to sales inquiries process your orders. We apologize for the inconvenience this may be causing you and will try to minimize any impacts on you.
Last, but certainly not least. We are currently are almost finished with the limited time discount offer valid until Dec 31. To summarize, purchase a Standard Edition License of your choice (iRealty, iAuto or iLister) and get a Special Edition License of any WorksForWeb product as a holiday seasonal gift!
/OR /
Buy a Standard Edition with a 15% Christmas discount before 31 December! Use the following coupon code, HOTWINTER08, to claim your discount. Don't let this money-saving opportunity pass you by!
We at WorksForWeb are ready for the winter holidays and proud to announce our Hot Winter Offers: Heart-Warming Gifts and Money-Saving Discounts!
You can purchase a Standard Edition License of your choice (iRealty, iAuto or iLister) and get a Special Edition License of any WorksForWeb product as a Christmas gift or buy a Standard Edition with a 15% Christmas discount before 31 December!
We also have launched iLister-based Business Directory and iLister-Based Online Medical Equipment Catalog. With the iLister Business Directoryscript, you can create a classified business advertising service where businesses for sale, franchise opportunities, and business brokers and expose multiple business opportunities and resources to prospective buyers.
WorksForWeb have launched a new minor release of the iRealty v4.4.1/iAuto v4.3.1/iLister v4.3.1 software. Several bug fixes, a few improvements made in front and back end, and great perfomance improvements are made.
We are also really glad to announce that the 'Expanding the Boundaries: Online Catalogs and Product Websites Based on iAuto/iRealty/iLister' competition is closed. We are really happy to congratulate our winners! More info about the contest please find at: http://www.worksforweb.com/contests/.
So, don't you think we are really ready for the winter holidays? ;)
Hi, there! WorksForWeb (WFW), a software development team specialized in the classifieds solutions for small and medium businesses, has proudly announced the new release of iRealty real estate classifieds script. iRealty Property software v4.4 introduces a number of new features to enhance the overall user experience. The most important one is the online booking function and availability calendar for apartment rental, small hotel and hostel, and time-share property websites.
WFW also improved visual presentation of listings by adding a GoogleMaps map on every property description, property ratings, and the ability to mark properties as "Sold". Online booking and Availability Calendar (Open House functionality). A much-needed function that makes iRealty ideal for apartment, condo and time-share rentals, and hotel and Bed & Breakfast websites. Let your visitors book rooms or apartments, set open house dates, etc by sending requests to listing owners. Listing owners can mark several periods when a property is occupied, and this info will be displayed on the calendar.
GoogleMap is added to the listing description – every visitor can now see the exact location of every listing on a map. “SOLD” sign on listings – an awesome tool to impress visitors by demonstrating successful sales of multiple properties your website is featuring. It is easily activated by either the listing owner or the admin. Multiple picture upload – add up to 10 pics at once without clicking the “Add picture” button a few times. “Our main goal is to make iRealty more user-friendly and full of features our customers are expecting from us. Adding full support for rental property management is one big step towards broadening the client base for iRealty," says Mr. Bolton, WFW’s marketing consultant. “We have quite a few new tricks and features up our sleeves, so stay tuned for more”.
WorksForWeb’s plans for the immediate future include further improvements of the platform, adding new exciting features, developing a marketplace for WFW products and services, and other steps required to promote and enhance our products and services.
For further inquiries and information on the changes and improvements found in iRealty v.4.4, feel free to visit our iRealty official website at http://www.irealtysoft.com/. Alternatively, we'll be happy to answer your detailed inquiries sent by email to sales@irealtysoft.com.
AboutiRealty iRealty is a powerful multi-language Web-based real estate classified script. Capture a growing for-sale-by-owner (FSBO) realty market with your iRealty-based website. Create a fully SEO-optimized website from scratch, apply your own design or use one of the three free templates supplied with iRealty. Multiple languages, postal code search for various countries, GoogleMaps, booking calendar and many other features make iRealty an ideal tool for creating property sale and rental websites worldwide.
Due to high demand of our future customers, we are more than happy to announce you that we will continue to offer Mid-Summer Mega Deals campaign. You have another chance to take advantage of fantastic discounts! You should hurry up to be in time to get a windfall discount.
Between 11 and 20 Aug, you get a choice between the two deals for iAuto, iRealty and iLister: Discount of $99 off ANY Standard Edition (coupon code HOTSUMMER08X) or BUY Standard Edition and GET Special FREE!
Come and Check Out Our Lowest Prices of the Season on our Current Promotions page.
We are having a Mid-Summer Mega Deals discount week. For a limited time, we are offering two hot deals of the season: a $99 discount for the Standard Edition license of either iAuto, iRealty or iLister. Please use the following coupon during the checkout - HOTSUMMER08 (that's zero-eight, not Oh-eight).
Alternatively, you can buy the Standard Edition of any of our products and get a Special Edition license of any of our products (either iAuto, iRealty or iLister) absolutely FREE!
Please contact our Sales Dept for more details or visit our Promos page.
Anyone needing a powerful and versatile general classifieds script with SEO-optimized URLs and listing data in meta tags, you still have a chance to buy iLister with a $54 discount for $465 only!
Moreover, we're giving away 10 iAuto or iRealty Special Edition licenses free of charge (one per order) to whoever buys iLister before 15 Jan 2008.
We are happy to announce discounts for the new version of iRealty, v.4.2. For the remainder of December, we offer a $24 discount for the Special Edition and $54 for the Standard Edition.
It's very hard to believe all that time passed and we never bothered to update the blog. Horrible! The fact that we've been pretty busy is not a good excuse. We will try to be more consistent posting new stuff here.
We'll try to give you a brief overview of what's been accomplished so far. We are constantly working on improving the quality of iAuto and iRealty. We are improving our internal development processes: work flow management, project and task planning, coding, testing, and control.
We have made substantial product improvements that will appear in the new version of the software to make iAuto and iRealty more reliable, robust, flexible and smart. We've also added several smaller features that improve the overall functionality of the software and make it more usable and powerful.
Our iAuto/iRealty community is growing, and the forum is slowly becoming a focal point where information about updates, fixes, tweaks and bugs is gathered and made available to those who need it.
We've been engaged in several bigger projects where iAuto/iRealty were used as the platform for custom solutions and even developed a totally independent solution from scratch. We will announce one of the projects shortly when it goes live with the permission of the owners.
This should be it for now, we'll be keeping you informed as we go along.
Following a very successful iRealty v3.0 introductory sale, and having a few potential clients that have missed the sale, we've decided to give our fans and potential customers a Halloween present.
Here it is. Anyone who buys iRealty Standard or iRealty Special edition between 10 Oct and 1 Nov, is eligible for a hefty 20% discount off any purchase over $150. That includes our iRealty Standard Edition, and, of course, our iRealty Special Edition! Yes, iRealty Special Edition will cost $175.20 until 1 Nov 06, and iRealty Standard Edition will cost only $415.20. We just love giving away presents to our potential clients!
And here's a Halloween present for our current clients. Anyone who purchased an iRealty Special Edition is now eligible for FREE LIFETIME UPGRADES! Please contact our Sales Dept for additional information.
We are progressing towards the end of the current product development cycle and are expecting to issue a final release of our new version, v. 3.0, at or around Monday 25 Sept.
We are going to make an announcement on our website and we will send the new release announcements to those who have previously inquired about the new release. The new version is going to have a new Smarty template system that will allow users to modify the look of the website much quicker and easier, as well as provide greater flexibility in terms of applying own or custom design templates to the actual software.
Of course, many bugs and minor system improvements accumulated since the last version's release have also been included in the software, improving the overall stability of the system.
