Exporting Data from WebsitesForPrinters.com Websites

November 9, 2010 Leave a comment

We’re in the middle of this big huge shift to put all our products under the MarketingIdeasForPrinters.com banner, and at the moment just about everything else has to wait in the wings to move forward. However, we were able to get a project through on the fast track … WebsitesForPrinters.com clients now have the ability to easily export job data from the website. It’s excel-ready and will allow our clients to use the job data in some very meaningful ways.

There was a lot of bang for the buck in this release. It was a pretty straightforward development effort, and it should prove to be a pretty good tool for our client base.

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Why We’re Not at GraphExpo

October 5, 2010 6 Comments

This year WebsitesForPrinters.com decided not to exhibit at GraphExpo in Chicago. I have really come to love Chicago and GraphExpo, I really wanted to be there, but it just wasn’t meant to be this year. It was a tough decision, but I’m certain it was the right decision.

Our decision to not attend has found many of our clients asking, “Why not?” This blog entry is for you … here are the two main reasons.

Reason #1: Last year’s show (Print 09) was OK, but from the exhibitors’ perspectives it certainly didn’t have the excitement of other shows. Learning that Heidelberg, Komori, and others would not be attending GraphExpo 2010 made this year’s investment seem even more ominous.

Reason #2: This is the biggie. There are big positive changes coming around the corner for clients of WebsitesForPrinters.com! These improvements are taking a lot of resources … much of which (if handled correctly) will be invisible to our clients and prospects. It really came down to this choice: Do we put all this positive change momentum on hold for a few months in order to chase down new prospects at GraphExpo, or do we keep our focus on the positive change so we can build a more powerful solution for our existing clients? No contest. We’ll choose to honor the loyalty of our existing clients.

So what are these big changes? You can get a feel for what’s coming by visiting MarketingIdeasForPrinters.com. All our individual companies and product lines will be doing away with their autonomy to create one new, powerful company. Everything that everyone already knows about WebsitesForPrinters.com and Ink Inc. will continue to be there, but it will be there better under the MarketingIdeasForPrinters.com banner.

It’s really coming together. Joining WebsitesForPrinters.com and Ink Inc. is The Buzz, which is a service designed to allow printers to reach out to their prospects and clients through social media channels. It’s worth a look: SocialMarketingForPrinters.com.

I miss the hustle and bustle of Chicago … but at the same time I’m glad we decided to stay here in Fargo, keeping our focus on our existing customer base. It’s a tough time for a lot of printers, we’ll continue to do everything we can to help them … even if that means skipping our annual trip to Chicago and GraphExpo this year.

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WebsitesForPrinters.com Unveils Admin Toolbar

February 17, 2010 Leave a comment

WebsitesForPrinters.com has now unveiled an administrative toolbar to allow our clients to more effectively manage their websites. So why is that so important?

The new administrative toolbar may not seem like a big deal now … but it will be soon! Here’s why. Prior to the toolbar, our clients managed their websites through a handful of links that led them deeper into the tools within the site. That approach served us well for quite some time, but what has been happening for the past year (maybe longer!) is we’ve been wanting to add more powerful tools to the website, but find we have nowhere to put them. Everything was too many clicks away. Quite simply, we have outgrown the administrative tools we have created.

The new toolbar has very effectively allowed us to rearrange and clean up all the deep, dark areas and hidden corners of the website’s administration. It’s allowing us to more clearly present all the powerful tools we provide to printers. I’m expecting many WebsitesForPrinters.com clients will look at the toolbar and say, “Wow! I had no idea so much power was waiting for me in my website!”

Here’s another important component of introducing the toolbar: We have now set the stage to release even more new tools to help printers succeed with their websites. We have so many projects we’ve been working on, but have intentionally held back on developing those projects because we know we wouldn’t have a good place to put them once they were done. Now, with the clarity and organization the toolbar provides, we have room to grow again. Life is going to be good for our customers!

The stage is now set. The Administrative Toolbar is in play, it’s time to take WebsitesForPrinters.com websites to the next level!

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WebsitesForPrinters.com Clients Win web2awards 2009

November 6, 2009 Leave a comment

WebsitesForPrinters.com is very proud and excited to announce that three WebsitesForPrinters.com clients have received awards in the inaugural web2awards, the industry’s first and only contest established for printing industry websites worldwide. Here’s an excerpt from the awards booklet:

The web2awards is the world’s first annual award competition that names the best websites in the printing industry. The web2awards were established by Printing Industries of America to recognize, honor, and elevate printers that are achieving excellence with their online presence. The mission of the web2awards judging body consisting of educators, designers, Web programmers, e-commerce experts, marketers, and industry consultants is to honor excellence in the various categories of print-related websites.

WebsitesForPrinters.com clients won three awards in the licensed web-to-print category, including the winning entry of the category!

 

WINNER – Best of Category: http://SupremeGraphics.com/

Supreme Graphics says:

Our customers love it. It’s made the print buying process easier for both us and the customer. Customers love the online order history, request for quote history, large file size transfer, and customized online product catalog.

 

Exceptional Website: http://www.AllegraAZ.com/

Allegra Print & Imaging says:

We now transact 600-700 line items per month. Innovation with our job ticketing software has saved one full time employee.

 

Exceptional Website: http://PrintingArtsPress.com/

Printing Arts Press says:

Our website is a great marketing and customer retention tool. It has allowed us to reach our customers and prospects anytime or anywhere. Customers appreciate the easy to navigate online tools, especially the ability to check online the products we keep in inventory for them. Prospects are routinely impressed with our website and appreciate the extensive information available about our company.

 

WebsitesForPrinters.com would like to offer a hearty congratulations to Supreme Graphics, Allegra Print & Imaging, and Printing Arts Press for being selected as web2award winners!

Printing Industries of America and the Digital Printing Council provide more information about the awards program at http://www.printing.org/page/5414.

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A Raving Fan of WebsitesForPrinters.com

October 5, 2009 Leave a comment

One of my favorite customers included me on the following e-mail which was sent to several of his printing industry acquaintances. He does such a good job using his website to its fullest, and he’s such an exuberant “cheerleader” too!

Today’s new WebsitesForPrinters.com Knowledgebase article … allows us to add a few more Job Status “granular details” into our Online Print Center Settings so we can send clients “mini email updates” on their job progress instead of just “In Production” and “Completed” email update notes.

The attached JPEG shows screen shots (removed for privacy) for a real job today on which we did this and shows some of the phrases we decided to put into the Online Print Center settings when our WS4P system sends email job updates to our clients for us!

Believe it or not, this same customer in (location removed for privacy), just awarded us ALL their printing business because of WebsitesForPrinters.com capabilities!!!!  We did a sales call on them, set up a “test drive” web account for them, placed their “products” on their own “customer portal” and did a “test order” with all the normal tools/stuff that all of us have, and they decided to award their $27,000 annual printing budget to us!  Wahoooo!  What an ROI for only $115 a month!!!

Keeps gettin’ better and more flexible every month ! ! !

Print On!

FWIW, the e-mail was edited slightly for readability, and to remove items that are best kept private out of respect for our client.

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Print 09 Observations

September 15, 2009 Leave a comment

Even though there’s still one day left of Print 09 (likely to be one very quiet day), I’d like to capture a few observations related to WebsitesForPrinters.com being at the show.

The first two days of the show were very slow … to the point where I was thinking that Print 09 wasn’t worth the trip.

Days three through five picked up considerably.

WebsitesForPrinters.com introduced Harmony (Press Release here). Existing WebsitesForPrinters.com clients and visitors were very excited! Quite honestly, I think this is going to be one of the biggest things … maybe even THE biggest thing … we’ve ever done.

We made several initial connections with other vendors interested in implementing the Harmony communication tools.

A prospect came over to our booth, and one of our booth staff saw them throw into the garbage the flyers of our most direct competitor. That was fun!

Another exhibitor (who could possibly be considered a fringe competitor) reported that  one of our clients visited his booth and liked his application of a web-to-print tool … but shed a tear (literally shed a tear!) about the prospect of leaving WebsitesForPrinters.com for something else! Wow, what loyalty!

That’s it for tonight. Unless tomorrow produces some dramatically huge surprises I suspect that will also be it for Print 09!

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Make Money? Save Time? BOTH!

July 27, 2009 1 Comment

I’m just about to hit the “Send” button on an e-mail to a prospect I visited last week. This printer has a customer that places 10-15  orders for business cards each week, and he wanted to find out if a WebsitesForPrinters.com website with the uDesignIT! variable data add-on would help his printing firm make those orders easier for his customer and more profitable for him. After hearing the monthly charge for this service I could sense some sticker shock. But … the sticker shock is unwarranted.

Here’s the e-mail I sent him regarding the way my calculator works:

Hi Larry,

Last week you called WebsitesForPrinters.com and we talked about the ability to allow your hospital customer to create and order their business cards online. You mentiond they are ordering 10-15 cards per week. When we discussed the WebsitesForPrinters.com monthly charges to allow those orders to happen, I think you went into a bit of sticker shock! 🙂

With that in mind, I’d like you to take a look at how my calculator runs the numbers.

Let’s start with some assumptions:

– 12 cards per week.

– Design rate of $70/hour

– 20 minutes per card to cover typesetting, proofing with customer, and all the back-and-forth that takes your employee time.

Now, the big assumption that comes into play is this: Let’s assume that the WebsitesForPrinters.com website eliminate 15 of the 20 minutes in the above assumption. (This is a totally realistic assumption. Keep in mind  you’ll get a production-ready card, already proofed by your customer. Your employee’s responsibility is then to reduced to entering the production-ready PDF generated by the website into your workflow.) You still get to bill for those 15 minutes saved!

15 minutes (or .25 hour) saved x 12 cards per week x $70 per hour = $210 per week

$210 per week x 52 weeks in a year / 12 months in a year = $910 per month

So … instead of your employees spending an extra 15 minutes to go through the process of putting a job into the system, they can instead use those minutes saved to generate an extra $910 of design or prepress revenue each month! Back out the $185 for the website plus uDesignIT! and that still leaves you with $725 each month. That means you’d pay for the WebsitesForPrinters.com startup charge in 2 months … which is a number that matches up nicely with the WebsitesForPrinters.com 60-Day Live Trial program.

In other words, you have absolutley nothing to loose (except your current website’s “We’re working on a new website!” display) and everything to gain! And … we haven’t even touched on other sales-building tools found in the website.

So with that said, are you willing to take a closer look at a WebsitesForPrinters.com demo website?

I’d be happy to dig deepr … just let us know if you have any questions. Thanks!

Happy Printing!
Dave

—
Dave Hultin, Managing Partner

Dave@WebsitesForPrinters.com

WebsitesForPrinters.com

800-736-0688 x 130

It will be interesting to learn his response. Now, if you are a printer that happened to bump into this random blog post on the Internet, I’d be interested in your response. One of the assumptions I presented was a billable design rate of $70 per hour.

What hourly rate are you charging for graphic design and typesetting? Is my assumption of $70 per hour on the mark? I’d really like to know! Please leave a comment…

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Two WebsitesForPrinters.com Clients in June 09 Printing Impressions

July 14, 2009 Leave a comment

Yesterday I was catching up on some industry reading, and was thrilled to see two clients of WebsitesForPrinters.com prominently featured in the June 2009 Printing Impressions magazine!

Jan and Mike Peissig of Gateway Printing are featured on the cover, with a great feature titled Working for the Long Term.

Frank Stewart and Carrie Parkinson of New Vision Printing and Graphics picked up a very nice mention in the Editor’s Notebook: New Vision Is Thriving Despite Bad Economy. A strong testimonial was pointing our way with this part of the story:

And he credits his firm’s Website (www.newvisionprinting.tc) as a great sales tool by projecting a more sophisticated image than one would expect for a company with under 20 employees and a little more than $1 million in annual sales.

Congratulations to Gateway Printing and New Vision Printing and Graphics for picking up the great press!

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WebsitesForPrinters.com Client Mentioned in Canadian Printer Magazine

February 27, 2009 Leave a comment

WebsitesForPrinters.com picked up a nice mention in Canadian Printer magazine as part of a story on one of our clients.

The story, No Waiting Till Tomorrow, is a great profile on Emily Lai of BCT Toronto. Emily and her staff had many good things to say. If I had to narrow it down to one favorite take-away, here it is:

She reveals that the company has been able to sign up a lot of new dealers simply because of the Web presence. Since going online she can identify a definite increase in business.

Congratulations Emily and BCT Toronto on getting some great press!

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Printer@Work Success Stories!

December 3, 2008 Leave a comment

It’s no secret that the Printer@Work e-mail newsletter is one of my favorite things to talk about with prospects considering WebsitesForPrinters.com. One of our clients send us this fabulous report back from one of her customers! Here’s what our client, and her customer had to say…

Dave, a customer just emailed a nice note on the email newsletter!
Thank you for doing such a great job. I actually got two comments on this today.

BR, Owner

—— Forwarded Message
From: EG
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 12:10:58 -0800
To: BR
Subject: about your newsletter

Hello B,

I just wrote this email to my boss, and I realized you may be interested in my thoughts too, just to know that I appreciate your enewsletter.  We are working on designing our own for BB, and I’ve passed this on as an example.

Here is an example of what I consider to be a very helpful and well organized enewsletter. I particularly like B’s note of “how I see it” today titled “Against the Odds.”  She always makes the notes personal, relating an inspirational story, and tied to the emotional contact she wants to generate with her clients.  They are also always short which makes them easy to read.  I consider this very successful to reach people like me – very little time or interest to read things in full, but I feel like I can always take the 3 minutes to fully read her enewsletters; and they make me feel good about working with them, and inspired in general. (Customer confidence!)

Thanks for the helpful tips and uplifting words every week; your newsletter is one I actually look forward to reading!  And I spend time perusing the helpful hints and design tidbits too – I’ve gotten so much out of them.

Keep up the good work!
EG

—— End of Forwarded Message

(Names reduced to initials to protect their privacy.)

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