What in the world have we been doing lately?
We’ve not been mucking around I can assure you. It’s been a long time since we sent out an email newsletter or did some serious blogging, but that’s all about to change over the coming weeks – expect a maelstrom of news and updates. Here’s what we’ve been up to lately…
We’re multiplying!
Earlier in the year we were stoked to have the Gold Coast’s infamous DJ Paine join us as our Community Champion. You’d have seen DJ’s work at our meet up events, at the Australian Professional Photography Workshops, warming up our brand new forum, and updated facebook and twitter feeds with tasty bite-sized morsels of excellence.
More recently we’ve been able to grow our customer support team with the proud addition of two new support legends. Lisa joins us from Austria where she is helping to grow the reach of our timezone support and Mike joins us from beautiful, sunny Ohio. You’ll get to meet these guys on our live chat and responding to support tickets in our help desk.
Adding more two more shells into our programming shotgun are our new Lead Developer Gabs “The Gun” Moreira (Australia) and our specialist Black Ops Wildcard Mr Sammy Harnack from Nor Cal. These two guys are programming powerhouses and you’ll soon start to see some of the cool stuff they’ve been able to develop for Team PhotoMerchant.
To cap things off, our first lady of support Rhoda has just (literally) given birth to a beautiful baby boy. Welcome to the team little Mr X!
Major infrastructure changes
Over the past few months we’ve spent a lot of time re-factoring our code and cleaning up our database requests. What this means is that your public websites are now MUCH faster for your customers to view your portfolio and galleries. It also means that your experience inside the PhotoMerchant application would also be MUCH, MUCH faster than it has been before; particularly when viewing your orders or galleries.
Apart from a few isolated incidents, the image uploading process is FAR more reliable than it has been in the past. Part of the restructure has taken a massive load off of our servers which means your images are being processed faster and more reliably. You can use this cheap dedicated server to improve your business performance and security.
Bug fixes and improvements
To give you some idea, we’ve managed to make over 70+ enhancements and bug fixes the past 6 months. Most would have gone completely unseen, some of you may have felt a change in ‘the force’ and others can finally put that pick-axe down and get back to selling photos :) Some of the highlights are:
[list type=”list4″]
- Brand new forum (the old one sucked, come join the conversation)
- Improved image upload/image processing speed
- Improved application interface speed
- Improved speed of PayPal order confirmation processing
- Fixed a bug in the Dashboard Gallery Views statistics
- On your website: faster loading Portfolio and Galleries
- Reduced SPAM message in comments
- Improved the speed of Digital Download files (for customers)
- Fixed multiple customer emails for Digital Downloads
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As ever, if you’re having any problems, please let us know via live chat or submit a support ticket and our team will get straight back to you.
Looking to the Future
As mentioned at the start of this post, we’ll be making some more feature announcements in the coming weeks, including some of those “big” things you’ve been asking after and an entirely new look on the world. Stay tuned for more…
