March monthly update

March monthly update

Happy March everyone. Here's your month update digest. All comments and feedback are welcomed and encouraged.

What's new this Month?

Servers and software updates - We've updated the servers and software that the platform runs on. These updates improve security across the board as well as various speed optimisations.

Automatic payment links - If you have an outstanding balance, you can call our customer service team to make a payment. Now, when you call, our system will try to recognise your customer account from your phone number. If you have a balance to pay you'll be offered the option to be sent a payment link to your phone and email, saving you any hold time.

Invoice clarification - We've made some changes to our invoices to make them a little easier to understand. When signing up for a product, if you are paying a deposit, you will be sent two invoices, one for that deposit and one for the remaining balance. Before it wasn't always clear which invoice related to which element of the total balance. We've made a small but helpful tweak adding the word 'deposit' to the invoice which relates to the deposit.

Email input boxes for forms - We've added a specific input type for email addresses in the form builder. Before, you would need to add a vanilla text input box for email addresses. The browser wouldn't know if you wanted an email address specifically and so couldn't perform any checks on what the user had inputted. This update helps ensure the user enters a valid formatted email address in your enquiry forms.

  • SagePay / Opayo update - If you use SagePay/Opayo payment gateway with your website, we've made updates to ensure it remains compliant with the PSD2 Payment Directive and Stronger Customer Authentication.

Email quotas - We've added a notification process for email quotas. We'll now let you know when your email usage is approaching 80%, 90% and 100% of your quota. This is to give you time to plan ahead, clear up unwanted emails to free up space. If you don't want to delete emails, you can upgrade your storage plan.

Copy page content - We've made improvements to the content management system. Previously, when adding a new page, you could copy the layout from an existing page on your site. However, you could not copy the content on that page at the same time. Now, when you select to copy a page you will be offered the option to copy the content as well as the layout. Please note that some content types cannot be at this time be copied but we are working hard to fill the gaps.

Website icons - We've updated all websites to the latest icon library, adding thousands of additional icons to choose from. This update also improves existing icons and their load speeds.

Branding - We've been working on updating our branding. You will start to see us rolling this out across the platform and our website.

Our websites - We've updated our Favicon (the icon you see in your browser tab) to our new branding.

Social media designs - We've started updating our branding across all our social media accounts to reflect a new look (let us know if you have any thoughts).

Social media plan - We are working hard behind the scenes to create more informative, helpful and creative content for our customers.

What's next?

WhatsApp and Facebook messenger - We'll shortly be adding WhatsApp and Facebook messenger to our methods of contact. This means that messages from both platforms will go directly to our customer service team. Unlike live chat, these communication methods mean you can dip in and out of a conversation without needing to be sat waiting at your screen.

Improve content management system - We've been working hard on creating a new 'Webfactory hub'. The hub will introduce our new branding and design. Improving user experience, and management of your account and websites. This is a massive undertaking, but we've made great progress. More information will follow in the coming months.

New product: Domains and emails - Currently your domain and email addresses are directly linked with your website product, we're creating a dedicated product for domains and email accounts to make it easier for you to manage your services and make the process much smoother when doing things such as launching a redesigned website or adding additional domain names.

That's it for this month. Follow us on social media to be notified when we post next month's update.