Small Green Tree Web Services » all buddy apps

Our Discount Scheme Just Got Better!

Richard — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:48:02 +0000

If you manage more than one web site, don’t forget that you can make great savings by “adopting” your additional domains as “child accounts” from your parent account. (By “parent account” we just mean your primary, main account. So if you are a web designer that would be the account of your own web site).

Our new improved discount rates for all our “buddy” applications are as follows:

2-4 subscriptions: 15% discount
5-9 subscriptions: 30% discount
10 plus subscriptions: 40% discount

The Ins & Outs Of Favicons

Richard — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:41:38 +0000

Favicons are those small images that appear in the browser’s address bar and in browser bookmarks entries. Hopefully you can see our own “small green tree” icon right now in your browser’s address bar!

There are different ways to add favicons to your web site, but after a bit of research and a bit of trial and error, we think we have hit on the best method.

With this method your favicons will also work consistently with your Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy script URLs.

Favicons were introduced by Microsoft some years ago, and for a while browser support for them was very patchy. In theory that situation has improved. Certainly you can now enjoy the benefits of favicons for your web site without it driving you completely crazy. But although there is supposed to be a proper World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard now for favicons, in practice we reckon you’re better off ignoring that for the time being. Hey, Microsoft are involved, what do you expect!

The problem began when Microsoft decided that favicons should be in their own format. Not *.PNG, *.GIF, *.JPG or anything sensible like that. Instead we got *.ICO – the format for icons in Windows.

Originally the idea was that you placed such a graphic (called “favicon.ico“) in your web site’s root folder (i.e. where your home page resides). And if you inspect your server’s access logs you will see that browsers are regularly putting in requests for that file. This old method DOES work at least (and in most browsers), but it is not at all flexible:

You have to name it “favicon.ico“
It must reside in your document root folder
You cannot have more than one favicon for your site
Worst of all! – this method won’t work with your Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy URLs.

So as the web moved on, folks started to ask searching questions such as “Hey, shouldn’t this be part of the HTML standard?“. And “Shouldn’t we be able to use non-Microsoft file types?“. And “Why can’t I specify this graphic in my web page HTML? That way I get to manage the graphic in the normal way – and maybe I can use different favicons on different pages!“. On top of that, millions and millions of webmasters said “We’d also like a method that works with Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy too!” (Well maybe we exaggerate a little).

Enter the standards fairy – the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) . All these wishes have now been granted, and we have a new method available (supported by all browsers) whereby you add a link to your favicon in the area of your web page. The W3C ‘s draft proposal as to how you should do this is here: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/howto-favicon

But here’s the BAD news: If you follow their recommendation, your favicons will not work in Internet Explorer! This is for two reasons:

1) Internet Explorer will only work with *.ICO files. So whereas the folks at W3C say you can do this:

Instead you’re going to need this:

2) But even THAT doesn’t work in Internet Explorer! You need to change “icon” to “shortcut icon“:

Or if you’re working with XHTML, it’s this:

And now, finally you have something that will work in all browsers!

(By the way, we’ve seen some folks suggesting for the “type” attribute that you should use “image/ico“, “image/icon“, “text/ico“, “application/ico” and “image/x-icon“, instead of type=”image/vnd.microsoft.icon“. This is a mistake though. The official mime type is “image/vnd.microsoft.icon“).

So how best to create and edit ICO files?

Favicons are 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 pixel square images. With the free @icon sushi you can open BMP/PNG/PSD/EXE/DLL/ICL files and convert them into ICO files.

A listing of ICO editing software is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_icon_software

New Discount Scheme & Changes To Co-Branding

Richard — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:01:52 +0000

You may have noticed already a new option called “child accounts” on your control panel.

The idea is that if you are a web designer managing a number of different “buddy” accounts – we would like to make your life easier!

So from your “parent” buddy account, you can now login to any of your child accounts with one click. Not only that, you can also manage your child subscriptions from one place and benefit from our new discount scheme.

The discount scheme is based on the number of subscriptions you have to all of our “buddy” applications (see “more web software” on your control panel). And this includes the subscriptions of any child accounts you manage as well.

2-4 subscriptions 10%
5-9 subscriptions 20%
10 plus subscriptions 30%

The “co-branding” feature of Web-form-buddy is now easier to manage too. Again it is all done from your parent account now with any changes you make propagating automatically to your child accounts.

We hope to expand on the co-branding feature in coming months – so any suggestions you have would be most welcome!

Discounts For Multiple Site Subscriptions

Richard — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 14:38:22 +0000

At present we do not offer an affiliate scheme for our “buddy” web site applications.

All our buddy applications (web-form-buddy, refer-a-buddy, web-store-buddy & opt-in-buddy) are licensed on a per web site basis and are renewably annually.

However there are no other restrictions or extra costs whatsoever (apart from web-store-buddy, our shopping cart application, where the price depends on the number of products you sell).

web-form-buddy: No limit on the number of forms you can set up. No limit or cap or additional cost on the number of form submissions you can receive
refer-a-buddy: Can be set up on as many pages of your web site as you like. No limit on the number of referrals
opt-in-buddy: Can be set up on as many pages of your web site as you like. No limit on the number of opt-ins

Having said that, many of our customers, for example those who are professional web designers, require subscriptions for more than one web site, and we are keen to support them!

One way we are doing this is through co-branding. We will be rolling this out for all the buddy applications, but it is already in place for web-form-buddy. This feature means that you can replace the ‘powered by web-form-buddy.com‘ link with a link to your own web site.

But we also offer a discount scheme for multiple subscriptions.

This works on a “make two payments, get the next one free” basis, and is the equivalent to a discount of around 30%.

To claim a free license on this scheme just start a free trial for a new account. Then give us the details of two previous accounts and we will uprade your new trial account to a full 12 month subscription.

When you apply for the free account, please provide the details of two payments you have made to qualify for the free license.

the domain names
the user ID’s
the dates of the subscription payments &, if possible, the PayPal or WorldPay payment reference of the payments

(Of course we also need the domain name and user ID of the account for which you are claiming a free license!)

The following conditions apply:

The qualifying payments can be for new accounts only (not renewals or upgrades)
A payment can only be used once to claim a license discount
This scheme applies to all our “buddy” products. But a payment for one type of buddy product cannot qualify towards a different type of buddy product. For example, two payments for refer-a-buddy can only qualify for a third free refer-a-buddy license, and not, say, for a web-from-buddy license
Ethical marketing: We have a zero tolerance policy towards spam (unsolicited bulk email). We expressly forbid the marketing of any of our products in this way. If you are in any doubt as to what constitutes “spam”, please visit http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html. In particular we note the requirement for email recipients to have granted “verifiable permission”. If we discover that any of our products are being marketed unethically we reserve the right to cancel any discount scheme and, if appropriate. all accounts associated with the spam activities

To apply for a discount simply uses the contact form on any of our “buddy” web sites.