The Small Green Tree Blog

Back in November we added to the capability to include the email address of the person sending you the form in your email subject line text.

The main benefit of adding field data to the email subject line text is that it can help you to scan and sort your incoming form data easier. So to make this even better, following a suggestion from Steve at Saint Specialties, we have done a little more work, and now - for regular, non-secure forms - you can choose to include the data from any field in the email subject line text! (any field, but it needs to be a web-form-buddy required field).

For secure (SSL) forms it would not be safe to include the data in the email subject line as it would not be encrypted. However if you have a field in your form for an email address (and you make it a web-form-buddy required field and you switch on the email validation rule), then you are able to use that.

To set up and use this feature you go to your control panel, select configure form and then select email options.

First add the special tag marker to your email subject line text. This marker will be replaced by the data from the form field.

The tag marker is: !FIELD!

Then choose the field that you want to use to replace the tag marker from the list of required fields.

Hey presto - you’re done!

Some folks think we are heading for man-made global warming catastrophe. Some folks are not so sure.

Without taking sides on the global warming debate, here’s a really cool piece of software to download and install for free.

LocalCooling.com - Fight Global Warming From Your Desktop

This is a really cool web application that helps you save money (or the planet - the choice is yours).

At http://www.localcooling.com/ you can download a bit of freebie software that you can use to control and monitor your PC’s energy use and settings. What’s cool is that it shows you the energy savings you are making in real-time translated into concrete terms such as how many trees and how many gallons of oil you have saved. Also (if you wish) your savings data can be posted back to localcooling.com where they publish the total savings being made by all participating users.

Here’s how it looks:

N.B. to get those stats to show in this blog I had to place the code in an HTML iframe. Unfortunately that means the link “Join The Fight” won’t work. Instead you can fight your fight by going here

Previously If you chose to charge a percentage rate for shipping with web-store-buddy you could only choose a whole number (eg 5%, 10%, 15%). Now it’s possible to specify a percentage rate to one decimal place precision. Cool! eg 5.7%, 6.9% etc.

(Thanks to Diane at yellowbarnweb.com for the suggestion)

The exact workings of Google’s ranking method is known only to Google of course. However here is an article that provides a very well educated guess at factors which may help your ranking - and factors that may damage it!

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

The link to the contacts library is now included on the control panel home page to make it easier to find

When you receive a form inquiry the email subject line will probably look something like this:

Web site enquiry from mydomain.com

You can modify this at configure form >> email options

When you scan down a lot of these stored emails it can be handy to see who each one is from. And in fact web-form-buddy allows you to have the email address of the sender included in the email subject line.

You do this by adding a special tag to the email subject line that you set up at configure form >> email options. The tag is
Examples:

1. Web site enquiry from mydomain.com ()
2. Web site enquiry from at mydomain.com

If the sender’s email address is ‘fred@gmail.com’, then this would result in the following:

Example 1: Web site enquiry from mydomain.com (fred@gmail.com)

Example 2: Web site enquiry from fred@gmail.com at mydomain.com

When web-store-buddy displays a shopping cart it says “shipping”. That phrase also appears in the order confirmation. However Diane from yellowbarnweb.com has a customer who makes a handling charge based on a percentage of the order rather than a shipping charge.

Web-store-buddy can calculate the charge perfectly well but it doesn’t look right on the shopping cart.

So what we’ve done is added a new option (under “shipping & handling”) that allows you to replace “shipping” with a phrase of your choice (e.g. handling, carriage, freight).

If you are are a web designer and you have set up more than one buddy account you can now add your own brand to the email tag lines that web-form-buddy sends out! This is useful for two reasons:

• it obviously helps with your sales & marketing
• your customers will know who has supplied the form processor application and therefore who to contact for assistance

Both the form email and and the form’s autoresponder email have a tag line like this:

~ web form processor powered by www.web-form-buddy.com

Now, as long as you have an active ‘buddy’ subscription for more than one site, you can co-brand emails with a tag line that points to your own web site:

~ web form processor powered by www.mywebsite.com

(We have also made it possible to disable the tag line altogether. We don’t particularly recommend that option however as it means the personnel in the organization will not know who to contact if they need support)

www.womensfunnyvideos.com pointed out that if you use both opt-in-buddy and refer-a-buddy.com - and if you don’t want to collect email addresses with refer-a-buddy.com, the control panel would not allow that option.

Now fixed!