Did you know you could easily create a menu layout with the item name on the left and the price on the right in our web-to-print system?

Check out this web-to-print help post. It explain how to add leader dots over tabulation signs like in this example:

Our recent stable release v. 2.1.0.0 of Magento Web-to-Print extension is a bit of a flop.

It seems to work fine, but we didn’t think through the new set of buttons under the preview.

We are working on an update to simplify it, remove unnecessary buttons and allow the good old one button control as an alternative.

Amazon Web Services, is letting us down. From their RSS healthcheck feed:

2:40 AM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region.

All of our sites and servers were inaccessible for about 10 minutes.  It’s back to normal now.

We added a “decline” order option to our Order Approval extension for Magento. Read the rest of this entry »

We continue to refine and add new products to our premium support service for web-to-print and dynamic imaging sites.

Our premium services are a bit different from the normal paid support provided by most IT companies. Our premium support is absolutely complimentary and customers have a choice of doing everything themselves or hiring someone else while still using our platform. Being open is the key.

A few recent additions you might be interested in.

Turn-key web-to-print websites

Magento is a very powerful e-commerce platform. It comes in some default configuration that is not always what the customer wants for a web-to-print or dynamic imaging site. The beauty of it all is that Magento can be customized to almost anything you want. It takes skill and time.

We are offering a choice of most common customization tasks to simplify and streamline print and design ordering process. It includes changes to the user interface, installation of additional extensions, a lot of configuration changes. testing and post implementation support to help you get up to speed faster. Pick and choose what you want or buy everything for $1000.

We offer this work pretty much at-cost because we want you to have a sleek site that takes a lot of orders. Something to do with our result orientated pricing model.

Get more return customers

Keeping in touch is important. Sending useful and relevant information to your customers generates even more business. MailChimp newsletter service can help you do exactly this and we can help you set it up in your Magento web-to-print site.

MailChimp is the leader in the newsletter industry. They even have a very sizable free plan to get you started.

Our service includes installation of their extension, configuration, account synchronization and running a small test campaign. As usual, you can do all this yourself.

See more useful services in our premium support section.

Whoops. Had to stop the site to get some maintenance done. It should be only a few minutes, in case you noticed.

Our Magento web-to-print extension versions prior to 2.0.1.0beta5 generate output pdf/jpg files and bill for the order regardless of the payment result in Magento. It led to some of our customers facing bills much more than they expected. E.g., an order was placed, files generated, no payment from the customer, but it was still billed for at ZP end. Read the rest of this entry »

Our main website about web-to-print and about dynamic imaging got a facelift. It is now using the same theme as our web-to-print help area.

We also re-arranged the way we call our software packages, but the substance is still the same.

Dedicated web-to-print and dynamic imaging

The most significant change is the Enterprise web-to-print offer. If you think you are big enough to justify a separate deployment of a web-to-print system as opposed to our standard SaaS offering we are happy to give you one. There is no definitive price tag because every deployment is different, but it makes sense to do if you pay us more than $4000 a month.

There are two main reasons for standalone deployments:

1. reduced cost on large volumes
2. security of supply

In other words, what are you going to do if your SaaS web-to-print provider stops providing the service to you tomorrow?

For some businesses it would be a complete disaster. Having the source code and controlling the hosting adds that level of security and independence.

The software can be deployed on your own servers, but our preference if you rent virtual servers on Amazon, RackSpace or other established cloud operator. Talk to us about your big project.

One of our image processing servers lost the plot earlier today (February 02 2012). It was saying a font was installed when it wasn’t. As a result a lot of orders and previews got Arial or some other random font inserted in place of the proper font. It didn’t happen to all the orders, but enough of them to cause trouble.

The problem appears to be fixed now, but we can’t say for sure because it relies on a visual check, so please, let us know if any new orders are still faulty.

Regenerating the files should help. Send us a link to the order if it doesn’t.

Still trying to find out why this happened and if any other servers are affected.

PDF, JPG and other print-ready files for orders older than a few days were showing as missing for quite a few orders.

The files were there all the time, but a bug was preventing their download.

Fixed now.