Sunday, April 3, 2011

Debut of Buzzr 2.0

Chicago (DrupalCon), March 7, 2010 – We debut the newest release of Buzzr today at a leading industry software conference. It has some tremendous new features, all aimed at making Buzzr the leading platform for small businesses, professionals and non-profits who want the most advanced self-service websites available anywhere. You can see a preview video on the Buzzr homepage.

Here’s some of what you’ll see:

Auto-Tweet: Want to attract a giant new audience? But you don’t always know what to tweet or you’d like to save time jumping back and forth between your website and Twitter? Buzzr is now an official Twitter App. If you sign up your website with your Twitter account, when you do something new on your site, such as uploading an image, writing a blog post, or posting a press release, a tweet will automatically be configured for you. The tweet even has a link back to the page on your site with the new content. You can look the tweet over and change if you’d like (or delete it), or just leave it as it is. As soon as you save the new content to your site, the tweet is published to your Twitter account.

If all of this is new to you, you can sign up for our Social Media Support Service and we’ll coach you along. Be sure to read the Buzzr 101 Guide if you’d like more information about setting up Auto-Tweet on your site. http://www.buzzr.com/help/buzzr_help/starter_guide-auto_tweet

Quickstarts: Much more than a style or theme, a Quickstart is a fully configured sample site specific to a category. We’ve thought through design, navigation, pages, forms and feature configurations, as well as provided sample images and content. That said, with Buzzr, you can still customize any element of the site, from colors to content to features. We’ve debuted with Quickstarts for Business Goods, Retail, Specialty Goods, an Art Gallery, Churches, Non-Profits (two variations), Doctors and Lawyers. That’s just a start, we have dozens more we’ll be rolling out. If you see a Quickstart you like, and it’s not in your category, don’t be afraid to use it anyway. You can completely re-configure and redesign it for your purpose in just minutes.

We still have starter Styles if you’d like to create a site without any special industry category pre-configured. And new ones will continue to debut.

Design: You asked for, you got it. It’s like Dreamweaver that ordinary people can use. Buzzr now has a point and click color wheel that can be used to styles almost any region on a site. Wallpaper, header, widgets, content well, typeface, borders and more. You can also upload an image and use it as the backdrop for any region on the site. That’s just to start: you can also adjust the padding between elements, increase the column dimensions by width or length, and in general, play with the spacing of your site ad infinitum. You can even save an unlimited number of designs for your site, and jump back and forth between the ones you like. And we still have an advanced CSS editor for the professionals who use Buzzr. Our Design Tool has so many great features, that we’ve written a guide (not nearly as long as the one that probably came with your camera!) to take you through it. http://www.buzzr.com/help/buzzr_help/starter_guide-design

Plus we have loads of other new features we’ve been perfecting, including Groups/Forums, Calendars, Website Activity Stream, audio hosting and integration with Facebook and You Tube.

And, of course, we still offer our intuitive drag and drop interface, and the most control anywhere as to exactly who can do what on your site (e.g. write press releases, blog, moderate comments.) Plus it's all hosted, so we take care of updates

If you choose our free trial offer, you'll also see we now offer three personal service offerings for people who want extra support: Social Media Suport, Search Engine Optimization Support, and Premium Buzzr Support. I'll be writing more about these services and our Build It For Me option in another post.

Let me know what you think! You can reach me at Ed@buzzr.com

Ed Sussman
CEO

Great Interview with an Overview of New Buzzr Features

Ryan Price of DrupalEasy.com sat down with me at DrupalCon for a talk about the release of Buzzr 2.0.




For those of you who don't know, Drupal is an open source platform that developers use to create enterprise websites, like WhiteHouse.gov, TheEconomist.com and MarthaStewart.com.

Buzzr simplifies and streamlines Drupal with an entirely original interface. Drupal is a very complex developer tool that takes months to master, but with Buzzr, in just minutes, regular, non-techie people can build websites with the same great publishing power.