Blog

The new administration screens are nearly finished. Final features for network broadcasting and inventory importing are being installed this week! The custom designer is easier than ever to use, we're really looking forward to you all taking it for a spin.

A big thank you to Kyle Little of Little Hardware this week for working with us and the folks at 48ws.com on the new inventory matching and filtering.

Another big thank you to Dinesh Mistry of J3D Solutions for outstanding work on the new data feeds. We're wiring in the network feeds and can't wait to be able to offer your statistical data to businesses, very valuable stuff!

Our design team is busy putting together more and more themes for businesses. Compelling slideshows, custom menus, detailed artwork, and clean simple screens will set you apart from other sites. We hope to build in hundreds of new themes for customers to use in the new system, and look forward to working with shops that want their very own look and feel for their website, email, and mobile pages!

The new inline editor is on display here. Direct inline editing saves time and allows users to quickly change any element on a page. Changing text, bullets, images is made simple! Switching out bigger marketing components like Lotteries and Ads on your page is literally point and click. The designer is used to build pages as well as email templates, we kept it simple and reusable.

We are testing and bringing more themes online daily. Release date info coming soon!

This is yet another theme schedule to be in the 2.0 release. We're turning on the new servers tomorrow for our alpha runs and bringing some select clients online to see the new guest screens. Look forward to many more updates on themes and account invites for the new 2.0 platform!

New pricing and a closer look into the platform is now available. This is a first of many changes to come as they rollout 2.0 this summer. The team is already migrating existing customers to the 2.0 platform, test running the new UI designer, and building 100% custom themes from scratch.

The new platform allows you to really stand out as a unique website with custom designs. We've bulked up our design team and are devoting a lot of time and energy to creating stunning sites that capture the essence of our client's businesses.

Specialization is now available giving you the ability to make your website a basic site serving pages, marketing driven running campaigns, or an e-commerce engine distributing products. Any combination can be made to make your site do exactly what you need.

Sites can now auto scale, allowing you to grow your site into a powerful destination point. The 1.0 platform could handle high volumes of traffic, but 2.0 is able to handle unlimited amounts of traffic. ZipBoss provides 30,000 visits free every month for every website, in addition they opened up a new $9 subscription for small businesses and professionals. You can check out the new pricing tool to configure a website that's right for you.

Signing up today gets you into the 2.0 platform early and the custom designing can begin quickly!

The new themes are being worked into the framework this week. We’re putting together a wide variety of styles for all types of businesses. In addition you can customize your theme to be precisely tailored to your needs.

Pre-built themes will have a one-time only fee of $99. Fully custom themes will also be available. You can change and upgrade any time you’d like!

Next week we’ll have more themes to show and our new homepage for 2.0.

The new administrator screens are being finalized this week. It took awhile to migrate all of the administration UI features over to the new engine, so it’s been nice checking this one off the list.

Next up, we’re migrating the new themes and skins into ZipBoss 2.0. This will be the last large installment for the platform. Many thanks to Jerry’s Artarama for helping us produce a fantastic new designer theme! Their theme will be one of the first to hit the new platform and it really looks sharp (pictures next week).

Next week we’ll show off the new themes! Thanks again to all the great idea contributors, we’ve been able to really pack this 2.0 version with the works thanks to your help.

This week we improved our caching and distribution technology. For distribution, we upgraded the website image file distributions to Amazon CloudFront to improve response times across the board. For caching, we installed memcached to keep most of our database elements and template schemas in memory avoiding sql calls and disk reads. Installing these framework improvements has resulted in cutting the page load and render time in half. Granted, these figures are based on our test pages only and with limited load balancing intensive routines.

The upgrade was incredibly scary since we destroyed much of our original platform code, yes we "destroyed" it and didn't look back (although it's still on svn just in case). Many Mountain Dews were sacrificed as a part of this project.

A Thank You to everyone who provided fine tuning ideas, and a special thanks to Paul B. @ Epicor for helping analyze and identify improvement areas in our iNet scripts. Lastly, we reached build # 1000 for ZipBoss and we should be throwing a party, but there's no time for that now, must... keep... coding...

Next week we're installing the new templates into the improved 2.0 engine. I hope to post some nifty screenshots of the great new themes and skins!

This week we started adding new themes to 2.0 including a fresh new ZipBoss theme. So yes, if you were so inclined, your site could look exactly like ours. Like most things, themes are free in 2.0 and because of the integrated component model you can safely switch between themes with a single click.

The perfectionists in our team are not letting me integrate the themes into the engine yet because they aren’t “perfect”. If you talk to these people (Mike, Geoff and Taunja), please tell them the themes are in fact “perfect” and to hand them over.

Happy New Year Everyone!

ZipBoss is a new business cloud for small businesses and professionals, and is designed to provide advanced web 2.0 websites with complete marketing for less than a mobile phone plan. Based on a cloud infrastructure and a plug-in architecture, business owners can now easily add custom built functionality directly into their websites while leveraging a complete online staff without paying expensive technology prices.

ZipBoss is more than a set of tools, it is a complete service which is why it qualifies as a true Business Cloud. A quick sign-up gets you in control of many powerful website marketing features including on-demand professional staffing. Designers will build your site to specification, populate content, images, and more without having to pay expensive costs. Maintenance is kept to a minimum through many content distributing features, ease of use, and online cloud designers for unique and custom work. In regards to extensibility, users can add services and themes at a click of a button to instantly extend their site to increase marketing reach, provide more content, or change the site's entire look and feel.

Business owners can now have a completely custom professional website up and running that continuously pushes sales generating content to multiple marketing sites and localized outlets. Visit ZipBoss.com today!