Design

Web design is important: Chance to get a full day’s design work for half price. Posted on July 27th, 2011 by Penny Edwards

The design of your website is the first thing that a potential customer will notice when they reach your site. We all know that first impressions count and therefore it is essential that the design of your site has the right impact. Scientific studies show that people make a judgement in less than second about whether or not they like and trust a website.

Think about it yourself. When you’re traversing the web looking for a product are you more likely to buy from a well-designed site or a badly designed one? Even if the product is more expensive most people will buy from the site they feel looks most trustworthy and that is easiest to use and navigate.

People are wary of badly-designed websites not trusting that they will actually get the items that they have ordered. They would rather not take the risk and pay a little bit more for the reassurance that a well-designed site brings them. Badly-designed sites are usually harder to navigate than well-designed ones causing people to get frustrated and move away. With the advent of the Internet people no longer even have to walk to another shop, with a mere flick of their fingers they can have left your site never to return, so you need go that extra mile to hold their attention.

With more and more shoppers moving online every day it is as important for you to keep your website looking as good as you would if you had a physical store. Would you go to a shop with badly stacked shelves, which was messy or difficult to walk around? And if you did go there would you expect to be spending big money? If you wanted to charge a decent price for your products then you need your “shop window” looking good to encourage customers in and to inspire them to buy. So, think about your homepage in these terms, imagine it is your shop window and that you need to use it to radiate reassurance and temptation to potential customers to get them through the door (which they need to able to find). Once inside they still need reassurance but also want to be able to find what they are looking for and be able to find it easily otherwise they’ll leave. Make sure the rest of your site is designed to be both beautiful and usable as well.

Now, take a look at your website (if you don’t have one it’s probably time to start thinking about one). Is it time for an update? Could a bit of extra design take your business to the next level? Could you get a few more customers through the door?

With this is mind Brightpearl has decided to offer the first 20 people to email us a free consultation & half price discount on a day’s worth of design for their Brightpearl website. Instead of for £600 we’re offering a full day’s design work for only £300. This includes free web consultation that will help you get the most out of the time. Making sure that we understand what you want to achieve, and can implement it for you.

Posted in Business Advice, Design, E-commerce | 1 Comment »

Brightpearl’s new look – webinar on Thursday Posted on June 21st, 2011 by Chris Tanner

So we’ve got some exciting things happening over the next few months, one of which is the all-new interface that we’ve been busying ourselves away on here at Brightpearl HQ. We sat back, took a good look at all things nice and all things nasty in the current design, merged the good stuff with a load of fresh HTML5 and CSS3, done a load of user testing, given everything a generous dose of modernisation – and are nearly ready to start rolling out the new design.

Faster, slicker, easier to use – lovely.

We’re running a sneak-peek webinar tomorrow (Thursday 23rd) at 5pm BST (UK time) or 12 Midday EST. It’s free to join, and we’d love to get your feedback too.

Register here!

Brightpearl's new look

Posted in Design, System & service news | 3 Comments »

Using custom fonts on your Brightpearl website Posted on May 28th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

Traditionally, only “web fonts” have been available to use on web pages; those fonts that are present on everyone’s computers. The old chestnuts like Arial, Courier, Times New Roman and so on. A custom font face can really help define your brand – and distinguish you from other sites.

There are a number of different ways to use custom fonts, ranging from embedded font files through to javacript rendering. Typekit.com is a javascript method, replacing your default font design with one from their selection of thousands. They offer a free plan, too.

Here’s how to use custom fonts on your Brightpearl website:

1/ Make sure you’ve got a Brightpearl website on your account. Watch the website playlist on our Youtube channel if you’re not familiar with how websites work on Brightpearl. Even if you’re on a paid account, you can trial the website module for free!

2/ Sign up for a TypeKit account at www.typekit.com

3/ Copy the javascript code from your Typekit account

Copy the Javascript code

4/ In Brightpearl, go to the website dashboard, then Snippets. If you’ve already got a _HEAD snippet, then add the javascript code to that. If you don’t yet have a snippet with the code “_HEAD” (you need the underscore at the start) then create one, and paste in the javascript code. Read more about Snippets here.

Paste the javascript into _HEAD snippet

5/ From the TypeKit popup editor, choose the CSS hooks that you’d like to apply custom fonts to. Typically this is just headings; the two CSS hooks that Brightpearl output for you on every website, regardless of theme, are pageHeading and subHeading. Of course you can add extra CSS hooks into template content too if you’re comfortable with HTML.

TypeKit editor

6/ Publish the font kit and check your website!

Custom fonts on your website!

Tags: css, Design, font, website
Posted in Design, E-commerce, Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

Get involved with Brightpearl's new look Posted on February 6th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

Brightpearl is designed to help you run your entire business in one integrated platform, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated.

We’ve been working on a new interface for 6 months now, planning, tweaking, testing. You’ve probably spotted some small changes coming in recently, laying the groundwork for the cool stuff that’s to come. We want to make sure that what we’re building is what you need, so now’s the time to get involved!

What pages do you access the most? Do you want reminders on screen, in-your-face or do you want them parked where you can get them when you need them? What’s your most common workflow as you blend your real-world business workflows with your online system?

For answers to these questions, we’d like your help. If you want to get involved in testing and feedback of the new ideas, then please get in touch with us directly at design@brightpearl.com.

New user interface due soon!

Get there faster

One the biggest improvements is in the way you navigate your way around the system. All the major pages will be available from the main menu, which means that you can move around much faster. Popular pages are listed right under the zone menu, then more options are available in the fly-out menus. Since every page you view has to be packaged up and sent to you over the internet, it’s important we only send what you actually need. When you click around the new design you’ll notice that the menu stays in place, and it’s only the page body that reloads.

We’ve done some interesting analysis around the speed of moving through the system; a typical multi-user Brightpearl system shows over 750 page loads every day. If we save you just a couple of seconds on each page, it all adds up. At the end of the month, with a regular user’s salary factored in, you gain an extra £250 / $300 worth of productive user time!

Navigation

More space for the stuff that matters

We’ve moved the reminders out of the way to give you more screen space for the important stuff. Icons sit on the left and light up when you need to give them some attention. If you’re running the app on an iPad or netbook, then you need all the screen space you can get!

Reminders

Clean, fresh and efficient

When you walk into an office that’s clean & airy with a lot of space you think “ah, I’d like to work in here!”. We’re taking the same approach to the new interface. All the useful stuff is still there, but it doesn’t need to be in your face. For example, we’ve combined the 4+ separate search boxes along the top into one, where you can choose what zone you search in.

There’s a lot more where this comes from too!

If you want to have a click around the new design, let us know what you think, or join our beta/test program, give us a shout at design@brightpearl.com. We’ve also got a discussion over here on our forums.

Posted in Design, New features, System & service news | 5 Comments »

New features in Brightpearl version 3 Posted on October 19th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

So, what’s in Brightpearl version 3?

We’ve been working hard to bring you a host of new features, and also make existing features much easier to use. We’re going to be updating the whole user interface over the next few months; this is just a taster of what’s to come. Drag and drop re-ordering, nice soft buttons, new colour pickers and more. We hope you like the changes

If you’ve got any feedback that would help us to make Brightpearl blend into your work day more smoothly, either by process or by changes to the user interface, we’d love it if you could get involved with our user panel. Just send an email to design@brightpearl.com for more information.

So, here’s a summary. We’ll be revisiting many of the new features for a closer look over the next few weeks, so watch your inbox (and if you’re not signed up for our newsletter, then join us now).

We’ve updated sales edit screen. There’s a lot of stuff going on in your business, so we’ve had to squeeze a lot of stuff in here too. Various things will appear as you add modules to your Brightpearl system (like inventory management). We used to have half our userbase on one interface with gazillions of options, and the other half on another interface that was lean, mean and fast, but didn’t support all of our features. Everyone now uses the same page to edit orders, which means we can focus our full efforts on making it really sing.

Update sales/purchase order edit screen

Add items straight from your price list using the quick-add box, re-order rows, calculate total on-the-fly, add sales codes mid-flow, edit custom fields and more.

If you’re using our ecommerce module, then you’ll be glad to know that shipping costs now come through to the back-office as a line item on the bottom of the order, and the shipping method is selected correctly by default, which means that you can filter your new orders by shipping method when you come into the office after a busy night of website sales, and ship the most urgent ones first. Splendid.

At the end of the day, you can export your sales list including delivery columns – which now also include the shipping method, which allows you drop the file straight into a packing system such as Metapack.

We now support multi-tier Sales tax, 4 US timezones and US date format. This opens up Brightpearl to users across North America, which is great news for those of you who’ve been wanting Brightpearl in your own timezone. Welcome on board!

date

You can now make your web portal (which comes included with every single Brightpearl account) look just like the rest of your branding. Change colours, add a logo and add if you know your way around spans, divs and moz-border-radius, you can add custom CSS too. Set up your portal at Setup : Options : Other : Web portal. Of course if you already run your website on Brightpearl (like these folk) then the portal comes as part of your website. It’s where your customers have self-service access to their quotes, invoices, tickets and personal information, and can also pay for quotes online if you’ve got the right payment methods set up.

Web portal

If you want to be able to process credit cards from within your admin system, then you’re going to love this. We’ve added an integration with Sagepay, so that card payments are authorised from within Brightpearl, with the payment allocated automatically into your accounting system. No hassles and really easy to set up. Read more here. We’re planning to add Authorize.net for our US customers shortly.

Process credit cards in Brightpearl with Sagepay

If you’re using departments for your accounting reports, you’ll be glad to hear that you can now filter your General Ledger to show all transactions without a department, and also code up part-journals to different departments (great for wages allocation)

Allocate a transaction across multiple departments

Management of your contact tags is easy. Drag-and-drop re-ordering, simpler screens, and a move to use the “modal” window. Using the modal window means that you don’t need to leave the screen below – so you’ll soon have the ability to add Tags mid-flow whilst working with contacts rather than have to set all your Tags up first.

Edit contact Tag

So you’ve got a list of contacts in your CRM – perhaps you’ve filtered the list to show everyone that has filled in a Smartform on your website, or perhaps it’s a list of contacts imported from an Eventbrite event that you ran. You want to print personalised letters to all of them. This is a simple case of 1-2-3 in Brightpearl; just set up your template, select the contacts and click the “letters” button. Lovely. We’re also working on a library of templates that you can use – watch this space

A letter as displayed on screen, including your logo and personalised text. Just hit "print"!

Easy printing of letters from CRM

For those of you with lots of product options, you’ll appreciate the small tweaks we’ve made to the option edit screen. Don’t forget you can manage products by Excel too – great if you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs.

Clear screen to update item options

Sales Credits and Purchase Credits

So this is a pretty major change for version 3.0 – there are two new types of orders; Sales Credits and Purchase Credits. You can create statuses for these separately to fit your own workflow. Of course there’s the new drag-and-drop reordering and colour selector too, so you can get set up in a jiffy. Here we can see 3 Sales Credit statuses, with the first set so that Brightpearl reminds us if the order has not been updated after 3 days.

Simple and powerful edit of order statuses

You’ll hopefully be using the powerful batch processing that comes on many screens in Brightpearl – saving you lots of time every day. We’ve made the whole process much slicker and easier to use. As an example in the screen shot below, you can send a (personalised) SMS off to each customer when we update their sale to “sent” at the end of the day.

Send email and SMS when batch updating orders

Just like the other areas of batch processing, printing a list of orders is a breeze. You can print one of the default templates (like a Quote) – or set up your own document templates for complete flexibility. Your imagination really is the only limit!

Easy printing of orders using any template you like

Do you ever find yourself typing the same bit of information into a field over and over again? We’ve got that covered. Just select a Quicknote from the drop-down list below most text entry boxes in Brightpearl and move on to your next job If you’re using a quicknote in a field that knows which contact you’re dealing with, then you can use contact merge fields. Same goes for orders and order merge fields.

Clear, crisp editing of quicknotes

Now for some really juicy stuff. Brightpearl integrates your sales and order processes with your contact database and CRM, which means that if you want to update your contact information from your sales screens, it’s a simple case of selecting the sales and choosing a function! If it’s more than just sending an email or SMS – use a Tag. Once you’ve added a Tag to contacts, you can bring them up in the CRM screens and do whatever you need from there.

Add tags to contacts from Sales lists

New SMS provider – Clickatell

Along with all the other screens we’ve made simpler, adding SMS templates is wonderfully straightforward. You’ve got a choice of a few “merge fields” to make the message more personal. To send SMS messages, you’ll need to sign up for an account with Clickatell and then just pop your API details (essentially login information for the Brightpearl servers) into Brightpearl. Read the full documentation here.

Easy, personalised SMS templates

Say you want to send a message to all your customers who’ve bought a computer fan from you in the last month. If you don’t sell computer fans, it doesn’t matter – you can search for anything you sell by name or SKU, and then filter the list by a whole load of other options too. You can send an email or SMS directly from this list, or feed it into CRM by adding a Tag (don’t forget you can also connect your Tags to Mailchimp email marketing)

Add Tag to contacts buying certain items from the sales detail report

In much the same kind of way, you can use your Top customers list to generate more re-orders, or else just keep your customers in touch. Communication Is Good – Brightpearl is the system to help you do all of this faster and more easily.

Easily send an email to your top customers

The “list contacts (beta)” screen is now handling all contact search results and listings in Brightpearl. This means easier batch processing of search results, direct export to Excel and a much cleaner, more consistent layout. Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding advanced custom search filtering in (which was on the old screen) – in the meantime those of you with older Brightpearl accounts can still access the old search screen from the “Browse…” menu. You can also change the columns displayed in this list using the options at Home:My preferences.

Contact search direct to export

In a similar fashion, the Sales List is now all handled by the new interface, which also allows much easier batch processing and direct export to Excel or PDF. Many of our users have only ever used this screen and won’t notice a difference. You’ll notice a change if you’re on Standard or Premium stock control. Some of you will be disappointed to see that the order contents are not shown by default, so you do need to open the orders to see what’s in them. We will be adding a “quick preview” very soon so that you can have a glance at what’s in the order without needing to open it up.

Updated Sales list screen

We’ve also improved the way that you can work with your customer debt. Send an email or SMS, add a note or even a contact Tag directly from the accounting screens. One report that you might find particularly useful is the Accounts:Customers:Reports:Invoices (unpaid and overdue) – from where you can easily send a reminder letter that contains details of the invoice and a link to your web portal so that your customers can pay you online!

CRM features from within your accounting screens. Lovely.

When sending emails from the pop-up window (just click on any red email link in the system) you can now pull in email addresses from your database.

Type-ahead search when sending emails

Also in version 3.0:

- Multiple calendars no longer supported : add events for people
- We’ve removed event ticketing. You can still have people on events, but you can’t connect events to orders
- We’ve discontinued Wufoo connection for our Smartforms. It wasn’t being used, sorry!
- Mailchimp : opt-in emails can now be sent when you add Mailer Tags to contacts if you wish. See Setup:Options:Contacts.

… and last but not least, we’re now listed on Google Apps Marketplace, which means that you can set up a new Brightpearl account with Single-Sign-On from your Google Apps Universal navigation menu. This is currently for new users only, we’re going to support Single Sign On for existing users in the very near future.

Brightpearl available from Google Apps

Posted in Customers, Design, E-commerce, General posts, New features, Products, Quotes & Invoices, System & service news | 11 Comments »

Get the 93ft high view Posted on July 24th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

This week’s client focus in on Bike-Science.com, a Bristol based outfit selling top end bicycles and offering a custom fitting service to get your ride just right. Read the full story here.

Bike Science run their website on Brightpearl, and wanted to get something up and running fast. Andy, the business owner, doesn’t want to spend his time designing flash graphics and learning HTML/CSS, so he brought in a Sheffield design agency that he’s worked with before; 93ft.

Andy also uses BookingBug, an online booking system, to handle scheduling of his bike fitting diary. Website visitors can book slots online. We’ve got some cool stuff happening with BookingBug over the next month or so. If you manage places on classes or workshops for your members/customers, then definitely have a look.

The booking bug widget has been embedded into his Brightpearl website to provide a seamless view for his customers.

I spoke to Stephen at 93ft about their experience putting a website together for Bike Science. As a design house, they are familiar with Actinic, Shopify and a number of other ecommerce platforms. The Bike Science site was their first experience using Brightpearl, and everyone’s pretty stoked with the results.

“It really didn’t take that long to learn”, says Stephen. “There are a few areas where the platform could do with more features, such as more options in the RSS feeds and easier handling of custom javascript, but we found it easy to put the site together with the aid of the skeleton templates and CSS files.”

There’s no coding involved at all; all you need to design and launch a website on Brightpearl is some HTML and CSS knowledge. If you want, you can even use one of our pre-built themes to make your launch even simpler.

If your website is not yet running on Brightpearl, then why not add a website to your account, get in touch with 93ft and launch a sexy, fully integrated online presence.

Tags: client focus
Posted in Customers, Design, E-commerce | No Comments »

We're giving away an iPad! Posted on May 12th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

Design a theme and Win an iPad …

To celebrate the launch of the Phase 2 web platform, we’re giving a 16GB Apple iPad to whoever designs the best ecommerce theme for inclusion in the theme library – a place where users can quickly and easily choose an attractive and suitable layout for their website.

Do you know your HTML and CSS?

Click here to read more

Posted in Design | 2 Comments »

More video support Posted on February 7th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

We’ve updated our video support, and added a few more for you. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Save time by bulk-uploading products

You can also use the Data manager to update product parameters like weight, web enabled, price etc.

Import from Excel to make data management quick and simple.

Following up sales leads

A guideline procedure for following up new leads that arrive in your CRM, using the Pearl timeline.

The Pearl Report Centre

Exploring some of the features of the Report centre. Filter, view or export to Excel and PDF.

Stock control in Pearl

An overview of the Basic stock control module in Pearl. Create an item, add some into stock, and then sell some on a sales order.

Quote, Invoice and extra templates

Create and use extra document templates for a sale – in this example we look at creating a “request for payment” document and send it off to a client.

Add a Smartform to a Weebly website

Need a website fast? Weebly offers an excellent way to get started, and with an embedded Pearl smartform all your new contacts will appear automatically in your contact management system.

Posted in Customers, Design, General posts | No Comments »

The next generation of integrated ecommerce Posted on January 29th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

We’re proud to announce the launch of our latest ecommerce client, bathroomvillage.com

This site is one of the new breed of “phase 2″ Pearl websites, which we’re going to be talking more about next week. Have a browse around the site to see a number of new features, including the mega menu, and product filters.

You’ll spot a number of dynamic features, such as the home page slider carousel, the multi-option pricing for complex products, and the hover-over cart display. It’s not revolutionary by any means, but it’s a massive step forwards for us, and a superb quality ecommerce platform compared to the other fully integrated offerings. Any of our approved design companies have the ability to add jQuery and javascript to a website, and the structure allows a solid template to be built, whilst giving restricted access to only some parts for the client, so there’s no risk of the site being broken whilst entering data or changing sections. Of course the team at Bathroom Village have full access to all the content, so they can update anything without needing to pay for a designer to get involved.

Sure, if a super bling ecommerce website is your one and only priority, then you can use one of many excellent stand alone offerings, like Magento for example. The thing about Pearl is that it’s a totally seamless progression from first lead all the way through to your VAT return. The back office product administration systems allow you to handle tens of thousands of product lines, take sales on the phone, handle multiple complex pricing structures, manage order fulfilment, drop ship and warehouse locations, and so on.

It’s not just an ecommerce website either. It’s a full Business-To-Business portal, where users can log in to re print invoices, view statement, check on project progress, raise helpdesk support tickets and manage their account details.

We’ll be doing a full customer run-through video soon so that you can see how all this fits together with the Pearl back office.

So what’s next?

We’ve nearly finished adding a few more features to the filtering, so that customers can browse all your products by option, to view “all items in blue” for example, then filter the results to “all items in blue with 4 legs”.

Of course it’s all very well seeing all this gloss and shine, but how do you get your site onto Pearl? It’s pretty easy. We’ve got a load of free themes in the pipeline, and a stack of designers hungry to take on your project. Watch out for the news next week where we go into more detail of the process to going live with a new website.

Welcome to the next generation of integrated websites!

Posted in Design, E-commerce | No Comments »

On the subject of change … Posted on November 25th, 2009 by Chris Tanner

One of the things that takes up a large part of our operational and brain space here at Pearl is managing change. One of the biggest differences between Software-as-a-Service products (like Pearl or Salesforce.com) and the traditional giants like Sage, is our ability to update the software more often.

For a young company like ours, it’s vital to be able to evolve. If we were to wait until we had a perfect, finished, shrink wrapped end-to-end business system before anyone got to see anything, then we’d either have burnt £10million+ in VC funding or we’d have gone bust.

Delivering software over the web, “on demand”, also allows us to react to feedback from customers, both for bug reports and for feature requests. Users of Pearl have nothing to download, and any upgrades are automatically applied to their account. The more we watch people using Pearl, the more we learn about what’s easy, what’s hard and what’s useful in the application. We need to learn and react so that we can bring new clients on faster, and give them a better experience, which of course will also benefit all our existing clients.

SaaS software is by nature organic, and always evolving. A very young system will have updates as often as once a week, especially if it’s in beta release phase and there are enough developers behind it to keep up the pace. We’ve settled down, however, to releasing a major version around once a quarter, which is about the industry standard.

The way that the software is built will also define the way in which changes are rolled out. Pearl runs a method where we can have different clients on different versions of the system, which allows us to give certain users sneak previews of new features, and also get some real world beta testing on upcoming changes.

Change is good for progress, but bad for consistency. It’s unsettling to find that your working environment has been moved about by someone else, it would be like one of your work colleagues rearranging the keys on your keyboard … a hassle to relearn, even if the new position was better. It’s unusual to get major workflow changes in a Pearl update, though. We’ve been building the system for enough years to keep that one nice and stable.

On the odd occasion that you need to change the way that you work after an update, we make sure that we give everyone plenty of warning, and the opportunity to try out the new features on the demo system (which is always on the latest version of Pearl). A recent example is the new way that sales pre-payments are handled. It’s vastly improved, and undeniably a step forwards, but it’s different, so no doubt we’re going to get some flak for it. Please put your suggestions on our Uservoice forum.

So as not to be too disruptive, we aim to update people’s accounts as infrequently as possible. The tough part about this for us is that the longer we leave it between releases, the more change there is. This means more extensive testing, and more of a step up from the previous version which might involve data updates in the background too.

Over the next few months we’re going to be updating the UI (user interface) – the way that Pearl looks and “feels”. We’d like to do this all in one go, but it’s too big a job to catch between two releases, so stick with us whilst some buttons are yellow and some are green!

We’re going to be bringing more and more screens into the “report centre”, which means than you have the power to filter, then export to Excel and PDF as well as viewing on screen (with configurable column settings and a report template designer coming too). This is also part of a re-engineering project that we’re doing in preparation for the launch of our API in the new year.

Our compadres over at Mailchimp are leading the charge with a crazy flurry of new features being added all the time (some would say too fast, and I’m inclined to agree). A lot of changes can be rolled out unannounced – such as a new option for a report. If we told you every new feature that we’ve added, all you’d ever be doing was reading our release notes. You’ll find the handy stuff when you need it.

Here’s what Pearl looked like back in 2007:

Pearl 2007

… and a dashboard in 2008:

2008

And as we near the end of 2009, with full Excel export, PDF reporting, configurable dashboards, Flash charts and a much easier to use interface:

2009

Posted in Design, General posts | No Comments »

Brightpearl Blog

Register here!

Get there faster

Click here to read more

Welcome to the next generation of integrated websites!

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Categories