Today Jonathan Hinshaw from EBWAY Creative Solutions went over how to properly sell a Business Catalyst solution, however, the advice given can also be applied to other solutions if necessary.

It is important to sell value instead of widgets. This can be achieved in a number of ways.

• Creating a positive buzz about you and your work
• Make others want you as part of a team and not simply an employee
• Make customers excited about referring your abilities and services to others
• Document your success through collecting positive testimonials and case studies

Also discussed was how to handle customer objections. Some of these objections may be in fact questions in disguise. Examples of common objections include 'Your competition only charges $X amount'. Depending on the situation, an appropriate response to this objection may be communicating that the two parties may not be the best fit if the lowest possible price is the primary motivation. Another appropriate response may highlight the fact you aren't sure what the competition offers, but you can certainly provide the correct information as to the services/products you can offer.

Another objection that can occur is 'Adobe only charges $X for these hosting plans, will you match their pricing?'. You can overcome this objection with a statement similar to the following:
"Adobe has no phone number readily accessible, whereas our support number is easily accessible and your issue will therefore be resolved in a more timely fashion."

It should be noted that slow sales may not be a result of a perception that your costs are too high. Occasionally there may be a downturn that is simply beyond your control. Jonathan believes that most salespeople can expect to sell/close around 25% of their leads.

Some clients may also have some questions in regards to the differences/features of Business Catalyst and WordPress.  Jonathan has made a very informative YouTube video that highlights the differences. You may find this useful when selling Business Catalyst over a WordPress Solution. Business Catalyst VS. WordPress.

If you would like to learn more about Jonathan and the services he provides, please visit his website http://www.ebwaydev.com

Today's presentation was from Mario Gudeji and Eddy Chan from Two Blokes [with a Postie]. Together, they went over some of their API integration projects.  Most notably they demonstrated an API solution that grabs CRM data from Business Catalyst and submits this to a ticketing system called Zendesk. The most impressive part of this demonstration was the fact that the fields imported from the CRM actually appear as custom fields in Zendesk. So for example, there may be a field in the ticket which contains the information a user selected in a webform about their preferred contact method such as phone or email. 

The first demonstrated API solution is ideal for larger clients who prefer case management features with a larger amount of features which is currently present in the Business Catalyst backend. 


The second demonstrated API integration uses a combination of hidden fields, web apps and secure zones. When a visitor wishes to contact a person who is a web app item they simply fill out a form as per standard. Since this is held within a secure zone the contact details of the web app item can be hidden away, otherwise they would need to be encrypted. When the form has been successfully submitted the contact person receives a SMS requesting they contact the user who has submitted the form.

The third API solution involves adopting an elephant. When a website visitor decides to support an elephant they receive a PDF which has been customised for that particular person such as first name, the amount donated and the name of the elephant supported. 

Mario and Eddy have a website if you'd like to view more information: http://www.twoblokeswithapostie.com

In today's BC Sandpile Scott Reynolds from Thrise gave a presentation about responsive website design, which I'm sure most of us are familiar with. A responsive design will adjust automatically depending on the type of device or screen resolution you are viewing the website on. A user viewing the site on a mobile for example, should be presented with a simplified version of the website, making tasks like browsing optimized for that particular interface.

Standard websites are built to a 960px grid, which is ideal for those viewing the website on a monitor with a 1024x768 resolution. The worldwide usage of this resolution has been overtaken by 1366x768. For those on smaller devices the website may not scale well, however for users on high resolution monitors such as 1920x1080 a website built within a 960px grid will be presented with up to 1000px of white space. Responsive design also allows us to cater for those with these larger resolutions.

There are a number of pre-made grids available on the internet. The most popular of which is Twitter Bootstrap which is the grid also preferred by Design Experts. It also has a number of extra built in JavaScript functionality.

For developers building a responsive website using Business Catalyst, the tag desktop is a useful tag which can be used to show or hide certain images for mobile or desktop machines. This can be achieved by naming your images mobile or desktop for example. 

Finally, there was some discussion on Adobe Edge Reflow. While the generated HTML code is messy it is useful intermediate between a  website design created in Photoshop and the website code created in Dreamweaver.

If you would like to learn more about Scott and Thrise, Click here

Adobe Business Catalyst have now rolled out the new Website administration console.  

Business Catalyst have made big strides forward in the way users manage their solutions.  With this in mind, Design Experts held a webinar which walked clients through the improvements that Business Catalyst have made to the Admin Console.  

If you missed the original presentation, you can still view it below;

If you would like to know more about the new Admin Console and what it can offer you, please contact Design Experts.

In today's BC Sandpile, Kristen Lindsey and Scott Thomas from Apokrisis LLC gave a presentation about content-centric SEO strategies. 

Website content is a factor in conducting successful SEO campaigns. Duplicated or irrelevant content may have a detrimental effect on a SEO campaign, including poor engagement for visitors to a website. In fact, according to the SEO table of elements available at http://searchengineland.com/seotable, content is a main search engine ranking factor. Gathering content for a website however, can be a point of frustration for both web development studios and clients.

Business Catalyst assists in providing appropriate content for websites, allowing content to be updated in a simple fashion. Additionally, Business Catalyst includes several simple and advanced SEO features that have been discussed in previous Sandpile meetings.

It is not advisable rely on several older methods of SEO such as having thousands of keywords embedded on a website. As well as potentially damaging your Google ranking, some of these methods are not adaptable to business conditions and requirements.

Some interesting terms you might not have heard before in relation to SEO are the terms Penguin and Panda. These are in fact codenames for updates that Google has made to their SEO algorithms. Penguin is aimed punishing websites who may 'spam' irrelevant blogs or forums with their website URL, which is ultimately aimed at increasing search rankings within Google.

Panda is another algorithm update which is aimed at dropping the ranking of sites with poor content, or content that may be found on another website.

It was also discussed that in blog posts you are able to link to your Google+ profile. Google has an article which describes how you are able to do this. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2539557

Today Madonna C. Mendoza from Konsum Technologies presented a cloud-based Hotel Management System which is integrated into Adobe Business Catalyst using the API features. 

The app which integrates with BC is written using PHP and has many advanced features such as room bookings, reservations and reporting.  When a visitor to the website wishes to book a room, they simply fill out a form which includes payment details.  When completed successfully this appear in the BC back-end as an order.

Due to API limitations Paypal is unfortunately not currently available as a payment option.

The hotel management system is also available to Business Catalyst partners at a cost of $2 per room per month, with a minimum of 20 rooms.  So for a theoretical hotel with 100 rooms it would cost $200 per month, with an unlimited amount of bookings.  Further, there is also no integration fee.

To view the management system yourself, simply visit konsumres.com

To watch a recording of the sandpile meeting, Click Here

If you would like to learn more about Madonna and Konsum Technologies, please feel free to pay them a visit

Podio also has an iPhone app available which notifies a user when a developer submits a timesheet into the system for example.

To Learn more about Urszula and her work at Onlineiq, click HERE

If you would like to learn more about how Business Catalyst can help your business, visit http://www.businesscatalyst.com

Today's Sandpile presentation was from Mike Sallander from BC Academe about integrating the events/booking module with web apps. 

This has several advantages such as having events with different prices, a search engine friendly SEO URL and the ability to keep the event page on the website even when bookings have run out/expired, allowing visitors to view events that have occurred in the past.

For developers, integrating the events/booking module with web apps also cuts down on the amount of Jquery required to have more advanced features.

More advanced functionality such as having discounted events for certain users e.g teachers was discussed, and many ideas were exchanged about the best ways to use this functionality in Business Catalyst

An example of a web app integrated with an event is https://trainingacademy.worldsecuresystems.com/app-registration/adobe-business-catalyst-developer-level-1-may-2013-class

Finally please note that Adobe will soon be launching additional captcha fields for web forms which will hopefully cut down on the massive issues some of our clients are experiencing with spam. 
http://www.businesscatalyst.com.au/_blog/BC_Blog/post/Introducing_our_NovDec_2012_system_update_-_improved_form_security,_new_support_workflows_and_exciting_beta_features_to_test_drive!/

To learn more about integrating the events module with webapps, Click here

If you would like to learn more about Mike and the work he is doing, visit http://www.bcacademe.com/

Design Experts Arteria is an active member of the global BC community.  One of the highlights of our week is our attendance at the “BC Sandpile” – a community of BC Developers who get together to share their knowledge of Web development and strategies they use to make Business Catalyst work harder for themselves and their clients.

Today's BC Sandpile was a presentation by Beth Kahlich who demonstrated a BC website which extensively utilises the API, allowing users to both donate food items and claim food items for pickup. Since this functionality requires the use of BC inventory management the eCommerce module was used over a webapp module which currently has no API integration. 

Since prices weren't needed for donation items some eCommerce features such as prices and payment methods were hidden away from users, but still visible in the website source code. 



When logging into the secure zone, the use of the CRM API is required to populate form fields with personal data like name and address for example. In the solution presented, many of the forms were actually contained within an iframe and hosted on an external server that has PHP support.



When a user claims a food product two emails are sent out. One is sent to the person who donated the item and another is sent to the person claiming the item. Again, this uses the CRM API. To learn more about API integration and how it can work for you, Please take a look HERE 

Today's BC Sandpile was a presentation by Joseph Salinas demonstrating the use of webapps and Bootstrap for a website created by his company. 

The demonstrated solution was designed for an investment advisory company. A user is able to login to a secure zone where they can view their investment amount, their balance and a bar graph which shows the potential growth of their investment. 

This graph is dynamically generated using http://highcharts.com and relies on JavaScript for generation rather than flash. Using JavaScript with Business Catalyst has an added advantage of being compatible with responsive design as offered by Twitter Bootstrap.

The Webapp in Josephs example simply takes an investment contribution and a number of years. Further JavaScript is utilised to dynamically calculate the interest on the investment amount. In order for a user to view their information only, a customer needs to be manually assigned to the web app item from the Business Catalyst CRM. From there, the list of submitted web app items module is used to display the information on the page. 

Currently the transaction history is built in static HTML, ideally this will be dynamic in the future. It should also be noted that while a user can make "deposits" and "withdrawals" using a webform.  Currently there is no e-commerce functionality so these transactions would  be processed manually.

Twitter Bootstrap is utilized to make the site responsive so it is viewable on iPhones and iPads for example. Joseph mentioned that he finds it easy to use with a number of great inbuilt styles for buttons etc.


If you would like to learn more about webapps and their use, visit BC Sandpile