Computers are fun
This winter, while most were posting photos of themselves on Facebook wearing a random “Christmas jumper” and drooling over that advert, our team* of turbo-geeks were forced to sit coding our new website.
*me
Despite the rising odour of stale pizza around the office and the onset of chronic Vitamin D deprivation, we are finally ready to unveil our new site.
A bit of inspiration…
I went to Cakefest in October 2011, a get together for serious CakePHP developers to hack their way through a series of workshops led by some of the CakePHP core team (big thanks to Graham Weldon, José Lorenzo and the rest of the guys at CakeDC).
During the two day workshop we ran through the latest version of their PHP framework, and it was clear it was time to do some work “under the hood” on our existing site.
I threw in a new design as well just for laughs.
New Features
We have customers who put several hundred copywriting jobs through the site each month so for them our focus was on improving usability, yet keeping a sense of familiarity, so they can go about using our service as normal.
Adding a job, finding your completed copy and making payments should all still feel the same as ever. We have hopefully done enough to avoid a Facebook-esque UI change upset!
Finding the perfect copywriter
Direct orders are becoming increasingly popular amongst our customers. Using the same writer time and time again makes perfect sense when the copy is part of a series of jobs, when the writer has built up an understanding of your tone of voice requirements, or for regular, ongoing work (like weekly blog posts).
Filter by experience in a given subject
But what if you are new to Copify? How do you know which of our writers is best suited for your job?
Well, considering we were about to rebuild the site from the ground up we have made this an integral feature. You can now quickly find the copywriter with experience in your subject matter.
Job alerts and notifications
New Dashboard Feed
We have a new dashboard to quickly find completed copy, place new jobs and get notifications.
One big flaw in the old system was slow alerts. Sometimes we were sending out alert emails for jobs that had already been accepted.
We have made some headway with this in the form of real time alerts in the dashboard.
Adding multiple jobs
Adding muliple jobs
One part of the current site we really wanted to improve was the bulk order feature. For projects such as product reviews, descriptions for ecommerce or for multiple articles as part of your SEO efforts, adding several jobs at once can be a bit of pain.
We’ve streamlined this process to allow up to 5 briefs to be added at once, and in the pipeline is a CSV import feature to upload unlimited jobs…stay tuned!
Payments just got easier
Secure payments
The checkout process of any website is dull – filling out web forms over and over again is about as much fun as being trapped in a lift with Jamie Oliver.
With the new release, we’ve cut back the non-essentials to make payment an absolute breeze. As before, all payment pages, and any other pages where we handle your personal info are SSL encrypted for security – one of only a few things we take very seriously.
Import your Linkedin profile
I'm not a copywriter but if I were....
Copywriters and publishers can now fill in their profile page with a Linkedin api.
With a click of a button you can import the about, specialities and work experience sections of your Linkedin account directly in to your Copify profile.
You will also notice we have switched to Gravatar for profile photos. If you haven’t got one already, don’t worry we’ve made sure your old one will still work your old avatar will disappear. Click here to generate a new one.
OK I’m ready, take me to the new site…
We’ve got a few days or so of testing before we go live, but you can get an invite to take a look around the current beta version by emailing us with your Copify user ID – just try not to break anything!
