I was reading Mark Lutz’s post on the Digital Wedding Forum blog “Got a WestHost Site?” and it struck a cord. Mark’s post is all about BACKUP.

I know it’s really boring — until some nasty event comes along and takes down your hard drive or server. In Mark’s post, he notes that WestHost unfortunately encountered problems as the result of a fire extinguishing system.

PhotoOne offers its DataSafe product which automatically backs up PhotoOne and remotely stores your data. Additionally, technical support is available if you need assistance restoring your data. At PhotoOne, we have restored databases after power surges, lightening strikes, water damage, networking issues and human error. This piece of mind is priced at just 45 cents a day — a very cheap option.

PhotoOne sent out an email to our clients last week about the very same issue and asked our photographers that are not on the current version of PhotoOne to upgrade. An upgrade to the current version of studio management software will provide you with the best service possible, assuming you are currently using DataSafe from PhotoOne.

The bottom line is that your backup needs to occur every day (from whatever source) and needs to be an important part of your daily workflow. It’s important to note: PhotoOne will not be able to restore data that hasn’t been saved.

We discussed website load speed back on September 17, 2009 in the blog post Website ? and how important it is to a visitor’s overall experience. Although a bit extreme, the statistic I cited in that post was that ” . . . Google has found that as little as a millisecond in load time for their pages can be the difference of millions of incremental dollars.”

In an effort to continue to evolve best practices, Google is adding load speed to their SEO algorithm. January 2010 is the rumored start for this additional factor making the optimization of page loading more important than ever.

I like this change by Google to the algorithm. On the one hand, it will make for more page-loading efficient sites resulting in a better visitor experience and retention — on the other hand, it will lower the use of bandwidth and possibly hosting fees. As the larger companies/websites become more load efficient our expectations will shift and we’ll expect the same performance from both big and small.

A free tool that we use at PhotoOne is WebSiteOptimization. It is setup to allow you to enter your sites URL and submit for diagnosis. As outlined on the bottom of their Homepage, the website speed test will “ . . . help you find out if slow pages are hurting your business. It will test page size, composition, download speed and point out some of the things that need to be done to increase your on-line competitiveness.”

For all of us who hate waiting in lines(*), go ahead and check out WebSiteOptimization. If you haven’t had your site tuned-up in a couple of years, it might be a good New Year’s resolution.

(*) fun fact: during your lifetime you will have spent roughly 5 years in a line.

We are coming up on the end of the year and it is time again to validate your studio’s compliance with the credit card industry standards. The credit card industry has created a set of standards to help mitigate fraud, abuse and thief. Elavon has updated their PCI Compliance Program and has included the details of the program on the Elavon website.

As you know, PhotoOne encrypts the credit card information processed through the software. While the encryption is a great first step, it is important to take a couple of additional steps to satisfy PCI-DSS compliancy. There are several features in PhotoOne that need to be enabled, if you’d like to confirm you are setup correctly, please send an email to support@photoonesoftware.com.

If you have further questions with respect to PCI-DSS, please call the experts at Elavon Customer Service: 800-377-3962, or the experts at Paywire Support: 888-799-2914, ext 1.

In this busy holiday season you or your staff may run into a situation that requires your studio to refund a customer payment. PhotoOne has set up its studio management software so that a photographer can quickly and easily refund a payment and include it in the financial reporting.

To issue a refund in PhotoOne follow these several easy steps:

Go ahead click on the Orders and then Edit the Order that contained the original payment.

Click on the Payments tab

Add a Payment

Enter the Payment Method (ex., cash, credit card, check, adjustment, etc.)

Enter the Payment Type (ex., refund, credit, other, etc.)

Enter Password, if required and Received Date

Enter the Amount with a minus sign (ex., -100, -1,250, etc.)

If it is a credit card refund you will enter the card information and then authorize transaction.

Go ahead and save the payment. If you are refunding an amount due to a return you will need to adjust the order. Either adjust the quantities of the line item or add a miscellaneous line item with a description of the return.

If you have any additional questions or need some assistance please call us at 888.428.2824.

It is an important time of the year to be marketing. We have included a couple of blog posts this year on the email editor and image insertion in PhotoOne. The post today puts a finer point on several features in our studio management software that will allow additional creative flexibility.

So you’ve added images to your emails, but now what? After inserting an image you may find yourself at a loss on how to improve your marketing emails. The PhotoOne email editor has more than just the ability to insert images; it is also very easy to “hyperlink” the image to the homepage of your website and use the format tabs to “create an email screen.”

We will review hyperlinking. In order to add a link to your email follow these steps:

1) highlight a word or image in your email that you wish to link
2) click the earth icon next to the “insert image” button
3) this brings up a window with two fields: URL and email type
4) to link to a URL:

a) leave the email type at http:
b) copy the address to the website into the URL field while making sure you include the whole link. example: http://www.photoonesoftware.com

5. to link to an email address that will open the default email application:

a) change the email type to mailto:
b) enter the email address into the URL box. (Note: Don’t delete the text auto-added that says “mailto:”)

That’s it! Now if your customer clicks the image or text it will bring them to the website you specified.

The next topic is the HTML and the plain text tabs. Let’s first provide a brief overview on how email works. With the prevalence of DSL and cable, emails are able to have complex code called HTML. Before this infrastructure upgrade, plain text was the only option for emails. Plain text means no images, no links to websites, and no fancy colors or backgrounds; just words. With faster connections images, links and code became more acceptable and HTML became the standard. You should note though that there are some rare cases where email providers only support plain text which is where the text tab comes in.

If you click on the text tab you’ll either see a blank email or your email, but just text. If you have something entered, but this is blank you can click the “generate text from HTML” and it will create a plain text email from your original email. If you have just an image for your email PhotoOne can’t generate text from it and you may want to make a small text email explaining your promotion. Creating a separate plain text email will not affect the HTML email and will only go to customers that don’t support HTML.

The HTML tab supports HTML 4.0 code and any changes you make while on this tab affect the edit tab and vice versa. If you know HTML you can create code here or you can use a program that allows you to generate HTML. Once done, just copy the code from that program and paste it into this tab.

There are hundreds of places to learn HTML, but if you are looking for a place to start W3Schools has several different tutorials from the basics, to tables and forms. I recommend starting with fonts and backgrounds and then moving onto tables and forms. With fonts and backgrounds you will be able to customize the color and font style of your text as well as the background. Tables may be useful if you have a variety of packages you want to show off and forms are great for getting quick feedback from your customers.

I want to thank Shane for providing this blog post. Shane is a member of our Technical Support team at PhotoOne. One thing he did want me to point out is that our Technical Support team supports PhotoOne and not HTML coding.

When a photography studio purchases PhotoOne, we are able (that is, 95% of the time) to import their existing client database for them – saving a tremendous amount of time and quickly getting their studio organized. We can import from a variety of programs, and the key to a successful import is to get the data into Excel where it can be properly formatted prior to import. This technique can also be used when gathering contacts from a trade show, function or other remote promotion locations as you rely on PhotoOne as your customer relationship manager. It should be noted that only customer information can be imported – not appointments or order details.

Most programs will have a menu option to export the data – usually through utilities. Ideally there will be an option to export to a CSV (comma separated values) file, though sometimes there will only be the option to export to a text file (.txt). Fortunately, you can use Excel to open text files, and upon opening, Excel will provide a wizard where you can separate the data into different columns.

Pre-Import Formatting
Once you have the data in Excel there are a few things you need to do prior to importing:
1. Split first and last names: PhotoOne has separate fields for these so you can either do this in Excel or let PhotoOne do it for you during the import process. If you want to do it in Excel, you’ll need two columns, one for the first name and another for the last name. In Excel 2007, you can use the ‘text to columns’ wizard to do this for you – selecting ‘space’ as the delimiter. Be sure to insert a new blank column to the right beforehand for the surname to be placed in.
2. Split Address into address1, address2, city, state and zip: Depending on how this is set out you can use ‘text to columns’ again or simply cut and paste.
3. Format Phone numbers: PhotoOne has fields for Home, Work and Cell Phone, so replicate these columns in Excel. To import successfully, the field must ONLY contain numbers. Use find and replace to remove brackets and hyphens.
4. Add required fields: PhotoOne has fields which must be entered in prior to saving a customer – most commonly ‘Business Category’, ‘Business Type’ and ‘Source’. If you import clients without this info, each time you open the customer record it will require you to enter this before you can save. So it is quicker to add these columns and fill them in on the spreadsheet prior to import. If you are unsure of where clients came from you can add the source code ‘existdb’ for existing database. You can add/edit these categories from with the setup menu in PhotoOne.
5. Other data: If you have custom fields in the spreadsheet e.g. (rating, age bracket, etc.), you can use the 20 customizable user codes in PhotoOne to record this info. Simply create columns in the spreadsheet called User 1, User 2, etc. You then need to rename this user code in PhotoOne via Setup > Business Settings > Customer User Fields. Another common use of this is to record the total sales to date figure for each client. Once all of the above has been done, save the spreadsheet as a CSV (using, Save As) to your PhotoOne folder.

Importing the data
First, select the file. From within PhotoOne, go to Utilities > Import > Customers. From the main import screen click ‘import names from ASCII text’. Browse for the CSV file using the ‘…’ button. Tick the box that says ‘skip first record’ as this is your header row, then click ‘next step’.

Matching the fields
1. Click the ‘first’ button in the bottom-left (this will pull in the headers from the CSV).
2. By holding the left mouse button, drag the fields from the left, into the list on the right (which contains the available fields in PhotoOne).
3. If you want to save this match for future use, click ‘Save’ at the bottom under map structures, you can then click ‘Retrieve’ to use it in future.
4. Click the start button.

Check for duplicates
This optional step compares names and home phone #’s and highlights duplicates. First, review the imported list. This lets you view the list one last time before import, you can also assign business categories and types from here. Duplicates will be highlighted in red.

You can also merge names. First, you should determine how to handle duplicates, decide whether to add the clients as customers or prospects, and capitalize the names (just the first letters). Once you’re ready, click ‘Merge the date above into the customer file’ and you’re done!

This blog post was contributed by Chris Harley at Instinctive Desires in Australia. Chris and Instinctive Desires use PhotoOne in their three different businesses and also provide sales, marketing and technical assistance with respect to PhotoOne in Australia. We appreciate Chris’s blog contribution and we look forward to having him guest blog again.