We have been laying a little bit low the last couple of weeks as we have been busy working on a number of enhancements and refinements to ServiceBeacon. We thought it might be good to put up a post as we just implemented a pretty significant change, that being a new application menu system. The new one looks like the old one but functions so much better. “How so?” you ask? Well, the old system was a pain in that you in order to get to specific functions like “Add a Reminder” or “Create Service Order” or “Add a Car” you first had to go to a page you may not have wanted to get to like “Manage Open Service Orders” or Manage my Cars”.

The new menu system is a lot more functional and user friendly: Just put your mouse over the main menu item to see see the sub-menu items. Way better, dont you think? Pretty much everyone agrees this should have been done from day one but it just didn’t happen that way.

Hope you like the change and what we did. There were lots of ways we could have implemented this but decided to stick to something relatively simple and not that far off from what we had before. If you have any other suggestions on how to improve it let us know.

Other changes:

1. We changed the font color from gray to black for all emails. Too much squinting going on trying to read the gray text. It looked pretty but if you go blind trying to read the email, who cares that it looks nice?

2. We changed the way the odometer gets updated in Step 1 of create a service order. The way it was working before was causing some consternation because if you entered a new odometer reading and hit enter, you would immediately get pushed to page 2 of create an order when all you were trying to do was update your mileage. The plan is to put this same process onto the Manage my Cars page as consistency is a nice thing to have in an application.

3. On our FAQ page, the instructions on how to retrieve your username and/or password wasn’t working. That’s now resolved.

4. We added the ability to add custom service items within Step 2 of creating a service order. Here’s an example:

This is a sample entry:

This is what it then looks like once it gets posted to the Additional Items area of your order:

5. Checked Opera to make sure it works with the app. It does and worked great. Safari is still having issues though.

6. We made a bunch of other subtle changes but here is one other we made as I wanted to give credit to where we saw this posted. SEOmoz is a really great website that focuses on search engine optimization (something we have just started to work on as ServiceBeacon starts to get good). They had a post on customizing and getting creative with your 404 error page. A 404 error is what you would see if you try and go to a page that does not exist. Anyhow, we liked the post, and here is ours. Hope you like it!

What’s next? Things that are coming over the next few weeks:
1. We are moving to a new server.

2. We have more schedules coming online.

3. We think we are changing our home page.

4. We are adding a dealership mapping and locating tool to the public side of the website.

5. More small fixes like some of the ones noted above (including getting Safari to work).

That’s it! Thanks for reading our blog and if you haven’t yet tried ServiceBeacon, you should really try it out and let us know what you think so far,

SB

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