[ad_1] Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) put out a big release today, following several maintenance releases and the last major release in July. Version 3.1 introduces 10 new core blocks available to users who are running WordPress 5.8 or newer: Buy Button Order History Products Registration Form Login Form Download Terms Receipt Confirmation Cart Checkout (Beta) These blocks enable store owners to do more than their shortcode predecessors. Although the shortcodes still work, the block versions allow for much easier customization with a better UI. One example in the announcement is the Order History block. The previous Purchase History shortcode output a simple table of orders, but the new Order History block has a card style view and allows users to easily modify the number of columns and how many orders are displayed per page. Purchase History shortcode output New Order History block The other blocks have been updated in a similar fashion, with extended functionality and greatly expanded customization options. It’s important to note that the new Checkout block was released in beta. It is not turned on by default for new stores yet. Users who want to test the block will notice that EDD has reordered some of the fields to improve conversions, improved the user context detection (only showing necessary fields to users), and redesigned the payment method picker. Email Summaries is a new feature for store owners in 3.1. It sends a weekly or monthly email to the admin or other custom recipients with a store update that includes metrics like gross and net revenue, new customers, and average order amount. It can also be disabled in the admin. A few other notable changes in version 3.1 include the following: New setting to require users to login to download files Success Page has been renamed to Confirmation Page to differentiate it from the receipt More detailed views and filtering options for Reports reCAPTCHA keys added to Downloads » Settings » Misc so users can automatically enable reCAPTCHA for the lost password and the registration forms New color options for purchase buttons New “View Receipt” link in the orders table Easy Digital Downloads is installed on more than 50,000 WordPress sites. The ten-year-old plugin is continuing to evolve and become a more block-friendly tool for selling digital products. Check out the announcement post for a full tour of all the new blocks and their capabilities. Category: News, Plugins Tags: easy digital downloads Share this: Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Like this Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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How to Set Up an Email Address for Your Own Website Domain Name
[ad_1] Running a site often means branding it properly. The idea is to reach every nook and cranny with your site’s name, so that you’re visible to potential customers. You can inch towards this goal by setting up an email address for your own domain name. There are a surprising number of businesses that use third-party branding for email addresses, and this isn’t the most optimal choice. The good news is it’s not a hard task, and you can still use your favorite email client to boot. In this post, we’ll look at how to set up a dedicated email address for your domain. First, let’s get into why this is a crucial element for your site. Why You’d Want to Set Up a Dedicated Email Address for Your Domain As we noted, branding is important for any site. You want potential visitors, readers, and customers to notice your branding wherever they see it. Lots of times, this is a visual element, such as a logo or specific stylistic aspect. There’s another element of your branding you may not have considered before: your email address. Think about the number of emails you send day to day, and what a johnsplumbing@gmail.com address says about you. In our opinion, it sends out the following messages: You’re not taking enough care in building your online presence. You don’t have well-rounded business sense, which tells a customer you may have neglected other areas of your business too. You’re positioning your email provider as the most important factor of your business. This might seem an extreme viewpoint, but it’s one of the first things a user will see when you’re contacting them. You are making it harder for a user to find you, even if they don’t know how to get in touch with you. Let’s give you a bit more insight into what we’re talking about. In short, if your domain name doesn’t feature in your email, it’s a missed opportunity. It speaks for your vision as a business owner that you’ll let Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!, and others have prominent positioning in a primary branding area. What’s more, it doesn’t make your email address unique to your business. Your email has an indirect air of being like other email addresses. On the whole, setting up an email address for your own website domain name is a way to make you stand out. It’s an opportunity you should seize. Hosting Your Emails (And Why Your Web Server Isn’t the Best Choice) There’s an aspect of setting up a dedicated email address that warrants further discussion. Without custom branding, your emails will be hosted at one of the many different provides available. We’ve mentioned Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, and there are countless more. When you switch to custom branding using your own website domain name, it would seem ideal to host emails on your server. After all, your site is hosted on the server, and if your emails end with the domain, they should too. This, for all its base logic, isn’t the best solution. Here’s why: Emails hosted on your server will be subject to the same fundamental security as your site. This may or may not be a good thing depending on your host. Deliverability suffers a lot from hosting emails on your web server. Spam filters are also not as efficient as other dedicated tools. There’s a User Experience (UX) deficit too. Many web hosts use robust open-source solutions to manage email (such as Horde or Roundcube). Though, the UX is often set by the web hosting control panel, and it lacks compared to modern providers. While you could run this email through a more suitable Graphical User Interface (GUI), the other drawbacks don’t make it viable. Our advice is to use a dedicated provider for your email, and let them handle it. Your sanity and deliverability rates will thank you. How to Choose the Right Username or Identity For Your Email Address Before we get into the technical nature of setting up an email address for your own website domain name, let’s give you some advice on choosing a suitable username. Of course, your domain name is set, so the username is where variety, uniqueness, and creativity come in. You can set the username based on your business ethos. For example, if you’re a serious and professional company, a simple info@mybusiness.com makes sense. In contrast, if you have a quirky element to how you present, hello@mybusiness.com would work. Of course, these can be adapted based on your desires. For example, “hey”, “contact”, your name, and “inquiries” are all viable options. Our advice is to keep things specific to a certain extent, and set up multiple email addresses for different tasks. For example, you could cover payments, support, sales, and more using dedicated emails. With the advice we offer in the next section, you can route mail from each of these addresses to a central inbox, so there’s no need for multiple accounts. How to Set Up an Email Address for Your Own Website Domain Name Next up, we’ll get to the technical information on how to set up an email address for your own website domain name. Because there are myriad combinations of registrar, web host, and Content Delivery Network (CDN), we won’t give you an exact process for one of them. Instead, we’ll offer the following steps: Throughout, we’ll highlight services that may be unique, or whether you may have a different experience with a certain combination of tools. 1. Set Up a New Email Address Using Your Domain First off, you need to create an email address using your domain within your host, or with an email provider. With some hosts this is simple (or at least possible). With managed hosting providers such as Kinsta, WP Engine, and others, there’s no way to create email accounts and addresses with them. This is because of the security and performance aspects we discussed earlier. It’s functionality some hosts stay away from,
Continue readingAutomattic Invests $30M in Titan, a Business Email Startup – WP Tavern
[ad_1] source: Titan.email Automattic has invested $30 million in Titan, a professional email suite aimed at businesses and companies offering white-labeled email solutions for customers. At WordCamp India 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company had just made “a pretty large investment” in the India-based startup and stated that it “will be a big part of how WordPress.com offers email going forward.” The Series A investment in Titan is Automattic’s largest to date and values the company at $300 million. Although Automattic has gained notoriety for its “no offices or email” approach to business, most of the working world has not yet transitioned away from relying heavily on email. “I think email is definitely on its way out, between things like P2 and Slack, which is a work place chat tool,” Mullenweg said on Glenn Leibowitz’s podcast in 2015. “Email just has so many things wrong with it. I’ve never heard anyone who’ve said they love email, they want more of it–have you?” Six years later, email is still a reliable source of misery for most working people, but Titan aims to transform it into a more meaningful communication channel for businesses with help of Automattic’s investment. It includes features like scheduled send, follow-up reminders, smart filters and custom folders, email templates, and white labeling with deep integration for various platforms. WordPress.com’s marketing has increasingly been aimed at small businesses over the past few years with a strong push for users to make money by selling things through their websites. It’s easy to see how Titan makes sense as a supporting product that legitimizes any business with a custom branded email address. Customers who have registered, transferred, or mapped a custom domain through WordPress.com are offered a three-month free trial of Titan-powered email services. Setting up custom branded email addresses separately would be a much more inconvenient process and most customers with custom domains are likely better off rolling email services into their existing WordPress.com setup. This strategically enables WordPress.com to be more of a one-stop shop for business needs. People are often reluctant to change their email providers so Titan has the effect of making WordPress.com’s products a more sticky subscription that would require some effort to reproduce elsewhere. “We need an alternative to Google and Microsoft, which have started to monopolize email,” Mullenweg told Bloomberg. “Of about 6 billion email accounts in the world, only a fraction are small business email accounts and they need a product that’s focused on their needs,” he said. After just two years, Titan has more than 100,000 small business customers. In addition to its relationships with WordPress.com, HostGator, NameSilo, and other web providers, Titan aims to grow its customer base by partnering with popular hosting companies, domain registrars, and site builders. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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