We use cookies to provide you with the best online experience. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to the use of cookies. Click this banner for more info.
The most significant of the eCommerce introductions in the Affino 7.1 release is our new Store Credits system. This of course bolsters the existing Service Credits - where Consumers are rewarded for their onsite activities with access to premium features and functions. Store Credits of course give your website a fully monetised approach to incentives.
Customers can accrue Store Credits in three ways - by making a purchase, similar to the Boots / Frequent Flyer / Nectar / Tesco loyalty points schemes, secondly by triggering any of the circa 40 Conversion Events (various online activities), and finally - Credits can be assigned manually to Users - either for incentive purposes or for transactional refunds.
The Checkout Screen (top) makes customers aware of the Store Credits system (name it what you like!) and displays ’Total Points’ accrued and ’Points received’ for that specific transaction.
The above, second visual, is actually a composite of 2 different control-side screens - a ’Store Credit Profile’ above and the ’Incentives’ panel below - as appears on any of Affino’s 40 Conversion Events. For the former, you set the Point limits - the Threshold / minimum points required for redemption, and the Maximum Order Percentage for which the points can be redeemed. There are two different conversion rates - the Points to Currency Conversion Rate - i.e. how many points to a penny/cent; then you have the Currency to Point Rate - which is how well you reward customers for their purchases. A typical rate for Points to Currency is 100 points = $1 in value, whilst $1 spent typically renders 1-5 points or up to $5 in credit for every $100 spent.
On each Catalogue Item you can activate the Credits via a ’Credit Scale’ setting - default value is 1, but you can increase multiplier up to 10 meaning 10x points for that Item - a ’0’ value means the Item is exempt from Credits.
The bottom panel in the visual shows how you can assign ’Store Credit Points’ for each of the 40 Conversion Events - so that you can monetarily reward loyal participants on your site - i.e. Customers who post reviews, ratings, recommendations and other useful editorial or social content / media.
The final component of how Store Credits incentivise is
My favourite introduction in the Affino 7.1 release is something I have been campaigning after for a while - Panel Design Elements.
The versatility and utility of Panels in Affino is really quite remarkable, as you can combine any of Affino’s 80+ Design Elements into a separate Design Object - which can pop-up from any Button DE.
Several sites already have made use of a Login DE as a Panel on a login button - as you can also see top right on this site. In fact the top right corner of the Comrz site is quite heavy with Panel elements. Apart from the Login, we have Forum Highlights on the small Forums icon button, Team Time Who’s Online on the Team Time button, Article Listing DE on the Rated button, What’s New DE on the ’New’ button, and a combination of Article Listing and further Button DEs on the ’BLOG’ button. 3 of the mentioned Panels are illustrated above.
The beauty of the Panels is that they can provide users with quick and concise information in a rapid, easily-accessible manner, and which can take up hardly any of your page real-estate.
I’m sure we will see some very clever implementations of panels in the forthcoming months; hopefully you will like the new innovations forthcoming in the new Comrz.com site design which is due to start implementation soon ...
There’s a lot of buzz going around on the Interest Graph. The Wikipedia definition is:
"The Interest Graph refers to the specific and varied interests that form one’s personal identity, and the attempt to connect people based on those interests."
For us at Comrz, the Interest Graph is not just about the people connections (although that is important). It’s also about presenting users with the most relevant white papers, networking and purchasing opportunities. It’s about showing them the best videos and and the most relevant ads.
It’s also about making sure that people only get the messages they will actually be interested in, and that the content of the messages is focused and relevant.
The Unified User Account
The single most important factor in building up an accurate interest graph on your users is for them to have a unified user account. It means that all the interests are collated against a single user profile which is then used throughout your engagement with your customers.
The second most important element is to use the profile data you have to provide the highest level of personalisation throughout all your customer interactions. That engagement can be online, via messages, or even direct via telesales.
If you have a traditional online setup you will be running multiple different touch point solutions with your customers, everything from your CMS / Blog solution, networking / community solution, through to your ecommerce / shopping cart, campaign service, analytics services, forum software, survey software and much more. It’s essential that you integrate these all with your centralised user accounts. It is also just as important that you integrate back into the respective solutions so that you can act on these interests.
Affino does all of this with just a bit of setup.
Overt and Covert Profiling
Everyone has some interests, some more than others, but for most companies and websites only a subset is going to be relevant. It’s essential to identify these and shape your proposition and community around them. It’s also important to look at what other interests your community brings with them.
Affino’s Interest profiling starts with topics and keywords, user profiles, and conversion events. Topics
As covered in earlier blog posts, ’Responsive’ design is one of Affino’s key priorities for 2013. Affino already handles ’Adaptive’ design, but what are the differences and benefits of each of these methodologies? A key trend in current web design is that people are increasingly accessing websites via their mobile devices - i.e. smartphones and tablets. Where before desktop / laptop was king, now customers are much more likely to access a company’s services via one of their mobile devices. The 3 methodologies each set out to tackle this shift in behaviour, and each has its pros and cons.
Adaptive Design
This essentially means designing several different interfaces - each to tackle a different screen resolution - Affino currently allows you to design and target different interfaces / Skins for: Web | Mobile | iPhone | Android Phone | Tablet | iPad | Android Tablet. You can create as few or many Skins as you need to suit your purposes. You would start by doing generic Web, Smartphone and Tablet skins and then specific per platform. The interesting trend is that tablets are approximating laptop / desktop resolution - so for Comrz.com we currently only have desktop and smartphone variant Skins. The key benefit of Adaptive Design is that you can create a dedicated interface for each screen resolution / access device.
Native Design
This essentially means creating Apps - which means a different solution for every device. In doing this you can create the perfect environment for your customers - for each device, but obviously this means a lot of work, and a lot of overhead as platform software / firmware is relatively frequently updated, and you need to prepare various assets for each of the different mobile platform stores. Customers will also obviously need to download and regularly update your app to make use of it. Morevover, you still require a core website as that’s where most of these company-centric apps get their data from in any case.
Responsive Design
This methodology involves creating just a single interface which expands and contracts to fit the various different access devices. There are numerous ingenious aspects to responsive design - how text and media re-size to fit, and the column / design element structure varies to accommodate
2013 is going to be all about being Responsive, so expect priorities to be very fluid to meet the ever evolving needs of the Affino community. One overwhelming priority we will have for 2013 will be Responsive Design. We’re going to be introducing Responsive Skins which means that pages will transform to fit any device, however they are turned.
The second Responsive element is that in 2013 we are going to turbo-charge Affino’s evolution. The past years have required a great deal of effort to evolve Affino to work on mobile and tablet devices; to become super-scalable and reliable; to run on the latest cloud-based architectures; and to have a new 21st Century management interface. All of those are now at highly evolved states.
It means that the Comrz team can now focus on rounding out Affino Social and Commercial platforms; do much deeper integration with the leading Social communities; evolve key communication and promotion aspects such as direct and real-time messaging, and a new approach to A/B and Multi-variate testing.
Below are many of the key challenges we will be tackling during the course of 2013. Expect the most productive Social Commerce platform to become even more so.
Responsive Design
We will be introducing Responsive Skins to Affino in the first half of 2013. Responsive Skins will mean that Affino pages will automatically re-organise themselves to provide the best experience whatever form-factor of device is being used to navigate the pages. This will affect how everything is displayed on Affino sites and is the major undertaking for the year.
As part of the process, the new Skins will be light-weight, fully CSS-based and Affino will have built-in code compression to minimise the page size.
Usability and Learnability
We will continue the major initiative to make Affino as learnable and usable as possible. This was what we spent most of 2012 on, and Affino is now much more usable than ever before. Key initiatives include new Setup Wizards, Control Centre Zone filters, and the new Media v3 management interfaces.
Continuing from last year we expect to make hundreds of further usability improvements throughout the course of the year and have already wrapped up some great ones for Affino 7.1.
What a year 2012 has been, and at the end of it all it’s still here. We’ve played our first tunes on Mars; started blowing up tumours with virus payloads; had huge parties in London and a bunch of athletes turned up to join in; and spent more time looking at screens than at any point in human history. We’ve also seen the completely re-designed iPad and iPhone, who knew, along with the latest and greatest in Android and Windows Modern.
Affino has had a similarly exciting ride on to mobiles and tablets. A complete makeover, both slimmed down and way more capable. The average Affino site has seen big growth over the year, with the typical Affino site growing between 200% and 400% during the course of the past 12 months.
It’s all coming to a glorious end, and we hope you all have a great festive season and are ready for an even more exciting 2013. We’ll be doing our full wrap-up of the year, and goals for 2013 during the break so keep your eyes out for some laid-back reading.
Affino 7 has a mobile optimised Control Centre. We’ve tuned the interfaces to be fast and usable on the mobile. No need to Zoom or scroll around, just what you need where you expect it.
Here are some of the key management interfaces you will be using on your mobile:
Mobile Control Centre
Mobile Social Centre
Mobile Control Navigation
Mobile Content Search
Mobile Article Listing
Mobile View Screen
Mobile Edit Screen
We really like what we’ve done so far, but it’s just the start. We’ll be tuning all Affino’s interfaces so that they’ll be as great to use wherever you are, and whatever you’re trying to achieve.
Our priority for Affino 7 has been to make the most productive platform available for running your business online. The integrated nature of Affino means you only have to manage your community, content, products, design, , promotions and analytics in one place. This is by far the most effective approach for managing an online business. What we have done with Affino 7 is to improve in every way how how you manage your online business.
Affino 7 has a New Control Centre, with the pages delivered by a New Page Generation Engine, and it runs on a New Cloud Architecture, all with the intent to deliver the best Social Commerce platform on the market today.
New Look Affino
We’ve brought together great productivity ideas from the Affino user community and the Comrz team. It has meant re-styling, re-factoring and re-architecting Affino from the ground up to be more productive and easier to learn. Affino 7 also has a great new minimalist look, and now works great on tablets and mobile devices. With Affino 7 we’ve set a new baseline which means that every new element we roll out in Affino will be that much better.
Affino has a brand new Control Centre and Live Edit tools. It is now optimised whether you’re using it on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device, so you can use it anywhere any time. We’ve really raised the bar for every management interface in Affino. You fill find almost every task easier to do, with great new short-cuts, lookups, help items, searches, lists, entry forms, and navigation elements.
Affino has been brought right up to the leading edge with it’s platform support. It now runs on the latest technology which means it is faster, more reliable and more scalable than ever before. It also means that the Comrz team will be able to accelerate the development of the Affino platform in the weeks and months ahead.
There’s a great new Design Centre. The Design Objects are now completely managed within native browsers with no Flash requirement. All the Design Control screens have seen significant updates and Affino now has better than ever custom CSS support. We’ve also introduced some much needed enhancements such as padding on Design Cells and full Font styling, along with a breakthrough ability for you to be able to secure each and every Design Element
The Automated Customer Ladder is Affino’s unique and ingenious engine for tracking, motivating and incentivising existing and potential customers on your website. A vast array of Conversion Trigger Event Types allow you to reward pretty much any kind of user activity on your website, and in turn trigger incentives and notifications which encourage further activities and interactions.
A highly detailed compound Analytics Screen monitors and filters the activities by defined target group type - Suspect, Prospect, Customer, Regular, Advocate. The system is in part devised along Abraham Maslow’s ’Hierarchy of Needs’, where a simple system of badges for instance conveys instant and visible recognition of active participation. Badges can be used overtly, or simply in the back-end for clearly tracking each user’s activity. The combination of Affino’s scale of functionality with such granularity of incentivisation makes for one of the most powerful promotional and motivational tools available online:
More Conversion Trigger Event Types There are now 36 different types from simple login, through registration, updating profile information, various forms of content entry and participation and of course targeted purchases.
Better Analytics The Customer Ladder Analysis Screen has been re-written for Affino 7, and now features S-Curve graphs, dynamically expanding lists and a Pinterest style layout. The new changes allow you to gauge trends far more quickly and effectively.
Better Integration with Notifications Triggering Newsletter mailouts from Conversion Events is now easier and more reliable than before.
Linked Incentives
Secondary Conversion Events allow you to daisy-chain triggers together - which means that a single activity can set off a sequence of related actions and rewards!
More Reliable Trigger Event Tracking The majority of users deploying the Customer Ladder, simply use it for tracking online activities - rather than the more evolved incentivisation and motivation. The core engine has been re-written to make it easier to track Conversion Events within custom analysis scripts.
Improved Targeting As with any type of customer interaction, like with advertising and campaigns - the customer ladder is only any good if it targets the right people with the right
Since it’s introduction in Affino in 2002, Design Centre has continued to blaze a trail of innovation for DIY site implementation. The only downside what that it was Flash based and therefore a technological dead end.
In Affino 7 the Design Centre has had to be re-written from the ground up, keeping all the elements which made it great and improving on it futher. The move to HTML 5 for the Object Designer means much more solid Design Object / Skin generation. Affino 7 has also made a more pervasive switch to CSS, this should mean experienced designers will have an easier time of achieving what they want with their custom CSS. The key changes are as follows:
Improved Interface We have captured everything that you loved about the Flash Design Centre, and simplified it for a more instantly gratifying experience - the key elements are the same - in a new clearer, colour-coded look and feel.
Fully Customisable CSS
Design Styles can now be completely customisable. You can take the CSS code that Affino generates for the Design Styles and override it with any CSS you prefer.
Smarter Save Now when you change things the ’Save’ but switches from greyed-out to green - if you see the Green Save button it means you have made changes to the Design Object and need to hit Save to retain those changes - of course Affino still auto-saves if you hit the Preview Button too.
More Speed Without a Flash and Flex display layer - Affino now processes Design Object arrays much more quickly and efficiently - which means that building Design Objects in Affino 7 should be a far quicker and more elegant process than ever before.
More Consistency In Affino 6 we had clusters of buttons in different areas of the interface - now all the essential buttons are in the Live Edit Bar as for the rest of the system. Design Centre is still a fairly unique experience, although it now operates om much closer lines to the rest of Control Centre.
More Robust We have re-worked how we store Design Objects and they are now less likely to error out and are much more robust.
Cell Padding An essential requirement for Mobile Skin - Horizontal and Vertical Padding can now be applied on every single Design Object Cell.
Affino 7 is one of the most versatile of the full-featured website systems and can be adapted for pretty much any means, there are certain scenarios though that Affino is already optimised for - high-impact out-of-the box performance.
Affino really is the complete Social Commerce Solution, so it is quite evident that in hybdrid retail and community deployments - Affino makes for a perfect choice - yet there are other less obvious permutations where Affino has significant pedigree and therefore eminent suitability too:
Publishing There are a number of International flagship Publishing sites running on Affino, including Human Kinetics in the USA, Gill & Macmillan in Ireland and Procurement Leaders in the UK. All these publishers capitalise on the full spectrum of Affino functionality and utilise a myriad of targeted microsites using the best of Affino’s commercial and social features. The scope of what all these organisations have already achieved - each running off just a single Multi-Site Affino Licence - is already impressive, and they are all still growing.
Social Commerce and Hybrid Online Retail Whilst there are millions of ecommerce sites out there on the web, there are very few that combine multiple varieities of retail - digital, packaged goods, subscriptions and memberships - alongside social promotion and community support. Retail sites which allow their consumers to champion and support the products and services they consume are a breed apart and have many more revenue streams open to them - Affino proponents at the forefront of online retail include Aido, Bathroom and Showers Direct and Flower Innovations.
Commercial Communities and Professional Networks Affino’s version of community is one which generates revenues for the site owners by as many means possible - through fully servicing the community’s members. Both Filmutea and Digital Doughnut have capitalised on Affino’s capabilities for connecting and rewarding site owners and site users alike. Filmutea for instance offers a number of professional subscription and bulletin board facilities alongside an Affino-powered funding platform and auxiliary services - to provide the complete professional film maker’s resource - a one-stop utility for anyone wanting to make films in Spain - seek out cast and crew, equip, fund, produce and
Internet Usage and Consumer Habits continue to evolve, the single biggest trend is that more people are accessing the Internet via their mobile devices and tablets. Tablet resolution has continued to grow - to a point where it’s pretty much on par with average laptop screen resolutions, and tablet usage is sky rocketing.
Smartphones though, even the ones with larger screens, have a reduced real-estate which needs to be tackled differently to your main website, which can easily be browsed by most tablets nowadays. For a productive Smartphone experience, a dedicated interface is really what is required for that format, and this is what we bring to Affino 7:
Dedicated Smartphone Interface Affino 7 has a dedicated interface for Smartphones - to give you the very best environment for managing your Affino site/s on the move. The priority has been to optimise the tasks you need to do on the run, such as member and social content management, checking orders and shopping baskets, and managing your inbox.
Larger Fonts Traceability and legibility are key on any interface, and all fonts have been scaled for optimal legibility on the smaller screens
Dedicated Graphics We have originated a dedicated set of scaled-up graphics for the core Affino functions on Smartphone which deliver an optimised mobile user experience, and look great on high DPI devices.
Simplified Control Centre Pretty much all of the key functionality is intact from the destktop / tablet Control Centre screens, albeit in a different layout - with all options laid out in a single flowing column - rather than across the page
Simplified Search On Mobile we have a dual tabbed Search - giving instant search results as you type for both Control Centre categories and site content
Optimised Browsing To make the most of 3G and lower bandwidth connections, we have implemented some clever cacheing features to ensure speedy delivery and storage of content via your mobile phone
Enhanced Usability Usefulness and Productivity are two words that best define the overall Affino experience, and the new Smartphone Interface makes it even more easy to get the most out of your Affino site - wherever you might find yourself - if you really need to update your site from the back seat of a taxi - now you really can ... with ease!
Along with the numerous innovations in look, feel and function, Affino sees some clever introductions in pretty much all areas of the day-to-day site-management experience.
We’ve always billed Affino as the most productive environment for full-featured site management, and even though some of these innovations are merely in the field of graphics or animation - they make for significant improvements to the overall satisfaction you get from using Affino. Here follow 7 highlights of what’s coming in the new release:
New Live Edit Switch | Bar
The new Live Edit Bar visibly pings in from the left of the screen as you switch from ’Off’ to ’On’ mode - all icons have been made clearer and more refined too
Design Style Preview
Enhanced Design Style Preview conveying exactly the different font sizes, formats and colours in their onscreen appearance, and featuring newly introduced Line Height, Word Spacing and Letter Spacing options
Mobile Format
Affino has a dedicated smart interface for Mobile Format - specifically Smartphones - where everything has been sized up and simplified for Affino control on the move
’My’ Filtering
Control Centre Panels are now reduced into singular displays where users can filter out their own content for all the different relevant content categories - taking you from overview to granular detail in just one click!
Cell Padding
An essential for Mobile Format skins - where cell spanning is a no-go and you don’t want text butting up against the screen edge - all Design Object Cells now have Horizontal and Vertical Padding options
Category Sorting
All Control Screen Category Selections now include a Sort mode where you can arrange listings to your own preferences via Grouped, A-Z or Most Used options
View Selection Button
Every Content Selection now has an additional button where you can pop-up a contextual screen - to view, organise or add further categories, if what you require is not currently available for selection - this hugely simplifies the admin process for newbies
The most obvious reason for buying into Affino is that you want to do more with your business online, and you want your staff to be able to achieve more and make a bigger impact. With Affino 7 you can do that and extend your reach to new markets across the waters and around the world.
Affino cleverly combines the capabilities of dozens of website technologies - streamlining them into an elegant system. Without a solution like Affino 7, you can achieve more online business engagement and growth than with any other single solution on the market. Affino achieves big things for a surprisingly moderate outlay, here are the key benefits of ownership:
Productivity Boost
No other system offers as much utility on-tap in a single seamless solution, and makes it as easy to use on a daily basis
Maximise Revenue Generation
Affino is one of the most capable revenue-generating-machines on the Internet - featuring - product and digital stores, memberships, subscriptions, downloads, funding platform and paid-for access to content and services
Total Customer Ownership
Own and control every aspect of your customer relationships
Adaptable
Evolve your customer experiences at will
Versatile
Affino powers retail and lifestyle sites, social and professional networks, recruitment sites, funding platforms and publishing empires, occasionally all on the same site
Multi-Format / Mobile
Affino allows you to easily mold your experience to PCs, Laptops, Tablets and Mobile devices
Much More for Much Less
Affino’s great price, and the savings it can drive through great SEO and Social Engagement mean you get an impressive return on your investment
Although the most obvious changes to Affino 7 are the new look and feel, pretty much every screen in Affino has been re-written. Almost every aspect of Affino has made big leaps forward technically and architecturally - so that even the parts that look the same are in fact quite different.
Affino does a great deal, handling what would normally require a dozen distinct solutions. The aim with Affino 7 is to make every task easier to learn and faster to action.
Although the new interface is more of an evolution than a revolution on the surface, it will make it far quicker to find and access the tools you need than before. The 7 key improvements are:
Consistency
Managing Tasks been streamlined and made more consistent throughout the system - making it easier to learn and faster to use. We’ve raised the standard for every interface to the highest degree of usability and consistency
Layout and Look
Brand new modern and minimalist look and feel provide a more satisfying working environment which helps you get things done faster - across all devices
Mobile / Multi-Format
Affino has never been more easily deployable across multiple formats nor as easy to manage across all those devices
Navigation
Affino’s navigation has been greatly improved to make it easier to find everything on your site. One-Click access greatly speeds up learning and access to sites’ features and functions
Productivity
Dozens of productivity improvements based on direct customer input - should see sites deployed and evolved faster than ever before - this Affino is the fastest user experience yet, by a long way
Simplicity
Removal of clutter and reduced complexity where possible makes for a cleaner, simpler, more approachable user environment and an overall friendlier experience
Speed
Essential tasks and page loading speeds are faster than ever before, every management screen is significantly faster - leading to ever greater productivity
The great advantage of Affino 7 having so many different functions and technologies in a single system is that you get unprecedented synergies when combining them all together.
Right at the heart of Affino are the Social CRM and Automated Customer Ladder which elevate Affino’s unique approach to Social Commerce to a level unseen in any other system. The true advantage of Affino is using the single interface to manage so many different evolved activities, including the following:
Social Commerce
The perfect marriage of social and commercial interaction - all enabled through a seamless interface - gives you a highly beneficial customer experience and revenue generator
Social CRM
combining your customer registration database with analytics gives you a deep customer insight through direct social network integration and demographic data collection
Automated Customer Ladder
Affino’s 36 Conversion Event types allow you to automatically trigger off an incredible variety of actions on your site; you can use social gaming to drive customer engagement and further revenue channels; and the in-depth analytics on the elements which matter to you
SEO
Affino’s depth and breadth of functionality, with built-in keyword and taxonomy management, allows for unprecedented and automated content tagging, indexing and analysis
Personalisation and Recommendations
Affino recommends connections, content and media based on a user’s preferences and onsite activities
Expert Commerce
Expert, opinion-led retail pin-point targeted with Affino promotions - produces a powerful form of personalised commerce
Content / Media Flow
Affino allows for multiple different types of complementary content and media to be displayed together on the same screen to encourage users to browse more and stay more engaged
When someone buys into Affino, obviously they get an enormous feature and functionality set - that is a given - all wrapped up in an elegant streamlined, uniform solution. Way beyond the individual features though is a core ingrained value system which is key to the overall user experience. When we design and specify Affino we have the below core values in mind when shaping how useful the system really is.
Many a powerful system has been undone by its underlying complexity and unwieldiness. This is why we pay such special attention to how the day-to-day user experience is, and how easy it is to have oversight of everything and manage the daily tasks. Before any tiny functionality is released for consumption, it undergoes a rigorous testing process to ensure that it has been deployed in the most usable format possible. We tread a tight line in consolidating ultimate power with ultimate ease of use:
Adaptability
Affino facilitates many types of commercial website and covers the main mobile formats, meaning you can evolve your website in any direction and at any time
Agility
Affino is quick in so many different areas - from creating and re-organising designs and structure - through to the serving of extremely complex, multi-layered pages - which seamlessly combine editorial content with media, ecommerce and social interactivity
Ease of Use
Affino features highly intuitive interfaces on both display-side and control-side - with everything in its proper place - for rapid access
Empowerment
The Scope and Scale and relative ease of use for such a powerful system allows all members of staff to take an active part in their company’s Affino website
Learnability
Consistency of tasks and functions throughout the system means that all knowledge of the system, however small, can be re-applied to all the system’s different functions
Productivity
Small teams, even individuals, can achieve sites of enormous scope and scale. Affino is set up to make a big impact and allow for rapid deployment of highly scalable projects
Traceability
Simplicity and ease of finding content, media and settings throughout the system - this includes multiple routes to the same content, as everyone thinks differently
A lot of technologies go into delivering Affino. These start right from the product design and architecture stage; through the project management, development and quality assurance process; and finally the delivery and day-to-day serving of Affino sites. All in all Comrz is using close to 100 different techs related to Affino.
There are some that we couldn’t do without, and which are the key engines that serve Affino pages to millions of users day in and day out. These are:
ColdFusion is no longer a fashionable (or perfect) technology, but it is one which is going from strength to strength as a platform. ColdFusion 10 is an incredibly strong platform and Adobe have made some great moves with evolving the latest generations. It allows us to deliver rapid innovations in a way that scales.
Affino runs on a lot of Amazon’s AWS services, including: EC2, S3, CloudFront and many more. The combination of service and value we get from Amazon is unbeatable.
We have tried numerous Database technologies, and so far none has delivered as effectively on our price performance needs as SQL Server. It’s a great solid performer.
Affino is new to Scalr, but it’s our auto-scaling technology of choice, and will bring a new level of scalability and reliability to the Affino SaaS services.
Linux is going to be a big part of Affino’s future since it is allowing us to extend the automations we have always looked to bring to Affino, whilst providing great reliability and solid performance.
The mainstay OS for Affino. It has steadily improved over the years, whilst offering the services that Affino needed to develop. We’re looking forward to see it’s evolution into Windows Server 2012.
Doing business online is much bigger than any one website. You have to be where the people are, integrate your business hub with all the key sites out there, and make sure that everything integrates effectively with your back-end systems that you use day in and day out to get things done within your company.
Affino 7 integrates with over 100 systems, and of those 60 are out-of-the box integrations that you can simply enter your settings and connect to Affino. Affino also has a great API for connecting to any compatible system out there.
It’s impossible to select any seven key integrations. Below are some of the best known and most used ones. It all depends on what kind of online business you’re running:
Affino is integrated with a dozen Google services. Google’s Analytics and Maps are still the world’s benchmark, and the Google Merchant Centre continues to grow in influence. We do a great deal to optimise Affino for Google Webmaster Tools and to deliver great SEO.
Paypal is integrated directly into Affino’s store checkout. Affino’s PayPal integration supports direct / indirect, credit card / debit card / PayPal payments, single-page / offsite payment, one-off and renewable payments all just with PayPal. It is one of a dozen different payment systems supported.
One billion of the world’s citizens interact via Facebook, it would be churlish not to be involved. Affino live-publishes your content directly to Facebook as required.
Affino integrates seamlessly with Twitter for instant updates in both directions. It can notify you when high-following members join your community and much more.
You can drop any YouTube video anywhere into Affino by simply posting the URL. It doesn’t matter where you use it whether it is blogs, media library, articles, chat, comments, wherever. Same goes for all the other top video and other media sites.
Affino stores integrate directly with eBay markeplace - giving store owners a far larger catchment area / audience, same goes for Google Merchant Centre and coming soon to Amazon.
An enormous amount of input goes into every major Affino version release, and Affino 7 is no exception. Front and centre to all our considerations are our customers’ ongoing requirements and feature requests - Affino almost wholly evolves along collaborative lines between the Comrz Team and every single one of Affino’s users.
It’s frequently a tough job consolidating all the different diverse requirements into a single streamlined system, but this is what we do every day. Pretty much every tiny nuanced functionality has been specified for a particular business scenario and activity. For every major release we endeavour to simplify the user experience, which is not always as simple as it sounds as no two Affino users deploy the system in exactly the same manner.
Every consideration is made to imbue Affino with simplicity, elegance and ease of use. It thus follows that the key technological inspirations convey those same values of clarity of purpose, elegance and simplicity:
The degree of detail and finish of the many elements of the London Olympics are a key influence in the look of the new interface. In particular, we took inspiration from the dynamic keyline pictograms - which elegantly convey movement and modernity. Affino’s Key Navigation Icons are largely inspired by those pictograms - harnessing the same values of forward movement and dynamism
Still the benchmark for online retail, now with a vastly improved elegant interface - Amazon continues to inspire with its ever increasing depth and breadth and yet singularity of purpose
Apple still remains the benchmark for elegant product and interface design, and supreme ease of use. It’s focus on learnability remains a significant design influence in how we consider Affino’s daily usability and overall customer experience
Despite its detractors, the BBC is a significant pioneer online - with its iPlayer representing the first and the best of the Internet TV Players, and the relatively recent BBC.co.uk update being the first significant move towards tablet-style navigation for the main website interface
Add Comments
