Most modern websites use cookies to track session information which often includes the user’s device information (width & height of their view, what features their device supports, etc.) and any choices they’ve made in their session. This information allows websites to customize web pages to fit the user’s device, to provide alternate information when certain features aren’t supported on the user’s device, to customize the user’s experience based upon their previous choices, etc.

In late May 2018, the Bongo4U system implemented a feature to inform public users that the system uses cookies and provided a link to the Cookie Policy and the related Privacy Policy for those who were interested.

The recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation in the EU has forced many websites to notify users about the use of cookies if any of their users are from the EU. Many website systems have chosen to inform all users since it is a best practice (data collection transparency).

The Bongo4U system has implemented this transparent approach and all public users will see the following notification the first/next time they visit any Bongo4U site:

For users that click the [I agree] button, they will not see the notification again in the same browser for one year. For users that just close the notification, they will not see it again until their next session.

Please let us know at support@bongo4u.com if you have any questions.

Thanks.

Emerge2 Support

During this time, the Google Analytics utility has grown significantly in its capabilities. It contains a wide variety of reports on website activity and allows site owners to drill-down to get deeper into any area of interest in how people use their website.

At Emerge2 Digital, we really like the Google Analytics utility and have been using it for many years. We have also been encouraging site owners to switch from the built-in website stats to Google Analytics over the past two years. As a result, the built-in utility has seen very little use.

It’s time to let the built-in utility retire. Therefore, we will be decommissioning the built-in website stats utility as of May 31, 2018.

For the past six months, and until May 31st, whenever a site admin user attempts to use the built-in utility, it informs them of the pending decommissioning and prompts them with a simple form to request access to their site’s Google Analytics. If you don’t yet have access to your site’s Google Analytics reports, please request it now as follows:

1. Login to your Bongo4U admin area
2. On the “Page Menu” select the “Website Stats” option.
3. Read the instructions and fill in and submit the simple request form.

As always, if you have any questions please email support@bongo4u.com

P.S.: If you have not yet seen any analytics reports of your website’s usage, it can be quite interesting and informative!

How do you know for sure?

Fortunately, the Bongo4U website system has a built-in feature to let you know which searches are failing, so you can take some corrective action.

You have a search box at the top of all pages on your website, right? If not, then you need to get one added ASAP. Website visitors are usually short on time and they only want to search for specific item(s).

The Bongo4U system records every successful and every failed search done on your website. For every word that someone can’t find on your website, that word can be added onto the appropriate page of your website, and subsequent searches for that word will succeed for all future visitors.

Here’s what to do:

Login to the Admin area of your website. On the main menu, select “Website Usage” and set its report duration to “Past 12 Months”. Look at the “Top Searches – NOT Found” report. There’s a wealth of information to be found on this page! Now you know what people have been searching for on YOUR website, but not finding. If the words are appropriate to your business, then you should edit the appropriate page(s) and add these words into the content on those page(s). It’s easy to do or ask Emerge2 to do it for you. After being added, those words will be found by your future visitors.

Check this Website Usage report on a monthly or quarterly basis and add the appropriate missing words. It’s a quick and easy way to provide successful content to visitors of your website so they can quickly find what they are looking for.

Extra bonus of this approach: The next time search engines scan your website for new content, they will pick up these additional new words. As a result, future searches in these search engines will start to provide your website information in the results when people search for these recently added words.

The big day is here and guess what happens a few minutes before the migration is scheduled to begin?

Our current hosting provide suffers an outage and our Bongo4U servers go off-line. Our monitors immediately detect the issue, and then we are stuck in a telephone queue on hold waiting to talk to their support team.

It is hardly ever “good timing” for an outage, but having one occur just before migrating away from a hosting environment, when we have many third party organizations across the country all coordinated to update their domain name DNS data in exactly one hour, creates even more issues.

In the end, the online outage was resolved in 10 minutes, shorter than the wait to talk to their support team.

The migration has begun and is progressing nicely as we write this update post.

Since we had contingency time built-in to the migration schedule, we don’t anticipate any impact on the migration timetable.

[End of Update]

The Bongo4U system will be migrating to an upgraded hosting environment on Thursday, May 19, 2016.

All Bongo4U websites will remain available to the public during the migration, except for a few moments at the exact “cut-over” time.

We need to disable access to the Bongo4U Admin area during the migration, therefore Admin logins will be disabled on May 19th from 1pm ADT, 12pm EDT, 10am MDT, 9am PDT for 2-4 hours to allow the migration to stabilize.

You may follow the migration process on the @Bongo4U twitter account.

Although we don’t anticipate any problems, if you do happen to notice an issue after the migration, please let us know the details (e.g. the page address, the error message, what you were trying to do) by sending email to support@emerge2.com

Please let us know if you have any questions and thanks for using Bongo4U!

Emerge2 Support

However, when an admin user wants to update one or more of these Email Forms, or check to see who these Email Forms are sending messages to, they often ask, “How can I find all of my Email Forms?”

Problem solved!

Bongo4U Dashboard

The handy Bongo4U Dashboard has been enhanced to provide a listing of all Email Forms on your website. For each Email Form it lists the Subject line, To Address(es), and the page the form is located on. You can now “at-a-glance” see if any emails are being sent to a past employee, the incorrect person, or a legacy email address.

In addition, just click any of the Email Forms and you will instantly be editing its configuration settings, all from the Dashboard.

Extra Tip: Did you know that you can also click any of the admin Usernames listed on the Dashboard to edit any user’s details or access permissions — all from the Dashboard.

More information regarding the Dashboard can be found in its announcement blog post.

Enjoy!

Most Bongo4U websites have one or more email forms. They are used for Contact forms, Request-A-Quote forms, and many other uses.

We had to change the “From Address” that was being used in email messages generated from the email forms.

Many email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, etc., have implemented a spam-detection mechanism called DMARC. This flags any message that does not come from an authorized mail server. Most DMARC implementations currently only flag the message but still deliver it.

Recently, Yahoo changed their DMARC implementation to reject all emails generated with a From Address that contains “______@yahoo.__” regardless of the recipient of the message, unless the message comes from one of Yahoo’s servers. Over time it is expected that more email providers will change their DMARC implementations to also reject messages that don’t come from their own servers.

This causes a problem for all websites that use the online user’s email address as the “From Address” for messages.

This means if an online user fills in an email form on your website and their email address contains “@yahoo” that this message will probably not be delivered to its intended recipient.

We have enhanced Bongo4U to handle this situation.

There has always been an optional field in every email form where the Admin user can specify the “From Address” to be used for messages generated by that email form. Unfortunately, many people leave the field empty. Previously, the system would use the online user’s email address for the “From Address” if this field was empty.

However, now the system will use “Website-Form@bongo4u.com” as the “From Address” if this field is empty.

To make your email forms better, please login to your website’s admin area and edit your email forms. Enter your organization’s general email address into the “From Address” field and click [Save Changes]

If you have any questions, please open a ticket or call us.

(P.S. Please note that the online user’s email address still gets sent as the “Reply-To” address, so that replies will be directed back to the user.)

Or have you recently added photos and noticed these common problems?

• Pages are loading slowly.
• Images look stretched or distorted.
• Slideshows are causing the content to move up/down.

There are many available free and paid photo editing tools. In reading various “Top-10″ photo editing reviews, the Pixlr tool is often mentioned in the top 3 of these lists (many times the first or second option is a paid tool). We have selected Pixlr to use in these instructions, but most photo editing tools provide similar basic capabilities.

Pixlr Express is a beginner-friendly online photo editor. It is a free web-based solution that can assist you with basic photo editing (Resize & Crop), enhancing your photos (Red Eye, Auto Fix, Sharpen) and providing other optional creative editing tools that you can experiment with (Borders & Image Effects). There is nothing to download or install, it just runs in your web browser like any other website.

For step by step instructions on basic photo editing using Pixlr Express read our blog: Basic photo Editing for your Website

However, there is a “catch” you should be aware of…

The Facebook “widget” that you add to your website to display your posts has one undesirable characteristic. As long as you have at least one post on your Facebook Page from the last 30 days, then your recent and past posts appear on your website as expected.

But, if you don’t have any posts on your Facebook Page from the last 30 days, then NO posts will be displayed on your website. Ouch!

Your website visitors will think that your website is broken when the feed appears as a big, empty box. But this is the way that Facebook programmed it to work. Facebook wants to encourage people to post useful information on a regular basis.

Of course, it is good practice to regularly post information about your business or industry on your Facebook Page. Some organizations post frequently, some infrequently — you need to determine what frequency works for your organization. If you are just starting with Facebook Page posts, then start with one post per week and once you are comfortable with this, then bump it up to two posts a week.

The bottom line is: Don’t abandon your Facebook Page, otherwise there won’t be fresh content for your Facebook visitors and as pointed out above, your website will also stop seeing any posts as well (leaving an embarrassingly empty space on your website).

If it helps, here is a post we wrote recently on the Emerge2 Blog which contains a number of ideas regarding what you might post on your organization’s Facebook Page: “You have a New Facebook Page: Now What?”

(This article was originally posted on the Emerge2 Blog.)

We recently subscribed Bongo4U admin users to this blog so that you can be kept informed of these new website capabilities (many of you had already subscribed to the blog yourselves).

An excerpt of each new blog post will be emailed to you. Click the link in the email to view the entire post.

Each email will also contain an Unsubscribe link if you wish to stop receiving blog posts.

If you wish to subscribe someone else at your organization to the “Bongo4U Blog by Email” list, add their email address here (they will receive a confirmation email).

To bookmark this blog: Bongo4uBlog.com

We hope you enjoy finding out about website features and tips!

Emerge2 Digital

There’s a huge growth in users who access websites using mobile devices, and this trend is steadily increasing.

How does your website look on a small device? Is the navigation even findable, let alone clickable without “fat-finger syndrome?”

Part of Bongo4U’s infrastructure has been rewritten to support devices of almost any size and orientation (e.g. smartphones, tablets, desktops) using “responsive design” techniques and other dynamically adapting enhancements.

This new responsive design infrastructure requires a different set of layout, style and navigation controls for a website.

Any Bongo4U sites created after July 2013 were created using the new infrastructure. Any previously created Bongo4U websites will require an upgrade to its layout, style and navigation controls to be compatible with the new infrastructure and all of its new responsive capabilities to support mobile devices.

To request that your website be upgraded to this new responsive design infrastructure, please fill in the following short request form. You will receive a quote before your site is upgraded.

Please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks!

What info will you see about your site?

• a list of site parameters and their settings
• whether certain features are enabled or disabled
• the number of pages, products, slideshows, email forms, testimonials, etc. in use
• a list of primary & alternate domain names configured
• a list of all admin users who can login and update your site

All in one easy dashboard display.

How do you access the Bongo4U Dashboard?

Just login to your Bongo4U website (mycompany.com/bongo4u) and click the new “Bongo4U Dashboard” option in the main Page Menu.

Enjoy!

But, Twitter recently stopped supporting the previous methods of displaying a Twitter feed on a website.

No problem! — Bongo4U has been updated to support Twitter’s new method of displaying tweets from a Twitter account. However, an admin person needs to login to their Twitter account and generate a “widget” for the Twitter account they wish to generate tweets from. This widget then needs to be copied into your “Twitter Feed” block on your Bongo4U website. Don’t worry, the process is explained below…

We have included step-by-step instructions for Bongo4U admin users to follow:

1. Login to your Bongo4U website’s admin area
2. Go to the page with has your Twitter Feed block
3. Click on this existing Twitter Feed block (to edit it)
4. Follow the instructions that are displayed on your Twitter Feed block.

Your Twitter account feed should then be up and running again in no time.

(Please note that some Bongo4U websites generate a Twitter feed using a Raw HTML block instead of using a Twitter Feed block. Both need to be changed since Twitter no longer supports any of the previous methods of generating a listing of recent tweets. If you are using a Raw HTML block for this, we suggest changing to use a Twitter Feed block instead.)

If you have any questions or problems, please just submit a help desk ticket here. Include the address of your website page that contains the Twitter Feed or Raw HTML block.

The Captcha box has been made simpler and much of the “extra stuff (noise)” has been removed from its display. Therefore, it is now easier to understand for users.

In addition, this Captcha feature is now enabled by default. (Previously, it was off by default)

If you had previously disabled this feature, you should edit your Email Form blocks and enable it. This is a very helpful feature.

You can read more about the Captcha feature here.

The Comments block will enable the submitting of comments by users and the display of all existing comments.

When you add the Comments block, you will be able to specify a number of customization options or just take the defaults (e.g. maximum comment length before displaying “More…”, the number of comments before pagination, the number of links in a comment that will trigger automatic moderation, sort order, etc.).

There is a Comments Admin area where you can review all comments after-the-fact and suppress/hold or delete any which are inappropriate. You can also specify a list of “banned words” which will automatically trigger moderation of a comment if any of those words are used.

Enjoy the interactivity of comments by adding a Comments block to any page(s) of your Bongo4U website.

How Does This Affect Me?

1. On Thursday, June 14, 2012 the Bongo4U Admin Area will be unavailable. This will prevent websites from being changed during the migration process and while “the dust settles” in the new hosting environment. The Admin Area will be re-enabled by noon-hour the following day (June 15th).
2. 90-95% of Bongo4U websites’ domain names are managed by Emerge2 and therefore Emerge2 will automatically update all of these managed domain names to point to the new, upgraded hosting environment as part of the migration. However, for the few clients who manage their domain name configuration (DNS) themselves or via a third party (e.g. their ISP), these clients will need to make arrangements to have their domain name DNS configuration updated ON JUNE 14TH to point to the new environment. All of the clients who manage their domain name DNS were contacted on May 24th regarding this migration and again on June 5th with the detailed DNS configuration information. If you were not contacted about this, then your Bongo4U domain names should be managed by Emerge2 (and will be updated automatically).

That’s it.

Tell Me More About the Migration

The new hosting servers use newer technology, have more memory, throughput, support more concurrent tasks, and provide a more reliable infrastructure.

All Bongo4U websites need to be migrated to the new servers on the same day.

Although the Bongo4U Admin Area will be disabled during the migration, all Bongo4U websites should remain online to the public throughout the migration process, other than for a short few minutes when the “cut-over” takes place.

During the migration process, we will be providing live status updates on the @Bongo4U twitter account. Please follow @Bongo4U on twitter for details: https://twitter.com/bongo4u

How Can I Be Sure that Emerge2 Manages my Domain Name DNS?

This is a bit technical…

Go to the Internic.net online domain name Whois lookup tool and check each of the domain names that point to your Bongo4U website(s). Note: Do not enter the “www.” prefix, for example, enter “mycompany.com” not “www.mycompany.com”.

If the resulting report includes the following three lines, then that domain name’s DNS is managed by Emerge2:

• Name Server: NS1.EMERGE2.COM
• Name Server: NS2.EMERGE2.NET
• Name Server: NS3.EMERGE2.NET

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to submit them via the Help Desk at http://help.emerge2.com

Thank you!

Emerge2 Support

For example, if Google wants to display a thumbnail for a page, or wants a description of a page, it can get that information from the Open Graph tags on the page. Or if a user is posting a link on Facebook to your site, the Facebook system will automatically “reach over” to your website to see if there are any Open Graph tags on the page and if so, it will pull the page title, page description, page type, thumbnail image for the page, etc. from the target page’s Open Graph tags and will compose a status update post from that information for the user.

Where Does the Open Graph Data Come From?

Bongo4U considers what it already knows about a given site and about each of the site’s pages to determine what to automatically generate for these Open Graph tags.

Any product catalog or promotions listing, or product detail pages, will have an appropriate page title generated, will have a page type of “product,” and for product detail pages will also have one of the product’s photos automatically tagged as the thumbnail photo for that page.

The Page Properties form within the Bongo4U Admin area for each page now has a “Page Type” optional field. This can be used to tell the Open Graph generator what object type to use for a given page. There are only about 30 object types currently supported (e.g. for activities, businesses, organizations, groups, people, places, products, entertainment, etc.). More will be added once they are supported by the Open Graph initiative. It defaults to “website” if you don’t define a page type.

The page description comes from the existing “Meta Description” field which is also located on the Page Properties field. Of course, everyone has already entered a sentence or two on each of your pages to describe what can be found on the page, right? If not, now would be a good time to take a few minutes to do it. This description is now used by more than search engines, since it will now also be used in the Open Graph tags that more and more external websites and social networking facilities are starting to reference and expect.

The Site Properties page within the Bongo4U Admin area has been updated to add a “Site Thumbnail Image Filename” field under the “Advanced Options” area. Having a thumbnail image associated with your site will provide the thumbnail to these external systems when they want to use one (e.g. for links/posts about your pages). You just need to upload a thumbnail image about your website, e.g. your logo, a screen capture of your home page, etc., to the normal “images” area of your website, then go to the “Site Properties” area, click “Advanced Options” and enter its filename in the appropriate field. This will create a default thumbnail image for all pages of your website. The thumbnail image should be at least 200 pixels wide and at least 200 pixels high, but smaller ones can also be used.

These Open Graph tags are invisible. Users of your website will not see them. However, they can be seen if you “View Source” in your web browser on your web pages and look for the “og:___” meta tags near the top.

Please let us know if you have any questions. And our Help Desk is always available at http://help.emerge2.com

It is a 2-step process.

First, login to your mailing list provider’s website (e.g. Constant Contact, GetResponse, iContact, MailChimp, Vertical Response, etc.) and locate the Opt-In form code that they auto-generate for your website. This code (HTML) can usually just be copied-and-pasted from their code generator, to your website. Copy this HTML into your clipboard (highlight the HTML and press Ctrl-C).

Second, login to your Bongo4U website and add the “Mailing List Opt-In Form HTML” block to any page or layout on your site. This will be where the Opt-In form will appear. When prompted to copy-and-paste the opt-in form HTML, paste it into the large input box(press Ctrl-V). Click the [Save Changes] button.

Don’t forget to test your subscription form. You will probably need to test it with an email address which is not already on your mailing list.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

When adding products into your Bongo4U catalogue, sometimes you have extra information which doesn’t fit any of the current product fields. In such cases, you can now enable “custom product fields” on your website. You just tell the system how many custom fields you want, and thereafter the Product Add and Product Edit forms will provide you with that number of custom input fields.

The custom fields are optional. If they are left empty for a given product, then they will not be displayed in the product listings and/or on the product detail page (to conserve display space).

To enable custom product fields, login to the Admin Area of your Bongo4U website. On the admin menu, hover over “My Site…” and click “Site Properties”. (Products need to be enabled otherwise the custom fields won’t matter.) Select the desired number of custom fields from the dropdown list, and click the [Save Changes] button. That’s it!

The next time you add or edit products, you will see the custom fields. Click the “?” link beside any of the custom fields for additional details.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Previously, all product listings were displayed in a format which was three (3) columns wide. But now the number of columns can be set to a number between one (1) and six (6).

To set the number of columns for your website, login to the Admin Area of your Bongo4U website. On the admin menu, hover over “My Site…” and click “Site Properties”. (Products need to be enabled otherwise the number of columns won’t matter.) Select the desired number of columns from the dropdown list, and click the [Save Changes] button.

If the number of columns is not set, then the default of three (3) columns will continue to be used.

Please let us know if you have any questions

Just add this new block to any page, enter the @accountname of the Twitter account you wish to see, and voila — its recent tweets will be displayed on your page.

You can customize how many tweets are displayed, whether it uses a fixed size or a scrollable area, what colors to set for the box, the tweets, links, etc.

It is easy and fast to setup. Just enter the account name, optionally customize it, and you’re done.

Thereafter, on each load of the page, the most recent ‘N’ tweets will automatically be extracted from the Twitter ecosystem and displayed on your website.

Refer to the associated entry in the Bongo4U Help Centre for details:

http://help.bongo4u.com/kb/content/?anc=twitterwidget#twitterwidget

An upgrade was implemented today which changes how the previously named “Paste as Plain Text” button () works in the WYSIWYG block. (the button with a “T” on it)

Previously, when you clicked this button, a pop-up input box would appear and any content that you pasted into this input box would have its formatting removed and only the plain text would be inserted into your block once you clicked the submit button on the pop-up.

This button has been changed to be a “Plain Text Mode Toggle.” By default, pasting starts as a raw paste function that retains any embedded formatting.

Many people use the Ctrl-V short-cut to paste content. It is a universally consistent method of pasting content in many tools, utilities and systems. The previous method of stripping out the formatting was a multiple-step (slower) process.

Now, you can click this Plain Text Mode Toggle button and then your subsequent Ctrl-V paste will be done as plain text (any embedded formatting will be removed during the paste).

The first time you click the Plain Text Mode Toggle button in a session, the system will display a quick note that says, “Paste is now in plain text mode. Click again to toggle back to regular paste mode. After you paste something you will be returned to regular paste mode.”

If you change your mind, just click the Plain Text Mode Toggle button again to change modes. The background of this “T” icon changes to visually represent if Plain Text Mode is enabled or disabled.

The previous “Paste from Word” button () remains unchanged.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

As a result, the WYSIWYG Editor within Bongo4U was upgraded today. This upgrade includes logic which makes the “IE9-problematic features” compatible with the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser version 9 (IE9).

This upgrade has also implemented a change to how the Paste function of the WYSIWYG block works: read about it in this blog post.

Please let us know if you have any questions about these enhancements.

We received positive feedback when the Testimonials feature was implemented. However, we also started to get suggestions from “early adopters” who were asking us to take it further — to add the ability to group similar testimonials into categories.

For example, to be able to group comments about the organization into one category, comments about a specific product into a category about that product, comments about service into a service category, etc. Then when adding the Testimonial display block on the About Us page, select the organizational testimonials, when on the Product page select the product testimonials, when on the Service page select the service related testimonials, and so on.

This was a great idea. So we implemented it too.

And we also made it so that the category is optional when entering testimonial comments, and also when displaying them, so you can still display, for example, a random 10 testimonials from *any/all* categories if you wish. You now have lots of flexibility to customize the display of your loaded testimonials throughout your Bongo4U website.

Here is a page of FAQ entries regarding Testimonials:

http://help.bongo4u.com/kb/testimonials/

When you are in a WYSIWYG block, and you click the Upload Media icon, and upload a video file to be displayed within your block, there is an “Advanced” tab during the uploading process. If you go to the Advanced tab, there is an “Auto play” checkbox that can be on(checked) or off(empty).

Previously, for Quicktime related video types like .mov, .mp4, etc., even if the Auto-Play feature was off, sometimes the video would begin playing immediately after the page is displayed. This bug has now been fixed. However, for any video which auto-plays when it shouldn’t, you will only need to view and re-save the video’s parameters so that the updated and fixed internal code gets re-generated for each such video. See below.

For each video which currently auto-plays, but shouldn’t, do the following:

1. Edit the WYSIWYG block which contains this video.
2. Click the media icon within the WYSIWYG block which represents this video (its placeholder).
3. Click the “Select/Upload Embedded Media” icon (which looks like a piece of film).
4. In the small pop-up window, click the “Advanced” tab.
5. Ensure that the “Auto play” checkbox is off(empty).
6. Click the [Update] button at the bottom of the small pop-up window. This will close the pop-up window.
7. Click the [Save Changes] button to save your fix.

This should fix the undesirable auto-play of Quicktime-related videos. If it doesn’t, then clear your web browser cache (delete the browser’s Cache or “Temporary Internet Files”) and then try the above steps again.

If you have any questions, please submit a help desk ticket at http://Help.Emerge2.com

Thanks!