This means that you can now send invoices to your clients from your own URL, like billing.mycompany.com. This would no doubt make your invoices look even more professional. Of course, if you are happy using the default subdomain with curdbee.com for your invoices, you can continue to use it as you have been doing so far.

Getting Started

The process of configuring your own domain (or subdomain) with CurdBee is simple. First, you will need to create a new CNAME record entry for your domain, which should be a subdomain like section.example.com .

To add a new CNAME Record for your domain, use the DNS panel of your domain registrar. There, enter the subdomain you wish to use as the Name. For example, if you want to use www.example.com then enter ‘www’ as the name. Then enter your current CurdBee subdomain (i.e. example.curdbee.com) as the corresponding value to your CNAME (some DNS interfaces may label it as Host Name or Data).

Next, you will need to update your CurdBee settings. Login to your CurdBee account, and go to Settings > Company Profile. There, scroll down to the section called Custom Domain and specify the full domain name you want to assign to your CurdBee account (for example section.example.com). Click Save Changes and you’re ready to go!

You can now create and send a test invoice to verify whether the URL change has been successfully applied.

Please Note

It may take up to 48 hours for your DNS changes to propagate throughout the Internet. During this period your custom URL may not be accessible from all geographical regions. Please verify that your new URL is reachable before sending out invoices.

Also please note that custom domains will be used only on your external invoices and estimates (which are sent to the clients). To access the CurdBee app, you will still need to use your CurdBee subdomain.

If you run into any issues when configuring this feature, feel free to contact us.

As a SME ourselves, we’re well aware that price is a big issue when putting together our workspaces. However, we also strongly believe that for small companies to work well they need to have the best tools for the job. In fact, with that in mind, we’ve been working on something that we’re now finally ready to reveal!

With the year drawing to a close and CurdBee doing great, we’re excited to be able to give our loyal userbase a little something for the holidays. That’s right, after a good run in 2009 thanks to your constant feedback and encouragement, CurdBee is here and handing out the good stuff in the form of Bundles, a unique new promotion from your favourite online invoicing service.

Cool, right? While you’re at it though, be sure to look inside. This isn’t just $25/mo value for $10. This is the chance to get online invoicing forever for just a fraction of what you’d usually pay. While a PRO account usually costs $5/mo, now you get a chance to get everything we have to offer for just double that, a figure that will remain unchanged through future price revisions. As your invoicing needs grow, and we develop more modules, you can of course continue to add to your CurdBee package. The features you purchase with this Bundle however, will always be priced at $10/mo, no matter how long you stay with us.

If you’re think about expansion and growth, and want to be sure that your invoicing package grows with you, now’s the time to plan ahead and get the features you know you will need in the months to come. So think about it, but don’t think too much – there are only 200 hundred of these offers available and if our initial research is anything to go by, they’ll be going like hotcakes.

It’s the end of the year, and as you plan for the next, remember that despite the economy, we’re all going to grow together. So plot, plan, and consider a Bundle. It may be just what your small business needs right now!

We wrote our billing system from scratch, since we wanted more flexibility with yearly billing option, PayPal payments and especially to allow easy billing capabilities for more great ideas we have in our white boards for CurdBee users in the time to come. However the implementations are never easy as on paper and we had to take little more time to tweak some of the processes and do the account migration from our old system.

So now you can start upgrading your accounts to Pro, add modules and view billing history.

We are working hard on restoring these features and will keep you updated on the progress here. Hopefully we should be able to restore these features within next couple of days (2nd week of November 2009).

It all started a few months back when we conducted our first set of in-depth analyses on the CurdBee website. Since going live last May to mark the launch of CurdBee Pro Edition, we got some excellent feedback from our users and also got featured on a number of prominent design/CSS galleries.

A few weeks passed, and as we tracked our visitors we noticed that the site’s bounce rates were pretty high (averaging 41%) and that our primary goal conversion (new visitor to free account sign up) was averaging at 4.2%. Our single page website (V1) was doing much better than this in terms of conversions and the bounce rate there was significantly lower as well.

With a revamp, sometimes it takes a couple of weeks for things to settle down and show some regular patterns. Yet, this was not the case with CurdBee V2, and we thus went back to the drawing board to think of possible solutions.

Conducting a few tests and interviewing some users during the next few weeks, where we were able to capture some interesting thoughts,

“I don’t know whether it’s only me, but I like your previous site. It was simple and clean. ”

“The site looks nice, but the header and footer are bit too dark, more white could have been nicer.”

Now that information was really valuable to us. We needed a little more proof before deciding what we would do though, and for hard data we turned to Crazy Egg, for some heatmap analysis.

After running these tests for a while in two separate instances, we were able to spot some of the main issues affecting the numbers.

1. Sign up, Upgrade and Extend are not links, yet visitors click them more often. Why? Do they look like links?
2. Visitors haven’t paid much attention to the screenshots in the highlights section. Didn’t they realize they are clickable and that they can view the full image?
3. The main call to action via the “Sign-up Now” button at the bottom of the features list hasn’t had much clicks on it either. Wasn’t it visible enough, especially since it was placed towards bottom of the page where users would have had to scroll down?

The problems were clear enough and we started looking for solutions. The result? CurdBee V3!

Is that all? Nope. We have more upgrades and updates, many of which have been requested again and again by our users.

Pay CurdBee with Amex and PayPal

To date we were only able to accept payments with Master and Visa credit cards,  and we’ve been getting a lot of requests asking the same questions over and over again – Do you accept PayPal?, Can I pay with Amex?.

So, we thought hey, why not make life easier for CurdBee users? As of today, both these options are now available. As far as I know, CurdBee is one of the few online billing apps to accept PayPal and we are hopeful to see a 14% increase in sales – at least, that’s what PayPal advertises on their website.

New Billing System with Yearly Payments

Yes, you heard it right. We have enabled a Yearly Subscription option for those who would like to pay upfront and enjoy a year’s worth of billing without needing to think about monthly payments. Also, with the yearly subscription, you will be only paying for 10 months (saving 17%), whether you go for the Pro Edition or for module upgrades. Check our pricing page for more details on this.

Processing payments on a daily basis and then seeing which ones go through, which cards fail, and then notifying users – that’s quite a lot of work and we need at least couple of hours to monitor all that on a daily basis.

“What if we make our billing date to 01^st of every month?” I asked Laskshan. We were analysing all the pros and cons and noticed that making CurdBee bill on a single day could be more beneficial in the long run, and that’s what we’ll be doing from now on.

Improved Support Section

At Vesess, we’ve always been passionate about providing our users with good support. With the launch of this new CurdBee site however, we’re taking our help desk experience to a whole new level. The main changes that our users will notice to the support section of CurdBee are the inclusion of a discussion forum and the introduction of a searchable knowledgebase.

The Discussions portion of the Support Section will allow users to create and reply to conversation threads. From problems to bugs and feature requests, this is where you want to end up if you want to connect with the CurdBee team as well as fellow users. We hope that the discussions space will grow quickly to become a place where CurdBee users can come to find quick, reliable help, and we’ll be doing everything in our power to make sure that this space remains productive for all involved.

Next, our new Articles section will function as an archive of tips, tricks and guides related to CurdBee. As a somewhat extensive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, this part of the Support Section will be particularly useful for new users, since we plan on documenting all of CurdBee’s basic functions here using an easy to navigate format.

New Demo Feature – Touch and feel the difference

Finally, and this is one of the updates we’re most excited about, you can now try CurdBee PRO for free, with all features enabled. While we hope this will encourage more of you to upgrade to PRO, you can try the full version and then go back to using the Standard Edition if you feel it’s sufficient for you.

So, why did we decide to add this feature? Going through our access logs in the run up to releasing this version of the site, we saw that a lot of users tended to make two accounts with us. First, they would create a test account to try it out and then create a legitimate one to use on a daily basis. We thought that allowing them to try PRO would limit the need for this, and that’s exactly what we implemented.

While screenshots and videos are nice, we want you to really experience the power of CurdBee PRO before you decide for or against it. We’re confident that in most cases, our full version will benefit you in more than one way and that you will definitely decide to keep using it. Don’t take our word for it though, go ahead and see for yourself.

These updates have taken a while, but we’re pretty happy with the end result. We hope you enjoy them too, and that you’ll continue to use CurdBee and introduce/recommend CurdBee to your colleagues, customers and friends who are looking for a simple and efficient online invoicing solution. While you check out these updates though, we’re off to the drawing board again to begin planning the Bee’s next iteration. As always, if you’ve got questions, comments and criticism, we’d love to hear from you, so do drop us a line. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to deliver the best billing experience in the months and years to come!

PS. If you’d like to see CurdBee previous home pages, here they are.

Our new PDF generation process is powered by WKHTMLTOPDF, which is a shell utility tool based on the webkit rendering engine and qt. It can seamlessly convert any HTML page to PDF while preserving all CSS styling and formatting, and well, that’s exactly what we wanted. The integration of this tool in to our Rails app was a cinch thanks to this plugin called WickedPDF.

We also redesigned the app’s Printer-friendly view to align with the new PDF view, and as some of you requested, now both the PDF and Printer-friendly versions of each invoice will show your custom logo.

Here is a sample PDF generated through CurdBee. If you’d also like to send easy and awesome PDF invoices like this, consider upgrading to CurdBee PRO today!

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.

To clarify:
Parter with a TopSpin or similar or build your own website, but what you NEED to do is this – give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people’s email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special – make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters… whatever.

Read the full discussion

Given the state of the economy, it is important to recognize the declining value of the United States dollar. Without getting deep into this topic, note the 97% drop in dollar value over the past century. With numerous causes for inflation transpiring, including bailouts, government “stimulus”, and foreign spending, one can only expect a greater loss of purchasing power in the near future. So what specific steps can a web designer take to plan for continuous currency devaluation? The three strategies below can help cut costs in the long-term without sacrificing the level of work and service delivered to clients.

Top 3 Cost-Cutting Strategies for Web Designers

(Thanks for mentioning CurdBee as an option!)