We "Upendo" to Write for You!

Depending on who you ask, you’ll be the recipient of a very passionate response when you ask any DNN’er their opinion about DNN upgrades.  In general, upgrading DNN is very similar to any other ASP.NET application.  Yet, when things go wrong, people tend to blame the application itself.  Don’t get me wrong, the respective application can and sometimes does have something to do with an issue that may occur, but in my experience, that’s the exception and not the rule.  Here are some tips to help you have a less "exciting" time the next time you have to upgrade DNN.

Upendo Ventures, a U.S. leader in e-commerce and CMS development and expert in DNN and Hotcakes Commerce, has announced that it’s DNN services have expanded after joining the DNN partner program.  This is great news for companies looking for built-in integrations, social communities, and advanced content management features found in the line of Evoq DNN products.

Last night, I had the pleasure of presenting to the Toronto Area DNN Users Group (a.k.a., TADUG), hosted by Aderson Oliveira.  TADUG is currently enjoying a revival, so I couldn’t pass up this opportunity.  He asked me to bring some e-commerce goodness to their user group, and I hope I delivered.  In this presentation and Q&A, we discuss some of the most critical trends and techniques that e-commerce website owners should remember.  Spoiler alert…  There are actually 6 tips in this presentation.  Surprise!

The summer makes us all feel busier than usual.  There’s always so much activity.  As a result, June’s meeting didn’t have the normal level of attendance, but we surprisingly had some great conversations, ideas, and energy around increasing traction.  We had excellent discussions about community-generated content, content locations, and theming our participation.

It’s taken me nearly a month to carve out the time to post this blog post, but the video went live the same day.  In the future, I’m going to put in the extra effort to draft and publish this announcement much sooner.  It seems that the warmer weather makes us all busier, and I’m apparently not immune to this.  Please enjoy our May 2018 meeting video!

We deal with companies of all sizes, but we have to work with small businesses slightly differently.  Why?  You can probably guess why… Budget.  Even if a small business does have a budget for certain things, it’s often difficult for small business owners to justify certain expenses.  One of these things includes branding – especially logos and artwork for your social media channels.

If you’ve never done your own e-mail marketing campaign, the very idea of it can be quite overwhelming – intimidating at the least.  Your head will be full of questions and you’ll like not know where to start.  But that’s just it.  You must start.  As our friends at Nike would say, “Just do it!”  So let’s get started!

I know what you’re thinking, “What do you mean, version 3.2 is out? I haven’t heard about version 3.1!”  No worries… Version 3.1 did come out and it was released, but none of the marketing materials went out to announce it.  I’m taking the initiative to announce both releases at this time.  They are exciting releases too – with 3.1 offering support for variants in promotions and 3.2 supporting UPS Freight.

There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about TLS compliance requirements.  There’s good reason for this, because notable vendors that are known for being on the forefront of security such as Authorize.net, PayPal, and UPS began notifying their partners and vendors about two years ago.  Everyone else began receiving similar notifications about a year ago.  What does this all mean though?

December is the PERFECT time to be strategic and lay out a plan for the coming year in four key strategic areas. And if you do it now, then December can become “Stratember” where you jump weeks of months ahead of your competition. Here’s what you should do now.