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Reduce Site Costs with the Cloud
Any news site that publishes regularly will eventually accrue an impressive amount of media in the form of images, audio, video and digital editions. Bondware has long supported integration with Amazon's S3 cloud storage service to help clients reduce the cost of storage and bandwidth. In the past, clients had to setup their own Amazon S3 accounts which can be a bit daunting for newcomers.
With this release, we have taken the Amazon cloud integration one step further by eliminating the need for clients to create their own Amazon S3 accounts. New sites can simply toggle a setting in the admin area to start saving money immediately on site images and files. Please contact Bondware customer support for assistance migrating older files to S3 in bulk.
Four New Templates Available
The development team and support staff are pleased to announce the availability of the four new desktop design templates. You can review these templates under Admin|Design|Desktop|Templates.
New official templates include:
- Standard Media
- Entertainment Media
- Banner Publication
- Publication with Side Nav
All these templates support color themes under the Design|Site Design menu.
 Writers & Bylines
Based on feedback and observation of client usage patterns, we have decided to further simplify the writer/editor functionality that was added several releases back.
With this release, we are eliminating the editor concept as editors and admins turned out to be one-and-the-same for most of our clients.
Also, we will be replacing the notion of assigning writers to specific sections in favor of a simple list of writers that can submit articles.
Improved Analytics Support
We understand the importance of site analytics to most of our clients. Bondware has limited stats/tracking included because there are numerous and powerful online tools that provide this service at little or no cost. The ability to integrate with these 3rd party services (such as Google Analytics) can help your better understand your online readership and makes a world of difference when you're selling advertising to sophisticated buyers.
In this release, we have added a new option under Admin|Settings|Analytics/Third-Party Scripts where you can easily paste embed codes from 3rd party services and feel confident that it will work across desktop/mobile/etc.
Introducing a New Service - Mobile News Apps
With the maturation of the Bondware software/service, our team is starting to look at new ways we can serve our customers. One question we hear frequently is "Do you build mobile apps?" We are pleased to announce that we are starting to work with select clients to build mobile apps that compliment their current Bondware sites. Obviously, pulling news content from Bondware will be a key feature along with sending app notifications of breaking news, etc. Other features might include featured photos, videos, "About Us", "Contact Us", a map to business and viewing of social media activity for your business. Anyone who has priced app development for Apple and Android devices knows it is not cheap. However, we believe we can offer this service at a competitive price. That said, each client app will be unique and will require a custom quote for the initial development and monthly recurring charges. If you are interested in this service, please contact sales@bondware.com or call us at 615-333-7775.
Last Word
We hope you enjoy this release. As usual, it includes many improvements to templates, elements and general bug fixes. You can learn more about the new features in our online knowledge base athttp://www.bondware.com/help.
Frank customer feedback is valuable to us. Please help make us better by completing ourCustomer Survey. You can choose to be completely anonymous or have us call you about a specific issue.
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