I’m excited about today, because we deployed a huge set of updates to production. Almost 40 closed tickets, a lot of design improvements and updates, three weeks of work and polishing. We want to keep you up to date about releases like this one, so here’s what we came up with.
We recently redesigned our welcome emails and I want to share the process we went through.
First, Natalie started with the copy in a Writeboard and did 7 or 8 revisions while polishing it. After she was happy with it I started working on the design. Obviously neither our newsletters nor new changeset email design (more on this soon) worked for this task, so I went right into the HTML and came up with this:
This week we are featuring Assistly, a help desk support software that’s been generating some buzz recently. I was talking to someone at Indy Hall where we work, they mentioned they are using Assistly (currently in private beta), which sounded familiar. I then realized they are a Beanstalk customer and had to feature them. I caught up with Jeremy Suriel, who was nice enough to respond on short notice.
On Friday night, starting at around 11:45PM EST, we will be updating Beanstalk with a huge update. Downtime of about one hour is expected for deployments, integrations and the activity stream on accounts, but SVN and Git will still be operating normally.
Now to the fun stuff. Here are some of the awesome features you can look forward to.
We’ve been working on some amazing updates to our deployment tools. Here is a quick peek at one of the screens. It should be ready very soon!
In addition to annual billing, the update we pushed to Beanstalk today also includes a new and refreshed look for our wizard pages, which is closer to the form design we added a couple of weeks ago. We also spent some time on making the copy, labels and form fields more consistent. It is important that you pay attention to every tiny detail in your app, even if it’s just a simple field label. I have to admit that over the months some changes made it to production without approval by a designer, so it feels good that we were finally able to fix these inconsistencies. Even if most of you probably won’t notice the changes, it was worth the time.
We have tons of customers who have requested the ability to pay for a year of their Beanstalk service in advance, most of the time because their accounting departments request it. So, today’s we’ve launched the ability to do so.
