Geoff and Carmela came to Buzzr. my company, and talked us through their vision. They wanted someone else to handle the technology, so he cold focus on publishing compelling information about money-saving green products, from smart cars to light bulbs. And he wanted to be able to publish his website day-to-day without the need for an in-house developer.

By using Buzzr and our Build It For Me services, Geoff and Carmela got the benefit of our highly experienced design and Drupal team, working on a streamlined, hosted social publishing platform tailored specifically for regular people who would find straight Drupal too intimidating. Geoff has a Gold Edition package, which means he was able to work with us to integrate additional features not already available on Buzzr.com’s standard feature set (now made up 195 modules.)

In the case of EnergySipp, Geoff and Carmela needed display advertising. We’ve started him off with a new feature for running Google Ad Sense display ads. We’ll roll out that feature to the rest of Buzzr.com in the spring. But it’s available to our Build It For Me customers right now.

Our guess is Geoff spent about 1/20th of what he’d have been charged to set up an equivalent site using a regular development firm creating a website from scratch, integrating and customizing dozens of modules one at a time. Instead, we used the Buzzr system of one-click deployment Quickstarts tailored for specific verticals, already packaged up with hundreds of features. We’re still able to create a completely custom layout and design, and turn features on and off with a couple of clicks.

Even with the site launched, Buzzr is staying in the picture. Our Gold Edition service includes performance monitoring, feature upgrades, training and personal support.

Check out the site at http://energysipp.com

(January 25, 2012) FootSteps Marketing, whose bricks and mortar retail client-base generate $180 million in annual revenue, announced that it selected the Buzzr Enterprise Edition as its exclusive platform for creating and maintaining the next generation of online marketing websites.

Since moving this fall from Drupal to Buzzr, average time to create a new website has shrunk from three weeks to less than three days. And, FSM has been able to train its retail store clients to update sites without assistance from FSM, previously impossible when using the much more complex Drupal platform.

The companies released a Case Study today that reviews the project.

Typical clients sites created with Buzzr Enterprise Edition include TerrysAce.com, HappyCooker.ca, ChoiceBuildingSupply.com and StewartHardware.com.

The Buzzr platform, heavily customized to meet the needs of FSM, will serve as the lynchpin of the company’s strategy to expand its service offerings the retail mass market, beyond its position as the elite provider of online marketing for independent Ace Hardware stores.

The critical feature adopted by FSM is the Buzzr Quickstart system, a method of cloning starter websites with a single click. FSM has adopted four Quickstarts, two for Ace Hardware stores and two for general retailers. The Quickstarts represent typical user cases for FSM. Cloned sites are then customized per client, using the many hundreds of features offered by Buzzr.

In addition, Buzzr created and integrated two major custom features for FSM: 1) online coupon building and distribution, including limited time specials and 2) multi-store listings and location positioning on a single map.

“Our customers need many special features on their websites. So we initially chose a very powerful open source CMS – Drupal – but its complexity was slowing down site building and overwhelming clients attempting to do content updates,” says Pat Curry, President of FootSteps Marketing. “After we switched to Buzzr, we were able shave weeks off of site building. Even better, our clients can readily handle updates.”

Buzzr Enterprise Edition is a Software as a Service (“SaaS) for multi-site website creation and management, offered as a white label solution for resellers. The product is a radically streamlined version Drupal, with a proprietary drag & drop user interface, and integrates more than 100 critical modules to create a method for the rapid implementation of websites.
BEE is a private label replica of the http://Buzzr.com self-service website building platform, and can be customized to include any of the 10,000+ Drupal open source modules. It also includes a multi-site administrative control panel, a sophisticated content management system, a point & click design suite, and a close integration with social media.

“I’m really excited we were able to handle the demands of FootSteps, a highly sophisticated client.” says Ed Sussman, CEO of Buzzr . “The large majority of our work at Buzzr is directed toward our enterprise clients. I think our highly personalized services made all the difference in the case of FootSteps.”

About Buzzr.com: Started in 2008 as a partnership between elite Drupal consulting firm Lullabot, and Ed Sussman, the former president of business websites for Inc. and Fast Company, Buzzr is designed to bridge the gap between sophisticated social content management platforms and ordinary website builders. The flagship product, Buzzr Enterprise Edition is a Software as a Service multi-site CMS and design platform that offers both Drupal back-end tools for professionals and an easy-to-use front-end interface for ordinary users. More than 100,000 websites have been built with tools created by the Buzzr team.

Contact: Ed Sussman, ed@buzzr.com or 212-867-4680.

About FootSteps Marketing : FootSteps Marketing (“FSM”) started as the largest provider of websites to independent Ace Hardware stores in the United States. Its dozens of clients generate $180 million in annual revenue. Founded by five large Ace Hardware dealers, and online marketing expert Patrick Curry, FSM recently expanded its mission to include providing online marketing for all types of independent brick and mortar retailers. Its strategy is to transcend its origins as a specialty web design shop and become a mass market provider of online marketing services.

FootStepsMarketing.com

Contact Patrick Curry, pat@footstepsmarketing.com or 970-510-5233

For those unable to open the PDF of the case study, partial text is reproduced below.

FootSteps Marketing

Organization Background
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FootSteps Marketing (“FSM”) started as the largest provider of websites to independent Ace Hardware stores in the United States. Its dozens of clients generate $180 million in annual revenue. Founded by five large Ace Hardware dealers, and online marketing expert Patrick Curry, FSM recently expanded its mission to include providing online marketing for all types of independent brick and mortar retailers. Its strategy is to transcend its origins as a specialty web design shop and become a mass market provider of online marketing services.

Objective
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FSM’s objective was to: 1) dramatically reduce the average build-time of three weeks to create client websites; 2) enable customers to easily handle content updates, and other website administrative tasks, without daily help from FSM; 3) lower the required skill level necessary to create and run websites; 4) maintain advanced SEO features and, sophisticated content management, such as customizing a constantly changing roster of online coupons.

FSM’s typical client generates more than $1 million in annual revenue. None have in-house expertise in online marketing, so clients require substantial guidance and support. This is FSM’s niche. FSM site building packages range from $3,000 to $6,000 (offered with monthly payment options) and support ranges from $195/mo to $595/mo. At this price point, expectations are very high. Instead of static brochure sites, FSM gained a client following by creating websites with constantly updated content to make the site attractive for repeat visitors. For example, FSM sites offer weekly coupons that could be created and viewed online, then e-mailed or printed out.

To meet these complex demands, FSM chose to create its websites with Drupal, probably the most robust content management on the market. With more than 10,000 modules and 15,000 active developers who are part of the “open source” Drupal project, it has been used to create thousands of leading enterprise websites with intense content management demands, including WhiteHouse.gov, Economist.com, and Grammy.com.

However, while FSM was able to build a growing roster of clients by leveraging Drupal’s extensive feature set, as it expanded it faced significant challenges: 1) Drupal is a very complex platform to use. It typically takes even experienced programmers months to master. Consequently, FSM had to hire expensive Drupal consultants and in-house programming talent. Even with these experts, creating new features, such as multi-store location maps, was difficult; 2) Drupal sites are very time consuming to build from scratch. Even simple sites can take weeks to build; 3) Drupal’s administrative interface is too complex for typical end users, such as hardware store managers, to be able to update and maintain their sites day-to-day.

After reviewing the market for alternatives, FSM approached Buzzr about the Buzzr Enterprise Edition. Buzzr is built on Drupal and its most important modules, but has been radically overhauled so that non-technical users can build and maintain sites using sleek drag & drop / point & click tools. Sites that took weeks can now be built in just days. FSM liked that Buzzr’s lead developers and co-owners are Lullabot, one of the world’s most elite Drupal consulting firms, whose clients include MarthaStewart.com, Sony Artists and The Grammys. Buzzr Enterprise Edition offers all of the several hundred site building features available on the branded self-service site, Buzzr.com, along with multi-site administrative controls to manage thousands of websites.

Clients can also secure additional modules from Drupal’s extensive library or request that Buzzr’s team engineer custom features. More complex features can be shielded from the view of clients who require a simpler administrative interface. Hosting, performance monitoring, security patches and regular feature upgrades are also included as part of the SaaS offering.

Approach
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Buzzr began by installing a copy of platform on its servers and inserting the FSM logo to create a branded environment. FSM also chose a URL to serve as a browser-based access point.

Next, FSM and Buzzr isolated website user cases that represented typical clients for FSM. These included 1) single Ace Hardware stores (two variations); 2) multi-store locations sharing the same website; and 3) “houseware” retail stores not related to Ace hardware.

The teams then worked together to build a client website using Buzzr – for Terry’s Ace Hardware in Colorado – to serve as the model for the first
custom “Quickstart.” Quickstarts are starter sites that have packages of features, permissions, content, layout and design configured for a special use case. Quickstarts can be cloned with one click. Buzzr includes many pre-built Quickstarts for verticals (e.g. lawyer, doctor, restaurant) and clients can also request any website built with Buzzr be converted.

As part of the build, Buzzr was commissioned to program two new custom features: a new, comprehensive web coupon system and, a new multi-location mapping system. Several additional existing Drupal modules, especially around SEO, were integrated to extend functionality beyond the Buzzr feature set.

After TerryAce.com, two other newly created client sites were built solely by the FSM team, then converted into Buzzr Quickstarts. The FSM team was trained on back end multi-site administrative tasks, as well as new features, and a simpler interface was exposed to FSM’s clients. For the first time, clients were given access to their sites to do content updates, create coupons and monitor site activity.

Results
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• Turnaround time on new sites reduced from about three weeks to three days.

• Average number of monthly site visitors tripled to 3500.

• Customer’s satisfaction greatly increased after providing them with self-service administrative tools.

• Typical clients sites are TerrysAce.com, HappyCooker.ca and ChoiceBuildingSupply.com

Going Forward
_______________________________

• FSM marketing outreach intensified to multiple national trade shows for non-hardware retailers, sporting goods and housewares stores.

• FSM is expanding into the >$1500 price range market for websites and plans to rely heavily on the large range of existing Buzzr Quickstarts (e.g. florist, general contractor, art gallery, etc.)

• FSM off loading more than a dozen new feature requests to Buzzr so it can focus on better serving clients

———————————————————————
For more info, contact info@Buzzr.com or call Ed Sussman 001-212-867-4680

Learn about our Multisite Editions at Buzzr.com

The Cinnamon Network is a network of over 60 leaders of various Christian denominations and charities who formed in September, 2010 to have conversations with government policy advisers about society and the Church. Members include the Church of England and the Salvation Army.

Their new Buzzr-created website, www.communityfranchising.net connects 4,000 U.K. churches with the dozens of charitable programs available for them to offer to their communities. In addition to comprehensive listings describing non-profit “franchises” that churches can join concerning Family Life, Addiction, Education, Housing, Finding Work, etc., the Cinnamon Network provides a social feedback loop for church leaders to rate and review the programs. The ratings are then combined into an aggregate score.

The website was presented at a meeting of more than 100 CEOS and Denominational leaders. “They see it as a key resource for churches to intelligently inform themselves about charitable franchises,” says Geoffrey Knot of Cinnamon Network.

Rather than create the initial website design and feature configuration themselves, the Cinnamon Network bought the Buzzr Professional Edition Professional Edition They also asked us to create a custom feature, for enhanced and aggregated ratings, which we were glad to do, especially after the Cinnamon Network offered to contribute the feature back to the general Buzzr.com community.

Thanks to the new feature, every franchise program can be created based on seven criteria, such as meeting the needs of the community, seeing people added to church, and training by the franchisor.

We’re incredibly pleased to have The Cinnamon Network as part of the Buzzr platform.

It’s because of this that we’ve added our new PayPal feature. When you turn on the feature (in Features/Permissions on your site), you’ll see a new icon in Add Content to add a Product/Service.

The form that pops up will let you do a few things: add a headline for the product, a description, a few images, a price. Plus there’s a field to insert code for a PayPal button/widget. PayPal offers several types of buttons that can be configured to allow different types of payments. You’ll need to open a PayPall account and get the code to create a button.

After someone pays on PayPal, they are automatically routed back to your website. PayPal accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, plus PayPal online transfers.

You can arrange your products for sale on a menu page on Buzzr (sorted as you please: alphabetically, by star rating, by most recent entry, etc.) or as a widget that can be dragged and dropped into any position on any page on your website. That includes the homepage.

You can also add PayPal buttons to am image gallery if you’d like to take advantage of image gallery features such as large pop-up slideshows.

We think you’ll find the Buzzr PayPal feature to be fast and easy to set up — and much less of a hassle than running a full e-commerce website, which you probably don’t need if you aren’t an online retailer.

Let me know what you think.

Every Buzzr site is divided into regions. For example, there’s the header, the wallpaper, the center well, the side columns, and the menu. By clicking on that region, you can change its color or upload a new image behind it, or stretch so it’s wider or taller.

We’ve created a new video to show you the ins and outs of the Design suite. You can find it on our videos page at https://www.buzzr.com/how-to-videos or on our You Tube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/BuzzrWebsites

Let me know what you think of the design suite.

For those of you who don’t know, Drupal is an open source platform that developers use to create enterprise websites, like WhiteHouse.gov, TheEconomist.com and MarthaStewart.com.

Buzzr simplifies and streamlines Drupal with an entirely original interface. Drupal is a very complex developer tool that takes months to master, but with Buzzr, in just minutes, regular, non-techie people can build websites with the same great publishing power.

Here’s some of what you’ll see:

Auto-Tweet: Want to attract a giant new audience? But you don’t always know what to tweet or you’d like to save time jumping back and forth between your website and Twitter? Buzzr is now an official Twitter App. If you sign up your website with your Twitter account, when you do something new on your site, such as uploading an image, writing a blog post, or posting a press release, a tweet will automatically be configured for you. The tweet even has a link back to the page on your site with the new content. You can look the tweet over and change if you’d like (or delete it), or just leave it as it is. As soon as you save the new content to your site, the tweet is published to your Twitter account.

If all of this is new to you, you can sign up for our Social Media Support Service and we’ll coach you along. Be sure to read the Buzzr 101 Guide if you’d like more information about setting up Auto-Tweet on your site. http://www.buzzr.com/help/buzzr_help/starter_guide-auto_tweet

Quickstarts: Much more than a style or theme, a Quickstart is a fully configured sample site specific to a category.  We’ve thought through design, navigation, pages, forms and feature configurations, as well as provided sample images and content.  That said, with Buzzr, you can still customize any element of the site, from colors to content to features. We’ve debuted with Quickstarts for Business Goods, Retail, Specialty Goods, an Art Gallery, Churches, Non-Profits (two variations), Doctors and Lawyers. That’s just a start, we have dozens more we’ll be rolling out.  If you see a Quickstart you like, and it’s not in your category, don’t be afraid to use it anyway. You can completely re-configure and redesign it for your purpose in just minutes.

We still have starter Styles if you’d like to create a site without any special industry category pre-configured. And new ones will continue to debut.

Design: You asked for, you got it.  It’s like Dreamweaver that ordinary people can use. Buzzr now has a point and click color wheel that can be used to styles almost any region on a site. Wallpaper, header, widgets, content well, typeface, borders and more.  You can also upload an image and use it as the backdrop for any region on the site. That’s just to start: you can also adjust the padding between elements, increase the column dimensions by width or length, and in general, play with the spacing of your site ad infinitum. You can even save an unlimited number of designs for your site, and jump back and forth between the ones you like. And we still have an advanced CSS editor for the professionals who use Buzzr. Our Design Tool has so many great features, that we’ve written a guide (not nearly as long as the one that probably came with your camera!) to take you through it.  http://www.buzzr.com/help/buzzr_help/starter_guide-design

Plus we have loads of other new features we’ve been perfecting, including Groups/Forums, Calendars, Website Activity Stream, audio hosting and integration with Facebook and You Tube.

And, of course, we still offer our intuitive drag and drop interface, and the most control anywhere as to exactly who can do what on your site (e.g. write press releases, blog, moderate comments.) Plus it’s all hosted, so we take care of updates

If you choose our free trial offer, you’ll also see we now offer three personal service offerings for people who want extra support: Social Media Suport, Search Engine Optimization Support, and Premium Buzzr Support. I’ll be writing more about these services and  our Build It For Me option in another post.

Let me know what you think! You can reach me at Ed@buzzr.com

Ed Sussman
CEO

As we gear up for the official launch of the Buzzr.com DIY solution, we’re especially excited about our new color picker feature. It’s a pretty amazing tool for creating or adjusting styles — you can change colors, spacing and fonts of virtually any element on the page.

We have the very talented people at ONE Agency, based in Belgium, to thank for this incredible tool, and the lead developers Kristof De Jaeger and Jan-Yves Vanhaverbeke. They are working feverishly on the project, and contributing the code to the world at large, through a new open source Drupal module called Sweaver. We’ve been helping out a bit where we can — our patches are being committed by Buzzr lead developer Karen Stevenson. Time permitting, when we launch, she”ll be writing a blog post about her work with integrating Sweaver into Buzzr. We’ve streamlined it to make it simpler for regular users and are working to make it compatible with our existing styles.

I must admit that despite having now worked with open source Drupal for almost five years, I still can feel a sting when I see a competitor (we really only have one and their platform is mostly for Drupal pros, not the ordinary user Buzzr is targeting) has adopted a tool we spent a great deal of time and money developing. True, we released it for the world to use freely, and in exchange, we get the benefit of any improvements the world gives back to the project. But I still get a little miffed when I know a competitor’s site would be much weaker were it not for ideas we developed.

I’ve confided this feeling in the past to my colleague Angie Byron, or “webchick”, the co-lead of Drupal 7, the next release of Drupal, and an important contributor to the Buzzr project. Angie is always reminding me that the nature of open source is give and take — and that Buzzr gets a huge amount from the Drupal community. It’s allowed us to create a platform for a few hundred thousand dollars that would have otherwise cost many millions of dollars, possibly tens of millions.

Nothing has brought that concept home more than the Sweaver theme module, the result of thousands of hours of work that we now get for free. The ONE Agency is going to do their own commercial work around Sweaver, and I’m delighted we can help make it better in any way we can. For all I know, we’ll end up offering similar services to certain clients. But when it comes to Sweaver, we’re friends and co-workers, not competitors. And that’s pretty amazing.

An update for those awaiting the official launch: we’ve pushed it back just a tad to incorporate Sweaver. We’re coming soon.

-we’ll debut a service (now in beta) to assist small clients create custom designs and feature configurations, along with coaching to take charge of running a great professional-grade site all by themselves.

-we’ll have our DIY platform ready to take out of beta, with a slew of important new features that will make it easier than ever for regular people to create and run their own powerful websites.

-we’ll be adding social features that create a whole network of activity for our site builders and site members beyond site-building tools. It’s what creates the Buzz in Buzzr and is the most ambitious part of our company plan — and also the trickiest to execute.

-we’ll be announcing at least one important new partnership.

In the meantime, check out our Showcase of sites created with the Buzzr platform and let me know what you think. (Keep in mind we have a bunch of new features set to debut that have not yet been incorporated into these sites.)

If you’d like to join us — whether as a customer, staff member or freelancer, feel free to e-mail me at ed@buzzr.com.

Cheers,

Ed Sussman
CEO

Buzzr.com