Great New Rating/Review Non-Profit Website in U.K.

When The Cinnamon Network, a U.K. non-profit, approached Buzzr about creating a website with Buzzr, they had two goals: finding a comprehensive social publishing platform anda platform they could run themselves, without a technical team. After shopping around, Cinnamon Network founder Geoff Knott decided Buzzr was the right solution and in just three weeks, we were able to help them launch an incredibly ambitious website

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.

Introducing Buzzr’s New PayPal feature for E-commerce

We know lots of our customers want e-commerce but without the hassle of setting up, paying for and running an elaborate e-commerce website. For example, you might want to sell tickets for a seminar. Or take donations. Or sell a 10 or 15 items from your retail store.

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.

Check Out Our New Design Video

Buzzr has an incredibly powerful design tool. It’s like Dreamweaver-lite in the cloud.

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.