Paul Smith’s College Launches on Buzzr Higher Education Edition

Congratulations to Paul Smith’s College on their new website, created with the Buzzr Higher Education edition. You can seeit here.

The orignal design was created by mStoner.com, our partner in Buzzr Higher Ed. mStoner is the national leader in website design and strategy in the Higher Education market. We have an exclusive deal with mStoner to partner on websites for small colleges.

The Buzzr Higher Ed platform allows mStoner to offer small colleges their services at a fraction of the million dollar price tag typical for large university websites.

The sleek design was created by mStoner and is a beautifule example of the type of sophisticated website that can be created with Buzzr.

The Paul Smith’s College website introduces a host of new features, including content hierarchy, which allows the administrator to specify which pages and which widgets the content should appear on.

We’ll follow up soon with a longer blog post describing new features of the platform and the Paul Smith’s College website in particular.

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.

Great Interview About Buzzr 2.0

Ryan Price of DrupalEasy.com sat down with me at DrupalCon for a talk about the release of Buzzr 2.0.

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.