Developers' Blog

Homebuild 1.5 is Now Live

Wednesday 29th April 2009 2:54 PM

We continue to make improvements to the Homebuild Shop. With this upgrade, the following enhancements were added:

Product Search

You can now search for products within a shop. Even better, the shop uses smart searching, so matching products pop up as you type. This not only allows customers to jump to the product they're searching for but to browse the shop by typing in a few letters or a partial name and see all matching products, regardless of category.

Bounce-Back

After your customers add a product to the basket, you can now redirect back to one of seven different pages, such as lists of your recommendations, best sellers, sale items or products similar to the one they bought. You can also choose to send them to the cart to prompt a purchase decision, or back to the original category so they can continue shopping.

Replace Category Name with an Image

Some customers wanted to use an image instead of a particular category's name, such as when the category represents a particular brand with a well-known logo. This is now as easy as clicking a button.

Hide Product/Sub-Category Headings

Showing the titles reading "Products" and "Sub-Categories" is now entirely optional. Make your shop appear however you want.

Position of "More Details" Link

You can now have the "more details" link included in the short description of your products either follow on from the text or appear as a seperat elink with matching icon.

Formatted Product Descriptions

You can now format the text of your product descriptions in the same WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor used elsewhere in Homebuild.

Payment Options Sidebar

To encourage trust, you can list the payment options your shop accepts in the sidebar. Displaying the logos of world-spanning institutions helps reinforce the trustability of your own site.

As well as the shop, we have also introduced two additional improvements to Homebuild:

Google Gears

Homebuild is now integrated with Google Gears, which speeds up the site. Spend less time waiting and more time doing when you're logged into Homebuild.

Embed Videos

You can now easily add visdeo to your Homebuild pages. Either upload videos from your own computer or link to them from popular we-based video hosts such as YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, bliptv, etc.

As well as these, we've made a lot of improvements under the hood that will add to the stability and usability of the Homebuild platform. Enjoy!