As of November 1st, 2020, MeZine and ResellerDynamics have a new mailing address. Please update your records to the new address below. If any of your customers pay for their website fees by check, they will also need to update their records. We have already emailed all customers that typically pay by check, but you may wish to follow up with any of your customers who do not pay by credit card to be sure they are aware.
MeZine Inc.
Unit 8350
200-375 Water St
Vancouver, BC
V6B 0M9
UPDATE MAY 27: All templates now have an alternate text field for the header image.
We’re excited to announce new improvements to help you make your customers’ websites fully accessible to those with disabilities. These tools will allow your customers to fulfill the requirements for ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Compliance. For those customers outside of the US, there are similar rules in place in the EU and coming soon to Canada. Other countries are likely to follow. Generally, they all follow the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) put forward by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Below, let’s go over the new tools we’ve built as well as some advice we’ve given to your customers to help their site become compliant.
Note we will be doing separate updates to reseller sites (i.e. the site your customers log in through) at a later time.
Alternative Text for Images
ADA compliance requires all images to have alternative text (AKA alt text) that adequately describes the image. This is read by screen readers and refreshable braille displays for people with visual disabilities. As an added bonus, alt text may also help with search engine optimization if you use keywords as part of your image description.
If you inserted an image using the text editor’s “add image” button, note that there’s always been an option to add alt text.
However, there were some images that didn’t have the option which we fixed as follows:
“Click to Change” boxes on all page layouts:
For any product images on a Catalog layout page, we have auto-filled the alt text with your product name. You may wish to change these to better suit your images to be more descriptive.
Header Image in Template Design:
This one will be released in about a week. Further instruction will be given in a future post about this.
Labels for Buttons, Text Box Fields, Checkboxes, Radio Button Options and Drop Down Menus
These labels are not visible on your website, but have been added to our code for screen readers and refreshable braille displays to read. Here’s where this was added:
New Captcha
We have switched our old captcha to the Google’s reCAPTCHA tool which is disability friendly. It now looks like this:
Further Practical Advice
Here is a list of other ways you can make your website ADA compliant:
As a final note, we recommend searching online for more information to familiarize yourself with WCAG so you can accommodate more visitors to your website.
Effective immediately, domain pricing will be increasing from $11.99 to $17.99 per year for those resellers who opted to charge their customers for a custom domain (e.g. mywebsite.com, mywebsite.biz). Your commission of $1.99 per domain registration or renewal remains unchanged.
Our domain registration costs have increased regularly for several years, but the increases have not been reflected in our prices.
With regard to your customers, only those reseller sites that charge for a domain will have a system notice appear. We will also check those reseller sites’ pages and correct the pricing for you.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. We’ll update here as soon as the pricing is corrected. It will be done by the end of this month.
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It is a way to secure communications over the internet via encryption. HTTPS is widely used for many purposes across the internet, including securing sensitive email and payment processing. We already include HTTPS encryption on several critical parts of our website builder platform – the checkout phase of your shopping cart, for example – but we are undergoing a large project to incorporate HTTPS encryption across all pages of your website.
There has been an increase in HTTPS usage over the last few years; in 2018, overall HTTPS traffic on the internet surpassed HTTP traffic. Beginning this year, some web browsers have begun displaying warnings when visiting a site that is not encrypted via HTTPS, which may concern visitors. In the interest of protecting the communications of our customers and offering a secure guarantee to your visitors, no matter what web browser they are using, we are undergoing the process of implementing HTTPS across the board.
Most websites will not be affected when we release this update; they will continue to function as they always have, except that all traffic to your site will be automatically redirected to a secure HTTPS connection. The only potential problem will be with integration of 3rd-party services that do not support HTTPS. We expect this to be rare, and we will be personally testing large numbers of websites to ensure that these problems are dealt with. Our support team will contact you if we discover any potential problems with your website.
Our development and systems team are already hard at work on this project. While we do not have a definitive timeline to provide at this phase, we are working as quickly as we can to roll this feature out to all users. As this is a large, complex project involving thousands of websites, we ask for your patience and understanding.
Please contact our support team via the Support link in the upper right of the website builder. If you are concerned about the functionality of a 3rd-party service or code used on your website, our support team is happy to help.
Our billing phone support line will be closed over the holidays, starting at 4:00pm on December 23rd, 2014, and remaining closed through January 1st, 2015. Billing phone support will reopen at 9:00am on January 2nd, 2015. During this period, please direct any customer billing-related questions to our online support portal through your website or the Reseller Ticket Interface.
Web-based technical support including Reseller Tickets will also be closed on December 24th and 25th, 2014, and will reopen on December 26th.
From all of us at Reseller Dynamics, have a safe and happy holiday season!
As of January 1st, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has enacted new verification processes for domain registrations. ICANN is the organization that manages .com, .net and .org domains internet-wide, and they require that contact details for domain registrations are kept accurate and up to date.
As part of their new verification process, new domain registrations must be verified by email within 15 days of their registration. If your clients are registering a domain through your site, they will receive a verification email to the address on file with their website account. They must click the link in the email to verify their ownership of the domain. Domains that are not verified within 15 days will be suspended by ICANN.
In order to ensure that your clients do not encounter any issues with this new policy, we encourage all of your customers who have purchased domains through you to verify that the registrant details on file with ICANN are correct and up-to-date. To check that that the information is up to date, your clients can enter their domain into the website below:
If the Registrant contact details (particularly the email address) are out of date, your clients can contact our support team (using the link in the upper right of your website builder) to provide us with up-to-date information. Please note that if your clients are updating the details on file with their website, it does not automatically update WHOIS info, so if they have moved or changed e-mail addresses since registering their domain, the new details may not be on file with ICANN.
If any of your clients websites have been suspended by ICANN, they can reactivate it by following the instructions that will appear when they attempt to visit their domain name. This process will re-send the verification email to the registrant email address. Just click the link in the email to verify, and your domain will reactivate within 24-48 hours. Note that if your clients website has been suspended and the registrant details for their domain are inaccurate, they must contact our support team to update their details before they will be able to verify the domain.
If you have any questions about ICANN verification, please feel free to contact Brett at info@resellerdynamics.com
Coming the week of the 18th of June, we will be adjusting the way your customers signup for a new website. After months of testing, we have found that the signup method on www.CityMax.com is cleaner, and gets more people signing up. We are now sharing this new signup process with all of our resellers. Your customers, when signing up for a new account, will see a similar signup process to CityMax.com. During this new signup process, customers will not need to choose a template, pages, or anything else. They will simply be taken to a “one step” signup that removes those other sometimes confusing steps.
There is nothing you have to do as a reseller. To see what the signup process will look like, please go to www.Citymax.com/signup.htm. A default template will now be applied to all new signups. Once in the site, they can choose a template of their liking. Choosing a template on the signup is a big decision, and we would rather have people signup, and choose once in, not bail out because they don’t see a template that they like.
If you have any questions on this, please email info@resellerdynamics.com to speak to your reseller relations manager.
Resellers checks have been issued earlier this week and are on the way.
Thank you!
As you may or may not be aware, there has been a postal strike in Canada for the past few weeks. Starting today, mail will start to be delivered again. The reseller checks have alreaady been put in the mail so you should be expecting these withing the next 10-14 business days.
We apologize for the delay in getting the checks out to you. Unfortunately it was out of our control.
All the best and keep up the great selling!
Are you experiencing any reporting issues for February?
We recently launched a brand new referral program that allows your customers to earn credits towards a free website for each sale they refer to you.
While our new program has gotten a TON of positive response from resellers, rolling it out has resulted in a small bug in our reporting system.
Specifically, several resellers have reported seeing inaccurate February payout amounts on their stats dashboards over the last few days. Some payout amounts appear lower than expected. This includes seeing a “$0.00” invoice which shows a payout of negative $10.00.
We apologize for any discrepancy and we are working to resolve this to provide you with accurate stats.
Please rest assured that when you receive your payout check for February, it will reflect the accurate payout amount you are owed.
Questions? Concerns? Please don’t hesitate to email your Reseller Relations Manager, Patrick Schrodt at Patrick.schrodt@citymax.com
Again, please accept our apologies for the glitch. Thank you for your continued business!