We’re so excited to share our new website with you guys! I know what you’re thinking – it doesn’t look all that different! However, we hope that you’ll check out the short video below to see some of the new features we’ve been implementing, as well as what we have in store for the DC community for the rest of this year.
A look at what’s new at Design Cuts:
The site is running much faster
After upgrading our main website platform, tweaking various backend/front features, and many more technical aspects that are firmly in the realm of Matt/Darren (and well over my head!), you’ll notice that our website is now running considerably faster. This is great news, as your bundle pages, tutorials and everything else should be much quicker to access now.
The checkout page is more reliable
A major perk of our new platform is that the checkout process appears to be more reliable. It always frustrated us to know that checkout issues were often outside of our control, but the new system looks considerably better, and we’ve noticed an instant drop in Design Cutters experiencing issues at checkout.
Your account area has been improved – with proper invoices!
We’ve long realised that our old invoicing system wasn’t up to scratch. Not only does your new account area offer you a proper list of orders, order dates and other useful details, but you can download comprehensive pdf invoices for your records, with all of your relevant details on them.
These invoices should also reach you in an improved order confirmation email, which lists all of your order details, and includes the pdf guide as an attachment, to save you time.
If you ever need to update your personal or company details, you can also do this within the new account page tabs, and these changes will be automatically updated within your invoice documents. Handy right?
We’ve introduced a shopping cart
If you’re ever looking to purchase more than one item easily, we’ve now introduced a shopping cart area, which you’ll see a link to in the top menu. Whether you want to grab a deal that’s being re-run, alongside your main bundle, or you perhaps want to add an item from our store, you can now do all this in a single order, and easily manage your cart items in the process!
Browsing your bundle items just got a WHOLE lot easier!
This is a big one folks! It’s probably the single biggest question that we get asked:
“How can I browse and navigate my Design Cuts bundle items more easily?”
We’ve been listening hard, and teamed up with community members Janeen and Julie to undertake a HUGE project to help you guys. We asked for your feedback on Facebook, refined our browsing guides, and then worked together to provide both an improved PDF browsing guide, and an invaluable image gallery option.
In short, these browsing guides will let you:
- See a complete overview of what’s included in your bundle
- Jump to specific sections of your bundle, using a handy, hyperlinked table of contents
- See a full product description/preview images of each item within your bundle
- Allow you to use search functionality to search for specific items, designers etc…
- See every single individual item within each of the wider packs in your bundle, and browse/search for these
We’ve added the updated PDF guide and image gallery to our latest bundle. We’re also working to add these guides to every single past bundle, and anticipate this process to be completed within the next 2 weeks. Of course we’ll also be including these improved guides for all future bundles too.
If you’re wanting a sample of how awesome these new guides are, please click the link or image below to download a sample:
Download your sample updated browsing guides
We’ve incorporated VAT into our checkout process for EU customers
This has been a tough one for us, as whilst we hate having to pass any tax onto our customers, earlier this year, it became a legal requirement for all online businesses to do so. If you’re based in the EU, you will see the addition of VAT onto your order.
We do realise that many of our community weren’t anticipating this change, and to be honest, neither were we. However, in line with regulations, we’ve had to fall in line, and can only promise to be as transparent and honest about why this is with you guys.
If you click here, you can see a useful article, with more details about this VAT regulation, and how it’s effecting online businesses all over the world.
The good news is that these tax details are automatically included within your invoice documents and order receipts, which should make your personal and company records a little easier to keep. Also, if you do have an EU VAT number, inputting this at checkout will remove the VAT from your order.
Finally, we have a new blog
We’re really excited because this site update brings with it a brand new, redesigned blog area. This year we’ll be focusing much more on bringing you guys the latest site updates, news and other fun content via our blog, and we hope that it’ll be a fantastic hub for the DC community.
This is only the beginning!
What’s really exciting for us is that this site relaunch is only the beginning. We have literally hundreds of awesome new features and improvements lined up for you guys, and until we’d updated our main site platform, we just weren’t able to push forwards with these.
Now that we’ve reached Design Cuts V2.0, you’ll see regular improvements happening around the site, all of which will be done to benefit the amazing community here. We’ll be documenting all of them right here on the new blog, so you won’t miss a trick.
We’d absolutely love to know what you think about these new features, and the future direction of Design Cuts. We can’t wait to share what we have planned for you guys, and thank you as ever for your amazing feedback, loyalty and support!
– Tom, Matt, Darren, Tina, Carol and Edita (The Design Cuts Team, a.k.a the Creative Geeks).
But I still can’t pay in £GBP? The currency in London, England. Where you were born and raised…
Hey Kieran,
Thanks for the comment and the feedback! I am so sorry we have disappointed you on the currency front- we are looking into providing the option to purchase in different currencies on the site. We have lots of plans in the pipeline and hopefully this will be implemented in the not so distant future!
I hope this helps, and please don’t hesitate to contact me should you have any other questions.
Hey – I love it.
The VAT-Invoice makes it much more easier.
The rest I´ll have to check later.
See you soon!
Peter
Hey Peter,
Thanks so much for your comment! I absolutely love the updated invoicing! It will hopefully make it a lot easier to customise your invoices for your purchases!
I would love to hear what you think of the other updates when you get a chance to give them a whirl!
Ohhhh the pdf browsing guides couldn’t have come at a better time. I was just thinking how difficult it was getting with my growing resources, and similarly named bundles to find things. I was just copying and pasting the images from the online version, so was getting quite cumbersome. Thanks DC for making this update. ps loved the vid & out takes. Nice work guys & gals.
Hey Leah,
Thanks so much for your comment and we are so glad that we launched them just when you needed them! Honestly I am convinced Tom is a mind reader lol!
We really hope they will make everything a lot easier for you and you are more than welcome!
The video was so much fun to make- we had sore faces from laughing afterwards :).
This is a wonderful improvement to the buying guide! Well done and thank you. Already this is save me a ton of time. This so many wonderful resources in our packs and its shame not to get better use from them. Being able to navigate them more easily is a superb upgrade.
And like a previous commenter said, I too have found any queries quickly answered in the customer service at Design Cuts, friendly and professional. Which to be honest, is refreshing in this day and age. Well done guys!
Hey Kayleen,
Thanks for commenting and for your feedback.
We are so happy to hear that the browsing guides are already helping you out- that is exactly what we hoped for :).
Thanks also for your kind words on our customer service- that has made our day over here! We really appreciate your kind words.
I was grateful to learn you’re going back to early DC offerings and updating those with a PDF. I found the addition of the PDF a great resource and help. I’m sure others feel the same way. You’re going the “extra mile” and it IS appreciated!
Hey Artcie,
Thanks so much for your comment. We are so pleased you like the PDF guides being added to all of our bundles- we figured it made sense for all of our bundles to have them as well so the team have been working their socks off to get these ready for all of the bundles :).
We really appreciate your lovely comment- it means so much to all of us here at DC. Thanks Artcie!