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
All reseller sites on newer templates now have a cookies notice appearing at the bottom of your website and your customers also have the same option for their own website. This was created to be compliant with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the US and Europe.
Please note that the text is set and will link to to our general Privacy Policy. We will also be making some other smaller changes to be compliant with GDPR in the future. With regards to your customers, the following was just announced:
We’re excited to announce that you will now be able to turn on a cookies notice that your visitors will see upon visiting your website. This was created to be compliant with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the US and Europe.
The goal of GDPR is transparency for your visitors so they understand that some of their information will be saved temporarily to enhance their experience on your website. A cookie file basically remembers a prior action that you want memorized as you visit other webpages. On your website, the cookie file is primarily for saving items in a shopping cart so that a visitor can continue browsing your website without losing those items. It is also used to memorize that a person has logged into a message board, voted in a poll or logged into their express checkout account when checking out their cart (if you have turned this turned on).
You may turn the cookies notice on or off anytime by going to “My Pages” -> “Privacy Policy” and checkmarking the box “Check to turn on your cookie notice per General Data Protection Regulartions (GDPR).” Then, click “Save.”
Now when visitors come to your website, they will see a notice at the bottom of your pages. It will have a link to your privacy policy which you may edit by clicking on “My Pages” and then “Privacy Policy.” As your visitor browses your website, the notice will stay put until they close the notice. Per GDPR, the notice will not reappear for 365 days or until your visitor deletes the cookie file for the notice on their browser. Sometimes people will occasionally delete all browser cookies which would automatically clear out the cookie notice file.
Can I edit the text for the cookies notice?
All cookie notices default to “To enhance your user experience on our website, this site uses cookies. If you continue to browse, you accept the use of cookies on our site. See our Privacy Policy for more information.” It was intentionally set this way to broadly cover all our customers. Also, per GDPR, for the type of cookies used on your website, you do not require your visitors to specifically agree to use of your website’s cookies. Instead, visitors need only be notified that cookies are used.
Can I change the color of the cookies notice?
Yes, but only if you are using an Enhanced Template and are comfortable with CSS coding otherwise please contact our support team to help you. Click on “Design” and then go to “Edit Current Template” and click on “Advanced Options.” From there, you will want to make changes to the [#cookie-container] CSS ID.
How come I don’t see the cookies notice?
If you don’t see the cookies notice, first make sure you have turned it on by going to “My Pages” and then “Privacy Policy.” Check mark the box near the top to turn it on.
If you still don’t see it, it’s probably because you need to clear your cookies on your browser as you’ve previously closed the notice. As another option, a faster way to see your cookies notice is to open a new incognito window (this allows you to browse the internet anonymously) then go to your website. On Chrome for Windows, press Ctrl+Shift+N and for Mac press Command+Shift+N. On Firefox for Windows, press Ctrl+Shift+P and for Mac press Command+Shift+P. Then, go to your website.
Will the notice appear on the mobile version of my website?
Yes. Regardless of whether you have mobile enabled for your website or not, the cookies notice will appear if it’s turned on.
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.
UPDATE 8:36 AM, May 16, 2020 – Maintenance is complete. All sites are back up. Thanks everyone for your patience. Have a great weekend!
UPDATE 7:00 AM, May 16, 2020 – Maintenance has started and sites are down.
Due to electrical maintenance at our network provider’s data center, we were just informed that all of their networking infrastructure will be powered down for up two hours on Saturday, May 16th, 2020.
For your website and your customers, this means from approximately 7:00 am to 9:00 am Pacific Standard Time, websites and emails may be offline. The actual down time is expected to be 30 minutes sometime during this window, but be prepared for up to two hours just in case. Additionally, our company’s website, email and billing phone line (it goes through the Internet) will also be closed during that time. We have posted a system notice to your customers (appears on their Dashboard at the top highlighted), posted a notice at websitesupportblog.com and are sending out emails today.
We apologize in advance for this inconvenience and we will work with our network provider to bring everything back online as quick as possible.
Thank You.
As countries are encouraging people to self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic, we would like to offer all of you the option to collect your reseller payout via PayPal temporarily. We will cover the fees this incurs with a few exceptions to those countries where PayPal does not allow us to accept the fees (e.g. Argentina). Please note that we can accept payments for the US, Canada, Australia and the UK.
HOW TO SIGN UP
As this affects the sending of money, for the sake of security, we ask you to sign up as follows.
1. Go to https://www.resellerdynamics.com/ and click on LOGIN at the top right. If you forgot your password, there’s an option there to reset it.
2. After you log in, submit a support ticket to us by clicking on “Help/Support.”
3. In your support ticket, let us know your Reseller web address and the PayPal email address you would like us to send payment to. Also, please confirm you would like to switch to PayPal payouts.
For any submissions received by the last day of the month, you will receive your future payouts by PayPal from customerservice@websitedynamics.com. At anytime, you may opt back to check payouts. After the pandemic is over, we will send a notice indicating when payouts will go back to normal. Note that PayPal payouts are all manually done unlike check payouts which are automated which is why this is a temporary measure to help our resellers.
FOR RESELLERS ALREADY ON A SPECIAL PAYOUT OPTION
For resellers who already have a special payout setup, everything will stay the same during this pandemic and will continue after this pandemic.
FINAL MESSAGE
We wish everyone all the best during these difficult times. Please stay safe and let’s all be grateful for all the amazing people around us.
UPDATE: We’ve just been informed that the electrical maintenance planned for March 28th has been postponed due to factors surrounding the current COVID-19 pandemic. We will let you know when a new date has been set.At this time, we would like to send best wishes to all of you and hope that you will stay safe during this difficult time.
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Due to emergency electrical maintenance at our network provider’s data center, we have been informed that all of their networking infrastructure will be powered down on Saturday, March 28th, 2020. For you, this means from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, your reseller website, your customers’ websites and all email will be offline. Additionally, our company’s website, email and billing phone line will also be closed during that time.
We apologize in advance for this inconvenience and we will work with our network provider to bring everything back online as quick as possible.
An email will be sent to all your customers on your behalf and a system notice has been posted. The system notice appears in a yellow, highlighted box at the top of all Dashboards for your customers.
Thank You.
Effective November 1st, 2019, we will no longer be accepting applications for new resellers. As we grow as a company and our focus shifts to new projects, it is important to us to preserve the quality of support offered to our existing resellers, both from a customer service perspective and a technical perspective as web technology evolves and changes.
If you are an existing reseller, don’t worry: ResellerDynamics is not going anywhere, and we will continue to offer the same great platform you have grown accustomed to with no reduction in support. Thanks to all of our resellers over the years for their dedication to building great websites.
Due to recent changes in web browsers displaying “Not Secure” messages, we have been diligently working for the last few months to convert all customer websites from HTTP to the secure HTTPS protocol. We are nearing the completion of this project, so if your sites have not already been converted, they will be completed within the next 2-3 weeks. Once this is complete, we will also be converting your host sites from HTTP to HTTPS. Your customers should not notice any difference except that their web address will show HTTPS instead of HTTP.
We recommend you read through the following guides; you can also provide these to any customers who have questions regarding integration:
Guide to HTTPS – My website is not secure – Fixing mixed content errors
Note that if a page sourced content that was not secure and there wasn’t an equivalent secure version, we left the content as is. The page will still say HTTPS, but the lock will have a warning for mixed content. Please contact us if you have difficulty finding the problem source material. You may also receive a certificate security error when accessing your email as a result of this change. If you receive this error, you can fix this by simply editing the server settings in your email client, and changing your incoming and outgoing server addresses to mail.b.hostedemail.com. If you have issues with this, please contact our support team.
If you have any questions regarding HTTPS integration, please contact our support team.
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.