Raptor Services

Just a short note to advise our customers and site visitors that we've experienced ISP connectivity problems due to technical faults with 3rd-party carrier equipment.

This has affected a number of areas in Queensland (Australia), and has meant we've been offline for much of today.  As a result - we've been unable to access the internet to process sales orders, respond to client support requests or retrieve and answer emails.

We apologise for the inconvenience, and look forward to our ISP resolving these issues.

After all of the interruptions and disruptions over the past month, we've finally got our new client services systems up and running.

The new HelpDesk system has proven to be a valuable addition to the site, as you're now able to monitor progress online rather than rely on email.

We've also got our new knowledge base up and running, and will now be building that information resource up with all of the common questions we encounter.  It will be another day or so before this is updated with all of our most important information, so if you don't find an answer to your question - be sure to send us an email.

Finally - our major new client services addition is an integrated ecommerce and software licensing/distribution system.  This will streamline the software purchasing and access process for our clients, and introduce other benefits such as access to invoices.

We've been testing the system and it's all running smoothly - so it's time to bring it on live for our clients.  We'll be monitoring sales to ensure they're being processed correctly for our clients, and we'll also do follow-up evaluations with our clients to determine the ease of the new process.

Payment systems available are currently PayPal and MoneyBookers.

If you encounter any difficulties with the new online purchasing system - please let us know immediately via email or the HelpDesk.

If you've tried to visit Raptor Services in the past couple of days (late April 2007), you probably would have found the site offline, and wondered what the heck was going on.

Unfortunately - Murphy's Law was at play on the weekend - and while I was busily working on major site upgrades in preparation for moving server - I was taken ill with a severe infection that developed over the course of the afternoon.  Talk about bad timing - as it was a trip to hospital for me, and has been a couple of rocky days recovering.  I still look like the "poster girl" for band-aids, betadine and alcohol-based surgical scrub, and have a paper bag at the ready - just in case I need to go out in public.

My main business site at raptorservices.com.au is still offline - so I've used a backup and my raptorservices.com domain to get back online for my many customers and software fans.  I'll then be moving the raptorservices.com.au site from its current server to a new server - so there may be some transitory disruptions to email contact, as I will be continuing to use my raptorservices.com.au email addresses.

There are also new updates for EZ Realty, EZ Autos and EZ Rider - and these are small bugfix releases to resolve a couple of issues for people running multilingual sites. 

I'd also like to thank everyone who has emailed me with well-wishes over the past couple of days.  Your positive thoughts have made me feel so much better :-)

best wishes,

Kathy

In response to the increasing number of telephone enquiries being received from all over the world, we've turned to Skype for a solution - and now have 3 new telephone numbers.  People in the Asia-Pacific region can contact us on an Australian number, those in Canada and the Americas may prefer to use our new US number, and we've got a number in the UK for those calling from european countries.  We'll also look at introducing additional numbers in other parts of the world once we establish a need.

You'll find all of our new contact numbers on our contact page, and we hope these new numbers will help make us more accessible to our many international clients. 

If you've just bought yourself some new software, you'll want a design to get your site up and running quickly!

Raptor Services customers now have access to the very same templates displayed on our EZ Autos, Realty and Rider demonstration sites.  They have 4 module positions down each side, a module position above and below the main content area, as well as "top" and "footer" module positions for horizontal menus.  Customers are able to access the templates once we set up access to our customer's lounge, as they don't come packaged with the initial download.

At 900 pixels, these are wide-screen templates - and they're particularly useful for portal sites.  Wide Realty, Wide Motors and Wide Rider all have identical layouts and colour schemes - they only differ in their header graphic.