Sometimes you want to give a specific message to your visitor and make sure they read it as soon as they land on your website.

We have chosen to released featured message which takes the form of a bar that will be displayed at the top of your website to avoid the usual annoying pop-up which are often closed before they are read by your visitor.

Type of featured messages

There are three types of "messages" you can choose from

• Business Objective : Choosing a business objective is often the best option if the end goal of your message is to encourage your visitor to book, order, request a quote, hire etc … The bar will have a button that will link to an internal page
• Informative Bar : This type of bar is meant at giving a useful information which you don't expect your visitor to act on.
• Custom : Those bars can include an external link.

Planning & Auto-publishing

You can program an unlimited list of message with a publication & expiration day so they will appear automatically on your website without any further intervention necessary on your end.

Only one message can be active at a given time so you won't be able to add overlapping publishing dates.

Custom Color

Each message can have a specific color which can be selected separately from your website color. To help you choose, our system will always suggest some colors based on your branding.

Multi-language

Each message can be translated in all languages of your website.

The inbox and Newsletter signup can now be tested without an active website.

In order to differentiate the test done in preview and real clients request, each inbox request made in preview mode includes the tag DEMO.

Giving customers the ability to book an appointment online is now a must for many service-based businesses. However scheduling an appointment can be very different if you are regular at your local hairdresser, getting in touch for the first time with an accountant or if you are booking a full-day treatment at a local spa.

With this diversity of use cases in mind we have developed a new appointment feature with 3 options:

#1 Integration with specialised appointment systems.

For this first release, we have developed integration with some booking solutions, more will be added in the coming months.

• Generic Calendar Solution : Calendly, YouCanBookMe, SetMore, Microsoft Bookings
• Specialised solution for Beauty: Treatwell, Fresha

#2 Appointment request Form

If you don't want to expose your agenda on the web, the appointment form is probably the best solution for you.

This forms captures the client information and their preferred time and date so you can engage directly with them.

#3 Appointment specific phone number

Businesses now have the option to provide a specific phone number for appointments.

Appointments will be available for

This feature will be available in all countries for the following industries: Beauty, Stores, Professional services, Art & entertainment, Active life.

We have updated the illustration set with 25 new and updated icons to make sure each page (and upcoming page) has a unique illustration that is easily recognizable. .

To improve the SEO of websites, structured data have been added to all websites. Those structured data give an overall improvement of SEO but also make it possible for businesses to appear with Rich cards in search results.

All businesses and their locations are now supported with more specific support for Restaurant & Hotels. The following pages now also have structured data :

• Events
• Jobs
• Store locator
• Portfolio
• Press
• Hotel rooms

Regular updates will be made to make sure we keep up with the latest standard.

Based on the feedback received, the following changes are now live :

CentralApp

• Profile picture of the company is now used consistently in the app.
• Sorting of Event venues has been fixed.
• Multi-location company now display the last time one of their location was updated.
• Design of the "Settings" page has been improved
• Improved display of gallery, logo & profile picture on mobile.
• New instruction banners in various page around the App.

Websites

• Compatibility issue with Forms on Microsoft Edge has been fixed.
• Various text improvements & typos

The dashboard will now show if there are some messages that still need to be managed by the business and the number of clients in the list.

Multiple companies can now be grouped into Groups that will be displayed in the Footer of the website.

The footer will include

• The name of each company
• A link to each company website.
• The name & website of the Group (The name will only be displayed if the group has a website)
• The logo of the group.

To enable this feature for your website or add multiple companies within a group, please reach out to our Customer Success team at support@centralapp.com

Website loading speed is critical to converting visitors into customer. More about the importance of Speed on Neil Patel Blog : https://neilpatel.com/blog/speed-is-a-killer/.

As part of our commitment to provide best in class performance, major improvements have been brought to our websites in the past few weeks and our websites can now reach a 90 to 100 score on most testing tools depending on network conditions.

CentralApp is all about building a robust marketing solution that will take care of the ever-evolving marketing needs of local businesses. Working towards that objective, we thought it was high time to build lasting foundations for the years to come.

We are glad to announce we have just released the alpha version of a very long project in which we had to rebuild the foundation of CentralApp

This major update comes with a very long list of new features, improvements and bug fixes. But the most importantly, this release is the foundation for the future!

Let us know what you think on hello@centralapp.com !