June was the ultimate party month for Amelia’s team! Quite a few important events lined up following one another, and we enjoyed the journey all the way. We’ve introduced a redesigned and improved booking form, we’ve attended WordCamp Europe in Porto, and we’ve celebrated the 4th birthday with a 30% discount on all licenses! So many reasons to celebrate.

Find out more about the events we are bragging about.

A Brand New Amelia Booking Form Release

We’ve been working hard in an attempt to boost our clients’ businesses to new heights. Finally, after several busy months, we were excited to announce the Amelia 5.0 update, with an emphasis on an improved, fully redesigned booking form. The new form comes with a sleek, modern, eye-catchy look, better loading speed, and straightforward and intuitive navigation. The whole booking process is organized in several informational and intuitive steps, presented via visible step-to-step progress you can reverse if necessary. All mentioned changes skyrocketed the UI and UX design.

List of achieved objectives that came with the new booking form

• Modern and inviting design for the enhanced booking experience
• Easier navigation for a better user experience
• Animated step-to-step transitions for smooth usage
• Visible Contact Us option for users’ convenience
• Sidebar for simple tracking of the booking process 
• Improved user experience for the booking packages
• Larger and more insightful calendar for better service availability review
• A better summary of finished bookings 
• Improved customization page for better brand-adjustment
• Increased loading speed for overall booking experience improvement
• Elevated conversion rate and retention of clients

In short, the new form is fast, modernized, insightful, smooth, straightforward, intuitive, easy to set, and easy to use.  We can assure you your clients will enjoy using it. 

If you are interested to know more details about the form, check this article for information.

WordCamp Europe 2022 Porto, Portugal 

In June, after a 3-year long pause, we had a blast at the WordCamp in Portugal! We were there to promote Amelia, but also our other products, wpDataTables, and Trafft.

We gained many valuable friendships and potential collaborations we are looking forward to. And we had so much fun meeting all the faces behind important names in the business. 

We were hanging out with our friends from Visual Composer, we discussed the existing integration improvements with the Mollie payments crew, Oliver Pos team even showed us the brand-new integration with Amelia, so we had a live demo with them!

Oh, we even chatted with the Google Maps team. We talked about how we can upgrade the customer experience with Google Maps and Amelia locations.

Besides the conference, we enjoyed exploring Porto, sightseeing, and trying delicious local food.

Amelia’s 4th birthday with the amazing 30% off discount on all licenses!

And finally, yet importantly, we have celebrated our 4th birthday! 4 amazing years of joining forces with a goal to create a superior WordPress plugin. That’s why we’ve decided to treat our customers with a 30% discount on all licenses. The period for the discount was June 10th to June 20th, but due to large interest, we decided to extend it to the end of the month! 

Seize the opportunity and grab your 30% discount.

At the beginning of June, after 3 years long pause, we attended the 10th Word Camp Europe in Porto, Portugal, and we had a blast!

What is Word Camp?

WordCamp is a conference attended by WordPress enthusiasts. The very first WordCamp was organized in San Francisco in 2006. Since then, hundreds of others were organized worldwide.

The WCEU conference is the ultimate source of knowledge and networking for the WordPress community. Both newbies and professionals learn new ways of effective WordPress usage and development. 

As WordPress covers more than 40% of the web, numerous developers, bloggers, managers, marketers, and consultants are gathering around ideas to share, connect, & improve their WP knowledge. 

As for the Amelia team, it was our 3rd Word Camp. The first one was in Belgrade Serbia 2018, the second in Berlin Germany 2019 and the third one was in Porto Portugal.
So after 3 years long pause, we attended it again with our two other products, wpDataTables and Trafft.

Now about the conference…

The European WordPress Community came together for three days of learning, sharing, and fun on the 10th edition of WordCamp Europe.
The conference was held in Super Bock Arena, a beautiful place in the center of the Porto, surrounded by lots of parks and local animals.

All the organizers, volunteers, and staff from the arena were very polite and friendly, which makes this place even more beautiful.

The energy was “booming” perhaps, the pandemic and long time without in-person events influenced this, but attendees were very open to sharing their knowledge, partnerships, collaboration, and even socks and t-shirts. 🙂

We had a coffee break with our old friends from Visual Composer, Mollie payments discussing our customers base and integrations that they use for all of our products.(Yes we do have integration with them)
Oliver Pos even show us the brand-new integration with Amelia, so we had a live demo.
And don’t forget Google Maps as well, the talk was about how we can upgrade the customer experience with Google Maps and Amelia locations.

 

Beside conference, we really enjoyed Porto sightseeing and exploring the streets, trying delicious local food, and taking pictures at the day

 

At the noon:

 

And at night:

 

Thank you WordCamp Europe 2022 for making this wonderful experience to us, and to all WordPress people. It was a pleasure to be part of this, and words can not express how motivated we are to continue delivering the best booking experience with Amelia.

Oh and yes, we even had time to swim in ocean, to prepare for the next year stop in Athens at WCEU 2023.

We spent many busy months figuring out how to provide your clients with a better booking experience – aligned with their needs and in tune with your business’ preferences. We were thinking in terms of user experience that will boost your business to an utterly new degree. And we think we succeeded!

However, none of this would be possible if there weren’t for you. We were guided by your suggestions. After we considered every opinion of yours, we committed a lot of our time to bring goals to the table. And the intention is achieved – the improved and modernized design of your favorite booking plugin is finally born!

So what are the improvements we managed to integrate into Amelia 5.0 Booking Form? Take a closer look.

Amelia 5.0 booking form improvements

One of the focal points of Amelia 5.0 is the new, modern, fully revamped booking form that pushes what can you do with it further. A brand new booking form comes with the following:

Modern design

We have designed a new form with a modern, fresh, eye-appealing look, containing crucial booking-related information. We organized the entire booking process in several intuitive and easy-to-navigate steps. Each of the steps your client needs during the booking process is visibly disposable, and just a click away. New design skyrockets the UX improvement to a point where it’s hard to be ignored. Your clients will love it.

Category selection 

Navigation through a list of your services is easier. During the appointment preselection process, your clients can click through all service categories with no extra effort. All services are organized within dropdown menus, grouped by categories and locations. This type of preview gives them a detailed insight into all services you offer, consequently making their current and future appointment decisions a lot easier.

Smooth and animated step-to-step transition 

A step-to-step transition process is accelerated with a help of smooth, modern loaders working from behind. Transitional animations appearing when moving from one step to another modernize the entire process, making the scheduling experience a breeze. 

Contact us option 

Clickable email is positioned in a visible place, so your clients can contact you if have any questions or concerns. This feature is optional – whether this option will be enabled or disabled, depends solely on your preferences. We encourage you to enable this option If you want to add a hint of professionalism to your business. 

Sidebar for easier tracking of the booking process 

We have implemented the sidebar displaying the booking process in real-time. This feature differentiates finished from non-finished steps. Before the definite scheduling confirmation, your clients can edit every process by clicking on the step back arrow on the top. This option allows them to navigate the booking process much easier. 

Improved UX for the booking packages

We have already mentioned that the user experience of the new form is pushed to a high level. But the user experience of the booking packages is another great thing to mention. It is noticeably easier to navigate through thanks to its intuitive design. We are sure your customers will highly appreciate this characteristic.

Larger calendar with available and unavailable time slots

The calendar within the new form consists of a larger surface, meaning each customer can easily see the difference between available and unavailable days. This feature follows accessibility guidelines recommended for modern UIs and makes the new form straightforward and more informational.

A better summary of the finished booking

Insights into former bookings are beneficial for future planning, and the improved form offers easy tracking of all past bookings recapitulation out of the client dashboard.

Simple customization page

The new customization possibilities are vast. You can effortlessly customize the form to extend where the look and feel match your brand needs. Designs you can achieve with new options are outstanding. We believe that the form will appear to your users as more attractive and more interesting to use.

Improved loading speed 

By adding more up-to-date technology and logic, we’ve managed to consequently speed up the loading process of the booking form by a significant amount of time. This is one of the crucial benefits. Your customer booking experience will become faster and smoother, which will increase the number of finished bookings.

Improved conversion rate 

The intuitive, simple, informative, and fast-loading form will give your customers the joy of smooth and effortless usage. Moreover, this feature will impact the customers’ retention rate increment  – meaning they will continue coming back to your services.

Comparison to the old form

To sum everything up, compared to the old form, the new form is faster to load, more modern, more insightful, more intuitive, easier to navigate, and comes with more setting options. You can create and adjust it easier, and you will enjoy using it thanks to its smooth work, modern look, and amusing step-to-step transitions. And finally, yet importantly, it is inviting and conversion-optimized.

What’s important to know?

The old form will be available until the total switch to the new form happens. Time-frame is approximately several months, but we will inform you upfront so you can transition in a timely manner. In the meantime, we encourage you to try the upgraded form and let us know your thoughts. We are looking forward to getting your positive feedback, so we can determine our effort wasn’t in vain.

That’s it for now! However, we are not wrapping it here. There are plenty of new, useful features to come into existence in the upcoming months. Upgrade possibilities on this cleverly projected architecture are nearly immense, as we’ve developed this form having a plethora of future steps in mind. Try Amelia 5.0, and let us know your thoughts. We are looking forward to hearing how it improved your business.