Very soon we’ll be launching a whole new redesign for inside the isocket.com / buyads.com product. We wanted to do a better job of giving people a heads up about product changes, so here’s a tasty preview!

(Update November 10th: It’s live!)

This new version covers everything you see once you log into the app: dashboard, account setup, profiles, inventory, order management, and so on. It does not include the public face of BuyAds (the directory, website profile pages, and cart/buying) but those areas are already being redesigned and we hope to take it live in early December. (Have a request? Let us know!)

We are super excited about this! There are pieces of inside the product we’ve been itching to update for some time. We’re continually striving to improve and through excellent feedback from our awesome community we think this is a big step up.

There were a few main things we wanted to accomplish in the redesign:

• Always & easily know if you need to take any actions. Ad orders have a life cycle which need human involvement from time to time (like approving an order), and we know it could get confusing about who needed to do what and when.
• Make it easier to see at a glance what you’ve sold or bought. 
• Bring everything related to an ad campaign order onto one page, the Order page. Metrics, payments, changing creatives… everything in one place makes it easier to manage a given order.
• Clearly show the relationships between different entities like groups and properties. Lets say you’re a publisher with one website… simple enough. But if you manage multiple websites under one group (e.g. AOL Tech includes TechCrunch & Engadget) it was a little disorganized. That’s been cleaned up to show that a Group owns Properties, a Property owns Inventory (ad zones), Inventory can have multiple remnant and pricing options, and so on.
• Overall look and feel upgrades. Pretty pixels make our <3 warm.

Here’s some sneak peeks!

Love it? Hate it? We’re working hard to make the best product you’ve ever used in advertising, so please let us know what you think! (P.S. all the data in these screen shots is fake demo data)

Everything has been touched in this new version, starting with the high level organization. For publishers, things are still broken up between Orders and Inventory, but everything beneath that has been reorganized.

The dashboard is a lot more useful now. It shows aggregated metrics, active orders, and any important actions you need to take.

Inventory is now organized vertically, meaning you start with your group (if you have multiple websites) and can drill down into a specific property and then into specific ad zones on that property.

Group:

Property:

Orders:

On your main orders page you’ll see an aggregated metrics chart, quick summaries of your active / running / pending campaigns, and then a nice list of orders.

Order details:

This is the area that has been the most improved in the new version. Orders can be complicated things – who pays whom when, what if dates need to change, the publisher needs to approve a new creative, and so on. We know the old version could get confusing, so we started from scratch on this page.

You’ll notice a very clear progress bar up top, plus status messages for both the campaign and payment. Things change as the order progresses – for example, when the ad is ready to run it will show the publisher the “order specific ad tag” they can use to traffic the campaign. Or when the campaign is running it will show the metrics specific to that campaign!

Better Order Fulfillment

Order Fulfillment is one of the coolest isocket features that some publishers still don’t know about. It makes it easy for publishers to create their own orders – whether its an in-house or test order, for an advertiser that you closed a deal with over the phone, etc. We made it easier to find and use!

What do you think? Cheers!

Continuing our sneak peeks at the new design / version being rolled out next month, here is what the new user profile page looks like. This is the page external people see when viewing your account.

We wanted to highlight your role, history, group and brand memberships, and of course the ad inventory you’re managing.

Click to enlarge. Comments welcome!

Big design changes coming over the next month! One of our goals is to make it easier to manage your accounts across different groups/brands/websites.

Here’s a sliver of the new account home page. The account home is still unique for each group you’re a member of. It brings the newsfeed up front and account management tabs behind it.

Let us know what you think (click to enlarge):

We’ve been tooling away at a new design and wanted to give you a sneak peek. You’ll start to see the changes in the Beta over the next few weekly releases.

It’s not a radical change – it will be familiar yet vastly improved. Our goals were to improve your experience by putting the more important information up front and reorganize some UI stuff in ways that made more sense. Oh, and some nifty effects too.

A tip for you fresh designers out there: AJAX and fancy UI effects can be overdone. That’s why our first designs didn’t have a lot of it implemented. Wait until people are actually using what you have so you can see what processes could should be streamlined, where it really makes sense to add a shadow box, etc.

Here is a sliver of the new socket page. Let us know what you think!

Some quick updates about what we’ve been working on the last few days.

The errors that popped up over the last week had to do with invite code registration, some ad code display funkyness in IE, and groups. They’ve all been resolved. We’re going to implement a system alert box at the top of the account newsfeed that will give you real time messages when something minor pops up. If you are a twitter user you’ll recognize it immediately =)

This week has been a lot of minor visual tweaking. We’re also working on some great new designs which you’ll see over the coming weeks. Maybe we’ll post a teaser image here?

We added the rest of the IAB sizes to the ad code generator, including the much desired 125×125. Remember that the account page you generate your ad code from will effect where the ad code points. In other words, if you want the ad code to point to your group profile you need to generate it from the group account page.

Enjoy!

New stuff this week:

• You can link directly to a group profile with buttons and URLs
• You can now view and edit your existing ad code
• Added “ads by isocket” or “buy this ad via isocket” text underneath ads displayed by a 3rd party provider. That way if you’ve chosen to display 3rd party code when your inventory is unsold, buyers can still click directly to your socket/profile. If they make a purchase, your 3rd party code is automatically overwritten.
• We’ve begun splitting off ad servers to an independent architecture. You’ll notice ads being delivered by “adsbyisocket.com” and “isocketdelivers.com”. This makes ad delivery more reliable for you.
• Added start and end dates for ad runs. More options to come soon.
• Nicer input error handling =)

Today, one month to the day after we launched our private Beta, we’re happy to announce the release of a significantly improved version for our private Beta users. We received great feedback (keep it coming) about bugs and feature requests and think this new version is a big step forward.

Most of the new features are for website display sellers. Some highlights:

• Universal ad code. You don’t have to worry about updates to our ad code – deploy once, and it updates on our end.
• Improved ad code generator for website banners and text ads. You can control what IAB formats to accept, color styles, zones, etc. Save different code profiles for different sites and formats.
• Buttons / badges for direct sales.
• Real-time ad delivery. If a buyer makes a direct purchase via a seller’s website they can pay, upload their ad, and have the ad delivered in real time.
• Ad copy approval for sellers. You can approve or reject ads before they display on your website.
• Improved feed and account management. Fixed bugs and added nice UI for socket and account management.
• GUI changes. We’ll continue to change some visual / interface elements based on your feedback.
• Improved feedback and ratings.
• Some bug fixes, including visual errors on Internet Explorer.

We’ve got a lot of new things on deck for the next few weeks. We’ll let you know what we’re working on so you can give feedback and help prioritize. Cheers!