Few days left in 2020 and we want to use this holidays period to thank our customers for their business and pass our warmest wishes to people we worked with and their families. Another year is about to end and new 2021 is on a horizon. Good time to look back and summarize all we will remember 2021 for and think of plans for the next 12 months.

The year started with introducing a new add-ons system which was designed to allow easy products configuration and modular structure to have only the parts our customers need and use. To help manage add-ons system we created a Dashboard section in Admin that allowed monitoring new add-ons and versions of those installed. This system helped to centralize development information and put all helpful links and references together for easier navigation.

Another challenge this year was a new documentation system which we managed to implement for FW Food Menu and FW Gallery at this point (FW Real Estate will be the first in the line in 2021). The problem with documentation is that few people read it using Ticket Support (which is good) to solve their issues. On the other hand frequent updates in many add-ons and regular products update make actual documentation quite a challenging process. In 2020 we tried to find a balance and solution for documenting our products and keep information actual. We are proud we found a reasonable way to do it which offers semiautomated approach to document generation and helps to keep release pace same high as before. As usual all our customers are welcome at our Ticket Support section and we do our best to provide fast and comprehensive replies as always.

Despite all our attempts to start more active blogging and promotion in 2020 we totally failed this part. As a little excuse/reason for this we may refer to a continuous search for the best product architecture to provide stable foundation for all extensions, designs and services that come with it. We thought it would mean changing the concept too often, but now we realize it would be much better and interesting if we involved our customers into the process and get feedback while polishing and testing final product design. Communication and promotion will become our key focus in 2021.

Looking back we can say that 2020 was a year of experiments and search for the best implementation of our ideas. We really found the answers and the next 2021 will be a year to present fruits of our work to the market. We are very proud that we could make our fully functioning main products free to all forever! We noticed that some features we previously supplied with the paid version were rarely used and people had to pay for things they never used. Also some features were used by few customers but everyone had to see them in settings which made configuration more complicated process. Also we could revise add-ons for our products and include small specific add-ons into bigger more popular items, lowering the price at the same time. We extended context help in administration area providing comments and notes while user the products rather than making people go to a different page and read it. Seems like it works much better this way.

This year was intense. If at the beginning of 2020 we had more questions than answers, now at the beginning of 2021 we have a clear plan on what needs to be implemented and how. We plan another fruitful year for our customers with lots of new designs and services along with regular products update. Stay with us, stay with Fastw3b!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!