Besides releasing a new version of Daylite, Marketcircle has released a new version of its website. The updated design brings together what previously felt like the work of several disparate designers and gives a cohesive experience across the site.

The site’s navigation is less cluttered and uses a hamburger/basement metaphor to hide less frequently-used options. The company’s products are front and center, instead of the being hidden in a drop down menu. Layouts are mostly consistent; the Billings Pro section needs to be updated to more closely reflect the design elements present in the Daylite area.

A welcome change is that Daylite users new and old no longer are required to give Marketcircle their name and email address in order to have download links sent to them; instead, users are only a couple of clicks away from the latest version of Daylite. Unfortunately, the same change of mind has not been applied to the Billings Pro side of the site. If users even consider the self-serve option (it’s not prominent), they will still need to provide their personal information to download a trial version.

For support, visitors will use newly renovated Help Centre. My initial perspective is that there is a more clear organization of the knowledge base articles, and a liberal use of tags—like “Downloads,” “Daylite 5.x,” and “Technical Support”—helps users find what they need. Marketcircle is also ramping up their use of videos to guide users in using their products and you’ll find a bunch of them in the free tutorials section. However, the Help Centre is clearly a work in progress: many articles previously on the website are not available at this time and some articles don’t seem to fit their category (“Importing delimited text files” under “Purchasing”?).

Marketcircle Partners, independent consultants like myself who offer services for Marketcircle products, are now called “Experts” and while Marketcircle has done a lot of work to revamp that area of the site, we no longer have a prominent link in the main navigation. You can find us in the Help Centre, but I hope that Marketcircle will do more to introduce us than put a link to “Learn more about Marketcircle Experts” at the bottom of the page. The link to the user forums was removed in January 2013 and has still not reappeared on the site; although I appreciate Marketcircle’s desire that the forum not be a venue for company support, it’s a great way to get user-to-user support and I hope that it gets promoted as such.

Go, take a look around, and let me know what you think, too.