Welcome to the new REV23

Greetings everybody, I’m happy to finally welcome you to the brand new REV23!

Today is significant in that it is our seventh year anniversary of serving the tattoo and body piercing industry, having released Tattoo Management Studio 1.0 on March 1st, 2010, and we couldn't be more proud of that accomplishment. Today's relaunch is the beginning of an all new REV23. We have a lot of amazing things planned, but for those plans to to come together we had to make big some changes first. So let's talk about what's just happened.

It all starts here on REV23.com. We've completely rebuilt and redesigned our site from the ground up, which has taken a whole lot of time, but the effort was well worth it. The former version of our site launched all the way back in 2010 along side Tattoo Management Studio's first release. When I first designed the original site, the iPhone wasn't even really a "thing" yet. While the software itself has gone through several major changes and improvements, the website... not so much. Other than some color changes, it's remained mostly the same for seven years and was not very flexible for us to add or update things. This had to change!

Along with a fresh and modern look, as well as finally being usable on mobile devices, we’re bringing some new features and improvements that we're pretty excited about. Here are a few things we'd specifically like to call attention to.

Logo and Branding: REV23 has a brand new logo designed by Limitless Design (another division of Painful Pleasures). You'll be seeing this logo popping up everywhere and our former tattoo machine logo phased out. Our overall branding is changing in general. REV23 Development and Tattoo Management Studio as names were simply too long and caused confusion. We're scratching out "Development" in public facing stuff such as Faccebook and YouTube and just using REV23, which most of you call us anyways. Though REV23 Development, Inc. is of course still officially and legally our name.

There was another big branding change, which has actually received its own blog post. But our flagship software, Tattoo Management Studio has been renamed to REV23 Desktop. Check out the blog post here to get the full scoop.

Blog: If you're reading this you should probably be able to tell by now... we have a blog! For a long time we’ve needed a way to share important news and get feedback on what we’re working on as well as just engage with you guys and gals! Previously we’ve relied on Facebook for this, however as many of you are now probably aware, unless you’re paying them, post reach there isn't great. Similarly, we've just never really taken to Twitter (and neither have you guys it would seem, our followers there are embarassingly low.) So this blog will be our best channel to get you great up to date information, so check it often.

We have a lot of awesome users who are very vocal and involved in the development process of our software. We also have a lot of users who want to be more involved in this process. We envision the blog to be a place for us to share ideas of what we’re working on and get feedback from you while we're working on it, tips & tricks, general news, tech announcements and more. We want you all to participate in the comments (feel free to change your profile picture and community display name in your Account). It will be a new way of engaging everyone as a community to help us make the best software possible and we're stoked about it!

Instagram: While not totally related to the new site, I also quickly wanted to call out our somewhat new Instagram account that we launched in October! You can find us at @rev23dev. Our Instagram has a more unique take than the rest of our social accounts, and I encourage you to check it out. There, you'll find more candid, behind the scenes stuff than you'll find on any of our other pages. For the earliest sneak peeks, previews of things to come and to just to get a sense of a day in the life of what its like to build REV23, our Instagram won't disappoint. Tag us @rev23dev, #rev23 and #rev23desktop.

Accounts: Another change is that anyone can now create a free REV23 Account. In the past your account would be created when you placed an order. We have a few reasons for opening this up, which we'll get into in a future post, but this also opens up artists, managers, front desk or anyone in your shop to have their own accounts to engage in the community. Your account can now also be tied to your social account (Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft or Google) for an even faster log on experience. Additionally, we've increased security by allowing you to enable two-factor authentication, receiving your code by either email or text.

On the account management side of things, you now have more control over your REV23 account than ever. You can now change your email address (something that previously required contacting support) and subscriptions are much more manageable with easier ways to update your payment information, reactivate your subscription after a botched payment or even cancel your subscription (though we’d hate for you to do that!). For our shops with multiple subscriptions you can now alias them to tell which subscription is which.

Store: The purchasing experience is much improved. When Painful Pleasures acquired REV23 back in 2012 we briefly went to a subscription only model for our software and the order process on the REV23.com site was changed. We realized soon after that you wanted (read: demanded) a choice and the licensing options returned but were only available on painfulpleasures.com. Full licenses are now back on this site (as well as Painful Pleasures). The other shortcoming of the former site was you could only order hardware when you created a new subscription. Any hardware you wanted after the fact would have to be ordered from Painful Pleasures, or by accidently creating another subscription. This is no longer the case and you can order hardware whenever you want right from this site. Go ahead, order something! We've also added product reviews for our hardware options to you can get a sense of what other users love about the hardware or how they find it best fits into their workflow. We've also added some new hardware that we recommend.

Wrapping up: We hope you like the new design! We sure are excited about it and the changes it brings! There are other big announcements coming. Some will be immediate, others will take some time before we’re ready, but this is really the beginning of the new REV23.

Please keep in mind, as this is a brand new site and you're all just hitting it for the first time, there may be some bugs! If you run across something, just let us know! It's not quite done yet and still needs some polish here and there.We'll continue massaging the site over the coming weeks and months so you'll see some changes here and there, some big some small.

So, what do you think? Let us know in the comments!