Now it is easier than ever to upgrade to a professional package, or manage additional upgrades for advanced functionality. We've just finished our upgrade interface, and we hope that it gives our clients more control over this simple but important process. It's very interactive and fun to use. Choosing different packages shows what features are included in the package, and the upgrades are totaled on the right. If you know your domain name, the system will upgrade you instantly and create a private hosting account instantaneously.

Did you know that only 49% of small businesses have a website (and most of those are terribly inadequate)? Only a few savvy businesses are taking full advantage of the power of the internet. If you don't have a comprehensive web strategy and a professional internet presence, you are losing clients to your competitors, you are losing credibility, you are frustrating your existing clients, and you are missing your potential for long term growth. In short you are losing a lot of money. Gain the competitive edge now. Distinguish yourself from ...

Last week we invited CMS Critic (www.cmscritic.com) to review our Gutensite CMS and let us know what they thought. Today they published a quick introduction to Gutensite and we expect they will provide a more full CMS review in the future. But we're overjoyed to learn that their initial reaction has been extremely positive. Of usability, they  said, "It’s extremely easy to use... It is very well laid out with a very attractive and intuitive interface." And regarding the design they said, "the design and beauty of this system are second to ...

We're cleaning house and slowly giving a makeover to all the designs for default specialty content pages. Most recently, we just redesigned the property list and details pages in keeping with the clean, modern theme that characterizes all the new default content. All our clients who didn't customize their property pages, will benefit from this free upgrade, giving their sites an instant refresh.

As I reported previously, we've been in the process of overhauling all our designs templates for different default content type pages. Well, we just went live today with an updated version of the Communities home page. If you have communities listed on your site, you may want to check out your communities page or this sample. It's a vast improvement to the old default template, and it gives visitors a visual look at all the communities (rather than a tiny drop down menu). If you haven't selected an image for that community (in your Admin ...

We just created a great budget Mini Property Website for a home for sale in Livermore California, check it out: http://www.yourvineyardhome.com. For $500 we utilized one of our Free Design Skins (the San Vito) added some content and photos, and provided a little bit of custom design on a page by page basis. The results are amazing, all thanks to the perfect starting design in our Free Design Skin library.

Several versions of the Librarian design skin are now public. Like most templates we offer automatic design elements or features that are relevant to the organizational type. It's a nice addition to our library and a good contrast with some of the more modern, techy designs we've done recently. We've already had several people choose it for their site, as well as others launch off on customized versions of their own.

We have 3 new free design skins to add to our Free Design library (follow the link to see which are still pending). The San Vito was named after a small town where the designer spent a week with good friends drinking cappuccino in the piazza del popolo, waking to the chimes of the ancient bell tower and enjoying the slow life of Northern Italy. The template is now installed and ready for public use, the others should be live shortly. Like all three new designs, the San Vito is warm, textured, with a feeling of history. We hope it will appeal ...

I recently had a frustrating (and learning) experience with DMOZ, the open directory project. This is a directory listings service that feeds information to major search engines. It is staffed by a group of fifty thousand volunteers that review website submissions to specific categories, and when approved they provide a link to your site in that category. It's recommended to list your site with DMOZ, but it can take months or years to be approved because of the inefficient nature of this volunteer project. In fact your site can be rejected ...

Quick tip, look up your business on yelp.com and see what your customers are saying about  you. This can be a great source of free feedback, and will enlighten  you to some of your strengths and weaknesses. If you aren't listed yet, create an account and add your business. You shouldn't review your own business, but you should definitely invite your loyal customers to give you some reviews. As a matter of practice, after you finish interacting with a customer, suggest that they leave you some feedback on Yelp.

Over the years we have developed a very capable product and have consistently offered high end personal service and support for our clients. We have a very loyal client base because we make it a point to go above and beyond all the time. We are in this for the long run and our goal in business is not to make money but to provide an excellent product to our clients, knowing that this approach will be profitable. But despite these things, we have learned the hard way that you can have the best product or service in the world, at the best price, ...

Congratulations to City Church of San Francisco on their new website. Credit goes to Steven (who added all the content and I presume also took all the beautiful photos). Gutensite provided a nice home page design and secondary page "shell" that allowed them to add unique images to each page (or select a random one from a default set if no specific image has been set) in order to give each page a unique feeling. They added their own content and we "massaged" their pages when they were done. Most of the dynamic content (e.g. non "Basic Pages" ...

As mentioned in the previous post, we made some significant design upgrades to our default content pages. The multimedia library (as well as the regular file library) now sport a sleek new skin that let you show off your video and audio files in style. Small icons indicate whether the file is Video or Audio, a sample thumbnail attracts your visitors' attention, and you can provide a witty title and short description about the video. Then whatever stats you enter about the video will show up on the right, e.g. date, size, time length, ...

We've been busy overhauling the look and feel of many of the advanced functionality pages that you may be using on your site. You may have noticed some marked improvement, if you happen to be using the default design (most people are). We recently mentioned the design and functionality upgrades to the calendar, but we've also improved the look of other pages: Blog Contact Page Profiles Portfolio Testimonials Resources Files Multimedia Communities If you considered using one of these pages in the past, but weren't happy with how ...

The month of June brings three more new templates in the modern strain of design: Metro, White on White, and Wodka (light and dark). Be sure to checkout each of these new free design skins, they may fit  your site personality better than anything you are currently using. We believe these will be perfect for professional organizations that want a very clean, simple look. They may also work well for portfolio sites that want to feature large images. These templates present a simple home page, with limited options for custom "modules" or text ...

We recently completed a whole slew of functionality upgrades, including some great new features for our calendar. Some of the upgrades include: Advanced Repetition Options: now you can get crazy with custom repeating events, until your brain explodes with the possibilities. Popup Details: now clicking on an event in the calendar brings up a simple popup box that lists the important details for an event (plus an option to view the full event details). List View: now you can view your events in a long list (instead of a month based ...

A little perspective perhaps, all in good fun...

Did you know that you can export all the data from your site? For example, you can export your Account contacts, Blog Articles, My Pages, Profiles, Store Sales data, Products, etc. You own your data and you can take it with you. How do you achieve this great feat? Every list page in the Control Panel has a Search button above the list. When this is clicked the search options appear (sometimes they are already open by default). You can perform a custom search, or just export the full list. Above the search options is a little button that says ...

We've been on a roll lately and that has meant a lot of upgrades and new features for our clients. Our goal is to increase the number of options people have for Free Design Skins, so that everyone can find something that is both professional and a good fit for their website. We're getting there. The new Folsom Series includes 4 different color schemes: red, purple, blue and green. It has plenty of areas for personalization, including: a large standard sized image slideshow area, welcome text, quotes, and modules on the home page, and ...

When we first created Gutensite, we wanted it to be powerful and flexible so that we could use the framework to build any site for any client. And in the hands of experts it has performed amazingly. However, as we began to open up our platform to anyone who wanted a free site, it became obvious that power and user friendliness are often at odds with one another, especially when a good percentage of our users (especially those with Free Lite versions) initially start  building their site with absolutely zero knowledge of how to use Gutensite, ...