This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. Gutensite is unapologetically a Content Management System. We are not a "visual website builder" like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc. Those platforms are great for what they do. Their visual interface is appealing to first time users that want to express their creativity. However, the creative options can be overwhelming and for non-designers they have a huge potential to be destructive to the website. They can be frustrating for publishers that need to organize a ...

After a lot of research, brainstorming and programming, we are proud to announce the release of our brand new packages. These new packages are designed to help organizations of every size afford a beautiful and powerful website that helps them succeed at whatever stage they are currently operating at and give them the boost and flexibility to grow to the next level. If you are subscribed to an old package you can stay where you are. But since most people will benefit from the changes, you can easily upgrade to a new package in the Control ...

Do you ever have those dreams where you need to get somewhere important or finish something on time, but you just can't seem to arrive or ever get it done? Sometimes that's the way it feels to run a business, like you are trying to run a race with feet that weigh a thousand pounds. Everyday there are endless interruptions that keep you from your projects. And when you get to your projects they take four times longer than you planned. This sense of stagnation can sap your energy and discourage you. And if you really don't make progress, your ...

Connecting social media profiles with your Gutensite has never been easier! Now, all of our free design skins are social-ready. All you need to do is enter the address of your profile into the labeled box and boom-- you're connected. You'll automatically have familiar icons of the profiles you entered at the top and bottom of your pages. Social networks featured are Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And If you want even more, just let us know and we'd be happy to work together and make this happen. We understand staying connected is ...

Recently we've had a lot of clients asking us about a scam letter they have received from a untrustworthy company with the wonderfully generic name "DNS Services" located in Vancouver, WA. The invoice looks like a bill for $65, and is sent to businesses in hopes that busy administrators will just pay it. This is a ridiculous offer since Gutensite already provides DNS services for free. Not only do you not need this service, you shouldn't trust a company like this to manage your DNS. If you are a Gutensite client, you have the peace of ...

We are excited to announce a powerful new "Staging" feature that allows you to preview exactly what your website will look like without actually revealing the changes to the general public. This allows you to test one page or redevelop the entire site and push it all live at once. This is a simple concept, but it comes in really handy. The process is simple and can be utilized with any content, e.g. My Pages, Blogs, News, Promo Modules, Menu Items, etc. Whenever you are editing content you can set the status to "Offline" or "Live". This is ...

We're committed to making sure Gutensite is compatible with the latest recommendations for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that your website has every advantage possible to achieve the best rankings that your content can earn. Below are a few of the most recent updates to our SEO features: Redirect to Remove Trailing Slashes. Search engines see the urls http://www.domain.com/blog/ and http://www.domain.com/blog as two different pages. This can trigger a warning for having duplicate content which dilutes your rankings. So we do a ...

Branding is much more than creating a logo or a clever ad. It's a Venn diagram where your personality, your values, your customers' experiences and your graphic identity overlap. A good branding design can reinforce your strengths for current customers and give a snapshot feel to potential customers. And in turn your reputation will affect your visual branding. The company with terrible customer service and a beautiful logo and the company with great service and an outdated, client-repelling logo are both in some trouble. Like friends that ...

It's Tuesday evening and you are scrolling through Facebook's newsfeed. What catches your eye and makes you stop and take a closer look? Odds are, the attention-capturing post had a picture. Our brains are wired to respond to images, so if you want to attract attention, you need beautiful images, evocative branding, and appealing design. Emotion + Desire = Motivation. Good design creates an emotional response that triggers desire. Emotion and desire create the necessary motivation to act. Strategic design will channel desire with a call to ...

  If your customers are looking for information about "how to build a widget", and you rarely, if ever, mention the words "how to build a widget" on your website, your webpages will never be found for that search. If you want to know how to rank high on Google, you need to understand the strategic use of keywords. Figure out the keywords you want, and then make sure you have a lot of helpful, keyword-rich content. Here are the top five places you should add keywords to improve your website rankings today! 1. Organically throughout ...

Have you ever been seduced by a beautiful gallery and a smooth interface promising you a quick and easy way to make a free website? Only to sign up and waste hours before you realize it's a lot harder than it looks, the promised functionality is lacking and you aren't a talented enough designer to keep your site from looking like a stinking pile of discarded Excel files? Here are the top five problems you'll encounter with cheap website services. Advertise our Hot Widget Sauce. If you blog about widgets, you'll start seeing ads for your ...

We live in an amazing time where our online lives are filled with thousands of innovative free services, many of which provide value to you every day. You rely on your free email to manage your life, you regularly use free mapping services to navigate to meetings, free review sites to find the best restaurant, free social media to interact with friends, free sharing services to upload photos, free calendars organize your time, free word processing to get work done, and more. So is this trend going to extend beyond the internet? Will we soon ...

Over the last few years the internet has trained us to assume that we should be able to get quality online services for free. And there are many companies that have built their business model around providing just that, e.g. free news, social media services like Facebook and Twitter, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google Maps, free music with Spotify, etc. Of course we all know that nothing is really free. Those services are either selling your data or your attention to advertisers. But it's a trade most of us are willing to make. The ...

We're working on improving the native SEO performance of all websites that run on our platform. Search Engine Optimization recommendations change all the time as search engines improve their secret algorithms and we have to adapt to the new rules. But we are committed to making sure that we make SEO optimized websites. Search engines do not like duplicate content. Unfortunately they aren't smart enough to know that it's just one page with different capitalization or with extra variables in the URL. Essentially if the URLs are different, it ...

Everyone and their cousin are making websites these days. There are thousands of platforms and for less than a custom cup of coffee you can get a website for your business. Some of them even look nice, if your secretary doesn't try to get too fancy with the font colors. Who is going to look for your website? How are people going to find it amongst billions of pages on the internet? When people find your website will they be engaged and inspired? Do you know what you want people to do once they come to your website? Can your ...

Gutensite was nominated as one of the Best Website Builders in the industry by CMS Critic and their followers. Voting has now closed but if you haven't tried Gutensite create a site with our free 14 day Pro trial, take advantage of our free support, and see why people love us.

Digital photographs contain a limited amount of information in the form of small squares called pixels. Whether the images come from a digital camera or are scanned from film, once they're in the digital world they can't be enlarged. There is no way to increase their resolution (meaning size), which is measured in pixels per square inch. The recent photograph above of my daughters and I in San Francisco's Chinatown, was taken with an older iPhone and you don't have to zoom in much to see the pixels in my wolf daughter's face. And while a ...

We don't talk about it much, but even those of us who adore our spouses are sometimes moved by the look of someone on the street, in a cafe or working in the wine department of Trader Joes (too specific?) Scientists say everything from our immune systems to our parental status can play a role in attraction. But there is a certain amount of voodoo involved as well—in my no-so-expert opinion. Something we can't exactly explain. After a few years of dating we can predict certain elements will attract us (smile lines and Urban Outfitter plaid ...

So yeah, we hate SPAM as much as you do. When we design sites, we make sure that all email addresses are encoded in such a way that most SPAMbots won't take the time to harvest. There is no way to truly prevent a determined spammer from taking your email address, but if we encode it well enough it's not worth their CPU time when there are easier targets out there. But when you want to add an email address on a page, it's very vulnerable. We have a solution now though, thanks to Smarty, the open source template engine that powers Gutensite....