We've added a new feature that is super helpful for allowing your organization to provide better customer service to your customers. Now any Gutensite Administrative account can be enabled as a Master Password account. Once enabled, that Admin account can login to any Customer account on your site. This option is particularly helpful for Customer Service personnel when helping a customer troubleshoot a problem, or to verify that a customer actually has the items in the cart that they claim, or to try to reproduce a complaint that the client ...

We've launched a Community Support Forum for all Gutensiters to talk to one another, ask for help, offer help, share ideas, etc. All our Professional clients have direct access to our dedicated support staff, but Free Lite users, Personal, and Webmaster accounts do not have this dedicated support. So now we're excited that there are more support options for everyone. The Forums are a great way to share knowledge with the whole group, or look for answers to questions that have already been asked. Initially, the Forums are going to be ...

We all know the old phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" and in a moral sense this is true. But in a broader problem solving sense that's not always the case. Sometimes two problems can compliment one another and one problem can become a great solution for the other. I ride my bicycle to and from work every day. Part of my commute is along the Iron Horse and the Canal Trails which run along public land that has been protected from residential development because it hosts power lines and drainage canals. So these right of ways conveniently ...

I'm working on a "top-secret", personal, side project which we hope to launch in a few months. The project is called "Comrade Share", and through our service we will provide new solutions to several common entrenched problems. In the process, I've come to some interesting conclusions about finding solutions to common problems. This isn't a roadmap to solving all problems, but it is one great way to rethink outside the box. And if the problem is big enough, your solution can change the world. Four simple steps can help us think through the ...

One of our biggest problems is finding enough time to promote ourselves. We are adding powerful new features to Gutensite all the time, which meet client needs or wishes, but we don't have time to brag about them because we're off to the next project. But over the years we've created a very powerful eCommerce Store with loads of options for customization. We have some companies with highly complex product requirements that stretch us to innovate features that meet their demands. This week we added some brand new features and revamped some ...

We're hiring. See our "Openings" page for for information. We need a really great web designer that can deliver. Is that you? Or do you know someone? Please check it out.

For Realtors that use our built in MLS (Multiple Listing Service) property feeds, we offer free Email Alerts for their visitors who want to be notified of new properties that match specific search criteria. There are professional services that offer this product exclusively, but Realtors prefer our version because it's free, visitors can create an email alert easily and instantly from any listing page on their site, the email designs can be customized, and more importantly, the properties in the email can link directly back to their own ...

Occasionally we have to perform server maintenance that makes your website temporarily unavailable (for example, tomorrow night at 8pm PST). When the server is down for maintenance, visitors are given a nice message to help them understand what is happening (so they don't think your site is broken). However, before the server goes down, they may be performing critical tasks, writing a comment, purchasing a product, etc. And so it's important to let them know that things are about to stop working. We have implemented a new alert message that ...

We have added support for a more visual calendar date picker to the CMS. So now when you pick dates, you don't have to consult another calendar to figure out what the date is of next Tuesday. The picker supports keyboard arrows for toggling the hours up and down, or specific number inputs.

You may have noticed that your site was unavailable last friday (July 16th at around 12:30 PM PST). The downtime lasted about 30 minutes and was caused by a hardware failure with one of the core routers at the data center that hosts our servers. This affected their entire data center, including our server. It was not a problem with our server per se, but a network problem that slowed or stopped traffic from getting to our server. We take uptime very seriously, but these things happen, unfortunately, despite redundancies and backups in the ...

One of the problems with growing your business large (a challenge we are facing more and more each day) is maintaining human relationships with your clients. Good relationships, Good will between businesses and their customers, builds loyalty and earns referrals the old fashioned (and stable) way. Already I see this problem in Gutensite, because I no longer have a personal relationship with all our clients (I only know the really old clients that remain loyal because of the personal attention we have given them over the years). These days ...

If you looked at our Blog, lately, you might conclude one of two things: 1) Gutensite must not have much to report, 2) Gutensite must be too crazy busy to blog about all the great things that are happening. If you chose door number two, you win. Go have a free website, on us. Unfortunately, I have to admit, blogging is not a high priority compared to all the other important things that demand my time (as much as I would love to spend my day sitting in a coffee shop blogging about how cool we are). But the truth is, we've been working on ...

We are proud to announce the launch of a new flagship Gutensite website for Alain Pinel, a local Luxury Real Estate Broker with about 1300 agents in the San Francisco Bay Area. We created the first Bay Area Open House Search website, which has integrated live property data from the four independent Multiple Listing Services in the area. This in itself was a Herculean feat, since they all follow separate data standards, so we had to create a shared standard of our own. The new seamlessly integrates this data, and provides additional features ...

We just integrated ReCaptcha's nifty Word Verification API into the contact forms for all our sites, e.g. Site Contact, Custom Forms, Comments, etc. They are kind enough to allow us to customize the look to be less obnoxious than their standard design (Thank You ReCaptcha!). One of the nice features is that it's handicap accessible, allowing the blind to "listen" to words, which is super cool. And the whole project, is an exercise in collective processing power of the internet. Everyone who verifies a word is participating in a project to ...

Okay, now I'm going to yelp about Yelp. We've had some ongoing drama with the popular business review site Yelp.com. We created a business profile a while back, so people would have an opportunity to review our work and give good or bad reviews of our service. But when we went back to add more photos a few months later it had mysteriously disappeared. So we created another profile, and discovered the new profile had a funky "-2" at the end (http://www.yelp.com/biz/gutensite-walnut-creek-2). It turns out old profile still existed, at the same ...

Similar to the Image Uploader we added a few months ago, we have now extended the functionality to work with documents and multimedia. Which means you can upload a lot of videos or audio into your library in one fell swoop, or upload a lot of documents at once, and watch the progress of your upload. This is a huge improvement in usability. But what's even better, is that you can upload the files to your Multimedia or Document library, while you are writing your Blog, adding your newest Property or Product, or adding any new page. You don't ...

We recently completed a simple but powerful upgrade to Gutensite that will allow much greater flexibility for page layouts. Traditionally when creating a basic html page ("my pages") you had the ability to work from a blank canvas, using the WYSIWYG editor to create anything you wanted. This is powerful, but good design is really beyond the capabilities of 99% of our users. And the entire purpose of the CMS is to allow anyone to edit the content, with the expectation that Gutensite will handle the design. So we've introduced a few extra ...

We work on Macs here at Gutensite (although we also have some PCs for cross platform testing). On monday, one of our iMacs did a standard software update for the wireless airport card. The update froze in the middle and in the process trashed the kernel irreparably. We tried disk utilities, purchased DiskWarrior for $100, ran these utilities multiple times, but to no avail. So we zeroed out the disk, and tried to reinstall, but it fails install every time. Evidently the Kernel (which is separate from the regular hard drive) has some major ...

Where did october go? I remember having a birthday at some point, but the rest is a blur. The good news, I suppose, is that the economy has finally picked up (for us at least) and we have more work than we can handle. We need to hire another designer and programmer, immediately. The bad news is, due to the sudden influx of work over the past couple months, I have been sucked back into the vortex of project management and programming, which means I have had no time to do any pro-active business development, partnership development, or ...

It's alive! After many years of wishing, and several weeks of actual work, our new image uploader is now available for use. This simple tool totally revolutionizes content management workflow. Previously you had to either upload the images to the library first, before adding some content (e.g. write a blog, sell a home, add a product, etc), or you had to add the images later (because you forgot) then go back and edit the record. Very cumbersome and annoying. Well now that has all changed. We have created a great new image uploader that is ...