Have you seen the latest issue of Web User magazine?
We’re very happy to say that in the Online Website Builder Group Test WebEden was given Silver!
We beat many other website builders from some of the biggest names in the business. It’s a proud day for everyone here at WebEden!
My thanks go to both you, the customers (without whom all this would be pointless!) and of course the developers, hard at work in the windowless box…
With much fanfare, we’d like to finally announce the launch of the WebEden blog feature – now available for you in all its glory!
We’ve been taking about the new blog feature for the best part of 2 years, and it has been a long and intense bit of work to finally produce it. The product is still in beta so we’re really like to hear if you have any comments about how we can improve it.
To start with, we’ve got 9 awesome templates that are blog specific for you to choose from. If you prefer then you can just use a standard template.
If you just want to add a blog to your website, get started by clicking the new ‘blog’ button on the WebEden toolbar
That gets you into the new Dashboard:
from where you can add an Text Post, and image post, or an article post:
The two other main options from the dashboard are to manage your posts, or your comments:
Within settings you can control general stuff like posts per page, comments per page, author info, comments management, and where you want to upload images to:
We’re really happy to get this product live, and we hope you enjoy using it. We’d really like to know if you have any feedback about the blog feature. Let us know what you think below, or the WebEden Facebook page or on Twitter.
We’d like to find out a bit more about who is using WebEden, your experiences, so we can learn how to make the system even better. We’ll share with you the interesting stuff we find out!
Please take a moment to complete the survey.
For traditional web developers who write their own code, there has been a cool way of displaying images called ‘light-box’.
We’ve now brought this effect to WebEden so that you can take advantage of it too!
Now, when in edit mode there’s a new ‘pop up’ tab in the Editor which let’s you set the pop-up flag, the pop-up image and an image caption.
This is what the editor looks like:
This means that any image can be popped up to full size, so that your visitors can get it in all its original glory.
This is what the same image looks like when popped up on the screen:
NB. This feature isn’t available for images inside galleries or frames, but we’ll look at extending it further in the future.
The only drawback at the moment is that this isn’t available for images inside galleries or those in frames.
Take a look at the new features and let us know what you think by leaving a comment on the blog, Facebook or Twitter.
Locked in a darkened room, fed on honey dripped down strings from the ceiling, the WebEden developers have turned their attention to beauty. And beauty, to them, means new templates.
We’ve had lots of requests from you about the type of new tempates you’d like to see. A lot of you mention that you like to start from scratch, without any template at all, so we’ve added a blank black and white one to the template list.
Others have talked about wanting to go for designs that use large background images with menus laid over the top. Here’s some cracking new ones to satisfy you:
And those of you who like more traditional formats, we’ve got some new designs that we hope will float your boat.
That’s it for now.
Let us know what you think about these new designs, either by commenting below or getting in touch with WebEden on Facebook or WebEden on Twitter.
After literally months of planning, arguing, designing, developing and testing we finally went live with our new website yesterday. We really like it, we hope you do to – and we’d really like to hear what you think.
Here’s what the old one looked like:
And here’s the shiny new one (to compare)
Well the old one had been around since early 2005, and it was really showing it’s age.
To start with it wasn’t very wide, built for a time when screens and resolutions were a bit smaller.
Second, the font was very small, making it hard to read and hard to engage with.
Third, although we had addressed this over time, there were too many unclear demands on the visitors’ eyeballs.
Over the years we’ve added to it and experimented some too. But wholesale change was what it really required.
What we’re trying to do with our homepage is to reduce clutter, make it easy to navigate, and make signing up to a trial as easy as possible. There’s been a general movement in web design towards ‘single action’ pages where the design reduces the choices for users to just 1. In the case of our homepage, it’s all about getting people to sign up to a trial.
The original design was put together by our designer Kevin Man, and it’s been coded up by resident developer Raymond Francis. And our hats are taken off to them for the hard work.
Here’s a picture of the happy couple (Kevin in the left, Ray on the right)
Waaaaaay to early to say at the moment, but take a look at this, a graph of the ‘bounce rate’.
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website without looking at any more than the first page.
Before the change our bounce rate was around 30%. Now it’s nearer 23%. That’s nearly a 25% improvement. That seems like a pretty good improvement to me! But more importantly, this shows the benefit of having a re-think about the design of your website too.
There’s still lots of work to do: sorting out the design for the forum for starters!
We’re really working hard to release our blog feature to you as soon as possible. It’s in testing, the feedback has been good, so it really won’t be much longer. Honest.
We would really appreciate your feedback on the design, good or bad, constructive or otherwise. You’ve all got good opinions on what looks good when it comes to the web, and we’d like to hear them!
We’ve just released a new update to our Website Builder that bring to life some great features.
On the 2nd of February update we gave you the option to have no background at all. We’ve now updated this feature so that now have a number of background HTML image options. This include tiling, no tiling, and horizontal or vertical tiling.
This give you a lot more flexibility. You might want to try anchoring the image to the top centre, or the top right or left. You can also choose whether the background image will be fixed in the browser or scroll with your page. Try it – it looks very cool.
We’ve had lots of you saying that’s a pain in the proverbial and sometimes confusion. Now you have the option of ‘quick access’. If you double click on something that is on the page master, you can jump straight to it. This means you can double click on the background to reach the ‘background’ panel in the design menu. This makes moving around the control panel a lot quicker.
You can always turn off the feature by clicking ‘Edit’ > ‘Preferences’ and then turn off ‘Auto Page Master’.
Since we’re shortly going live with the new blog feature, we had to remove page length restrictions, since articles, posts and comments can flow on and make the page bigger. So the page length max of 3600 pixels has been removed, allowing you to make things as big as you want. What I would say is that pages beyond a certain length aren’t very engaging, so keep thinking about whether or not your website visitors like long pages.
Some quite nice design changes with this update – let us know what you think!
In a couple of weeks time we’re updating the specifications on most of the WebEden packages. We’re applying higher Webspace and Bandwidth allowances to every account. And for all current customers we’re not changing the prices of your account.
We’re also simplifying things so that resellers can resell on any of the new products, though there will be lower site limits on some packs. Existing customers will retain existing site limits, and existing Resellers can move to new packs if they want to or stay on their existing plans.
Yeah!
From the same time we’re putting up the price of all packages. The price change will not affect current customers. If you already subscribe to WebEden the amount we charge you will not change. This price change applies to new customers and upgrades only.
We haven’t change the price since we launched at the start of 2005, and this means that we can increase the amount we invest in our development team to improve the products and services.
So if you’re planning to buy or upgrade, make sure you do that in the next couple of weeks.
We’ll let you know the details of the changes once they’ve been finalised.
Thank you for your ongoing support. And feel free to leave a comment below.
Last week we told you about our new release which means that your WebEden website now has a mobile version suitable for smartphones and other mobile devices.
One of the most complicated parts of this was making sure we built a version for all screen sizes – including tablets and mobile phones – and which detected whether the device was running Flash.
Broadly speaking, mobile phones will see the mobile HTML version, other devices without Flash (including the iPad) will see the desktop HTML, and any device with Flash installed will see the Flash version.
The Destop version of a WebEden website:
And the mobile version of the same site:
This is the first time we have built a mobile HTML version, so we’ve called it, erm, version 1.0! Its set up for small screen mobiles so all the content of your website is in a single column. Images are resized, links are larger to make them easier to press, and navigation uses a roll out menu. This makes the whole website easier to read and navigate.
This is definitely a work in progress. There are lots of things we’d like to do to improve it, and we’d like you to tell us how you want it changed too.
One of the reasons why people love WebEden is because you can use it to design in any way you like. We don’t restrict where you put your content and images, but allow you to drag them round the page and resize them until you’re happy.
That’s great from a design perspective, but because there’s often no formal architecture it make it challenging for us to write logical code that turns this unordered design into a formal structure for a mobile.
So for the mobile version we had to write an algorithm that analyses your free form design, makes sense of the order, and then lays it out in a single column. The code needs to make assumptions about what’s important and what’s not.
In order to create a structure for each page we try to group objects which lie over the top of or near to each other (on the X and Y axis) into rows and columns.
Here’s a tip: Keep related content lined up, either in a line or on the Y axis, so it helps us group them correctly.
We assume the widest column on your website is the most important and display that highest on the page, with the other grouped content falling in a single column beneath.
Another Tip: Make sure your most important content is in the widest column.
We then identify the header as content at appears above the site menu. As for the footer we use the placement of widgets such as the login button or the social media links as an indication of footer content. If you don’t have these then we assume the last row is the footer.
Tip number 3: Try testing the position of objects to help us correctly work out what goes in the header and footer.
There are some parts of your design that are there for pure aesthetics, and we ignore these for the mobile version. These include some images, empty text boxes, or items covered by other objects. Let’s say for example you place a coloured square behind some text. We make a decision that the text itself is the most important part of the design and render that in HTML, whilst leaving out the coloured square.
Tip 4: If you definitely want an image to show up in the mobile version then make sure it’s not covered by anything else.
We realise this isn’t perfect so are working to improve it for the next release.
The mobile HTML version of your website is fairly generic. For example, we use the HTML background colour and use that. We don’t apply additional styling to text or menu colour. Again, this is something we’ll improve next time around.
On the mobile HTML version the ‘menu’ button at the top will always display, even if you have hidden the menu from the page on your desktop site. This is important to make sure that users can always navigate the site.
At the moment the first ‘title’ text box on each page is set as the H1. Other ‘title’ text boxes are given H2. In the body text a bold line less than 120 characters is given H3.
That’s the basic intro to the mobile version of your website, how we make decisions about what goes where, and some guidance on how to change how it looks.
We really want to find out what you think of the mobile version, or if you are having any problems, so please leave a comment and let us know what you think.
Well we thought we’d have this out last year, and then we tried to do it a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re finally live with a WebEden release to get really excited about.
The developers have been working flat out on this release since early last year – we let them out in the sun for half and hour in September but they’ve been locked back in their windowless room ever since. Because this is a big project. We’ve had to rewrite some of the central parts of the WebEden system in order to integrate the mobile HTML roadmap (released now), the new Blog (released shortly) and e-commerce features (after that, not long).
We’ve now created the technology that will simultaneously publish a full Flash version of your website (for desktops and laptops), a desktop HTML version (for those people who haven’t installed Flash), and a mobile HTML version optimised for the small screen.
Here’s a desktop version of a site:
And the same site on a mobile phone:
The mobile optimised version your website is rendered in a single column of HTML. This means that all your content appears as a long vertical column which is easy to read and allows the user to scroll down the page. The website navigation is by a roll out menu, which means that most of the screen is devoted to your content.
This is just the first version of the mobile HTML – we’re going to be improving and upgrading it over the next few months. If yours is a website where you think the mobile version isn’t placing your content in the right order, please let us know and we’ll add it to our test cases.
In future, we’ll be adding styling options for the mobile version that will allow you to customise it.
TAKE NOTE: If you’re looking at the HTML version on your mobile and find a page with no content on it, just press refresh and it will display the content correctly. The ‘empty page’ will only occur the first time a page is visited following the release. It will happen only once. It will not happen for all users.
The exciting new shapes widgets lets you apply fills, gradients and effects to lots of different shape objects, usefully allowing you to customise the basic design of your website. Shapes is a project that’s going to be added in the next few months – we’ll be letting you apply these effects to text boxes, the blog, and images.
There’ now a feature which lets you turn off the Flash background of the site. In its place you get the HTML background. Doing this makes it possible to do the full screen image / fluid web design style that is so in vogue right now, with big headers and footers.
As we keep banging on, we’re shortly going to be releasing the blog and e-commerce. We’re just sorry they can’t all come at the same time.
We really want to know what you think of the new release, and would love to see the new designs that you can come up with using shapes and backgrounds. Please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think.
