As many of you know, we have a new website management system that has been in beta testing over the last month. On Monday morning the 16th of November we will apply the new site management to all sites. Those of you that have elected to test it and anyone that has created a new website in the last 30 days will not notice any difference, since you have already been using the new management system. We still welcome you to apply the new management bar to your website early.
The new "Website Management Bar" is a replacement to the old backend administration system that has been a part of our platform for so long. Our goal is and always will be to provide you with the best social website creator that offers very robust features and functionality for all levels of users. The goal behind the new management bar was to make customizing your website easier, faster and more intuitive and based on the feedback we have received I think we have achieved this.
Some key improvements over the old way of administrating and customizing your website.
Full front end management menu bar, More intuitive menu structure making it easier update, maintain and getting help with your website.
Completely New Content Builder, with real on page drag and drop editing, element undocking and more!
Completely New Design Editor that features new options, easier to understand controls, dragable tool boxes, and much more!
New administrator announcements area to keep you informed on new updates, tips, and other news happening throughout the network.
On Monday morning we will put out another announcement that will have a full features list of the website management bar along with other important information. Remember this is still a new feature and will be under going continual development and improvement. We listen to you, give us your feedback and report problems for the good of all!
Join us for our Website Management Bar Webinar this Monday at 5pm EDT for a tutorial and Q&A about the new management bar.
Webinars are free and allow you to see full video and hear audio. In addition we will be taking questions from people about the features, how to and tips while using audio and video to help illustrate and respond to a question.
We have rolled out a few new improvements and added 2 event elements to go with the new event system. As many of your know we rolled out a new event page/system last week. We have had a good chance to collect some great feedback from our users.
You will now notice 2 new elements in the feature element category;
Mini Calendar - Self explanatory, this allows you to place a calendar that is linked to the new event system
Event Box - The event box allows you to place an element that displays different information from your events. You can create as many event boxes as you want and set unique information options, similar to how the Members and Videos boxes work.
Other improvements and adjustments
New Email form editor has been deployed for the new management bar system. The new email form editor is more free form, thus giving you greater control over how your email forms look.
The Main Blog page element now has options to control the page size, so that you can set how many blog entries a person can view before clicking to the next page.
Videos and Site Photos pages now display the number of comments on a video or photo in the search/list view
We are getting close to releasing the new management bar to all websites, if you have not done so already you are welcomed to switch your website over to the new management bar at anytime.
We understand when moving to our premium solution, one or two plans just doesn't fit all. Starting on Monday November 2nd we will be discontinuing our Pro and Lite Plan structure for a more flexible build your own plan premium option. Now all new accounts will be Pro accounts or "Premium Accounts".
The largest differences between our current plans and the new build a premium package include;
Scalable traffic selection (Our current plans allowed 25,000 page views with additional fees for overages). By allowing you to select your traffic allowance, Allows us to offer plans starting at only $4.95/mo (No Yearly Prepay required)
Removes the page view limit and replaces it with a more industry standard of Monthly Giga Byte (GB) transfer allowance
Allows you to pick and chose the premium features you want to use (Shopping Cart, Member Subscriptions, Ad Manager, Video Uploading)
Select your own page, element and storage limits so that you can price a plan that works best for you.
Select a support plan, allowing you to decide the level of support you would like to use.
You can no longer add a domain unless you are a premium customer.
There will be a noticeable overall price increase with our new pricing since things are now itemized, but we will continue offering our large discounts for prepaying 6 months or more.
No more shopping cart item limit, the shopping cart is now a flat $10 add-on with unlimited items.
New Video Uploading option, with your own player. (This enables people to upload video right to your website and has sharing features)
For those of you that support us by upgrading, for the most part this will not effect you or your plan with the exception on how your traffic limits are handled. Currently all upgrade plans included a base of 25,000 page views, since page views as a form of usage measurement are being discontinued you will be switched over to 50GB monthly transfer for Pro accounts and 25GB monthly transfer for Lite. As always, when we have changed our pricing model we honor existing plan pricing for current customers, so unless you cancel or upgrade your plan you never have to worry about your price going up.
If you are not upgraded but want to under the current plans I encourage you to do so before next week. As with any of our current customers, your pricing will be locked in.
The new and improved events page has been released and is ready for you to add to your website! Our new event system does not upgrade the current event calendar, and must be added by clicking on new page then selecting Event Page from the list.
Some Features you will enjoy!
3 Different Event Types
Announcement - This is for posting events that do not require action by a participant
Standard Event - Full Event type with RSVP, Location, and many other options
Pay Event - Built-in event registration and payment for event RSVP. Integrated with PayPal. We are the only social website platform that offers this built in.
Integrated payments for Pay events that allow the event user to set the PayPal email address for payments. All Payments come directly to you, NO REV SHARE.
Customizable Options for controlling access for who can create events and what type of events they can create.
Easy to read view to see upcoming events, past events or just your events
Event Approval Options
Settings for controlling when commenting on an event is open
Settings for who can comment on your event
Address or website URL box for giving the location of your event. Includes a link to Google Maps for directions.
Rich text editor for detailed event descriptions with image uploading.
Fully element based allowing you to move around some sections of the event calendar to your liking.
This release is Beta of the Event Page/System and some features could not make it in this release but will be added over the next 30-90 days. Coming soon features include;
Event Photo tagging allowing users to post photos from your events and display the photos on the event view.
Event Preview Photo Selector (Coming Really Soon)
Exportable Calendar ICS file for automatically adding an event to your own calendar on programs like Outlook.
Event Inviting Features
Mass Message Attendees
Private Events
We hope everyone enjoys this new event system. It is just one of many new features we are working towards to finish this year with a bang!!
Full Front End Editing added to new management system
About a week ago we
rolled out our new management bar for our users to try it out and provide us
with
feedback, before we roll this update out to all of our websites. The new
management bar will replace the way our websites are managed, within the next
week or two after we feel convertible with how the new management system
functions for all users. New websites created as of this week are setup with the
new management bar. The goal behind this is to continue adding improvements and
features to offer you the most complete, but easy to use social website solution
on the net.
Today we have applied a new update to the management bar system that
incorporates full front end real time page editing. This feature is something we
have wanted to add to our website platform for a long time, and today it is
finally a reality. This update allows you to add, edit and move elements around
on a real view of the page you are on, at the same time we have a page layout
option to overcome some cases where html or code added be the website
administrator may break the front end editing features.
Take a moment to watch a short video about how it functions.
Another feature you may see added soon is a new undock option on
elements to allow you to drag and position them anywhere on a page outside the
preset pay layout zones.
We have made some adjustments with how site intros are displayed. Now you can add your own custom page html complete with body and meta information, in turn this will cause the intro page to ignore the Style Sheet for your website. This way if you wanted to display a different background in your HTML code as an example, you can do this much easier now. Thus Allowing a greater level of intro customization.
If you are using the new management bar, when saving your intro you will be redirected to your intro page to get a preview of how it would look to new users visiting your website.
Over the next 24-48 hours we will be performing updates and changes to our platforms file system structure. During this period you may notice issues related to member profile photos and member photo galleries. Currently our system uses a central depository for member photos if the member has not uploaded a profile photo to a given website they are a member on. As one part of this update we are changing it so that only photos will display for a member photo on a member on your website will be if they have uploaded a photo on your website. This will result in some members no longer having a profile photo on your website until one is uploaded by that member. The reason behind this change is to give the site owner control over removing member profile photos that are not allowed for your given website.
Are you ready for a new and improved way to manage your website? We are a few week away from rolling out our new website administration bar. Before we do we have opened it up for you to help us test it and get feedback.
The new website administration bar will replace the backend administration area, giving you a new and improved experience when editing and customizing your website along with a few other new additions on the site management end of things.
New front end style editing, no more having to enter your website administration area to manage your website.
More intuitive menu structure from updating, maintaining and getting help with your website.
New administrator announcements area to keep you informed on new updates, tips, and other news happening throughout the network.
Full page manager that is clearer and easier to understand. This will make it easier for you to locate pages that need editing.
Our goal with the website administration bar is to make things easier for new users to use our platform for social website creation. The new website administration area combines what we have learned over the past 3 years about how people use their website and with feedback from users that decided not to continue with their website with us.
As a result we have released a platform update today you can optionally switch to the new website administration bar and help us improve it through your collective feedback. We will be fully release the new website administration bar to all websites by the end of this month.
Like we have experienced in the past, we know change can be hard for some people. But this update is about moving the platform forward. When giving us feedback ether positive or negative please provide information to back up your feedback so that we can make adjustments and improvements.
If you want to take part in trying out the new website administration bar on your website, you can do so by visiting your website management welcome page. On that page you will see a link Use New Website Manager.
In order to further polish our platform we have rolled out a new and improved member search page. This largest improvements include a new look, options you can customize, and more.
New Edit options button on the box containing the member. With the edit options you can customize the header, how many members to display per page, what you want people to see, and the format of the information returned.
Pick the information you want to display - Select from displaying age, custom status, location, register date and last time that person visited the website.
Change the result style - Pick from table, card, title, small and list formats or with custom CSS create your own. Each option changes the way the information is structured. For example selecting table will list the information in a Table format with a table header for each column.
To apply the new member page to your website, first delete your old member search page. Then go to your content builder, click on New Page then select Member List/Search page and follow the steps. That's it, once completed you will have all the features and detailed here.
Make sure you check out New Features Coming Soon post that tells about all the new goodies coming soon.
Today we released an update that greatly improves the rich text editor you use for adding content to your site. The rich text editor is used on custom content elements, forum posts, blog posts, etc.
This update was focused on speed improvements and get the new editor to work with the content builder system. You will also see it has a brand new look and improved functionality overall. Like anything new there may be bugs, problems or issues with it. Please report problems you encounter in a support ticket including if you run across an area that the editor does not load. The key thing about the editor is it loads much faster then before.
Other Improvements
Blog Improvements - New Settings added to the main blog page element and blog preview element
Featuring - You can now feature blog entries, this works with the blog preview element and it's new set of options for display by different types including featured entries.
Approval options - On the main blog page you can click the edit icon for your blog entries and set require approval for new blog posts. This will cause blog entries entered by members to be approved before displaying. If you have pending blogs for approval a new Pending Approval link will appear with the number of blogs for approval. Any blog moderator can approve blogs.
Views - Now when an entry is posted it will track views. The views is only visible to blog moderators and to the person that posted the blog entry.
Video Improvements - New settings for approval, and featuring
Featuring - You can now feature videos, this works with the Video box element and it's new set of options for display by different types including featured videos, the great thing about elements is you can create as many as you want and mix and match with different display options.
Approval options - On the main videos page you can click the edit icon for your videos and set require approval for new videos. This will cause video entries entered by members to be approved before displaying. If you have pending videos for approval a new Pending Approval link will appear with the number of blogs for approval next to the view all link. Any videos moderator can approve videos.
Video Quality Improvements have been added for video uploading by our Enterprise clients. This greatly enhances video quality on play back and full screen.
In addition to these updates we have made a number of small fixes and adjustments. Remember we depend on you reporting problems, anomalies and help with pointing out small usability improvements to improve our platform and service. Please report any issue you have in a support ticket, all websites have quick access to support from your website management area.
