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.

To register go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/443752657

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.

Some Features you will enjoy!

1. 3 Different Event Types
   1. Announcement - This is for posting events that do not require action by a participant
   2. Standard Event - Full Event type with RSVP, Location, and many other options
   3. 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.
2. 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.
3. Customizable Options for controlling access for who can create events and what type of events they can create.
4. Easy to read view to see upcoming events, past events or just your events
5. Event Approval Options
6. Settings for controlling when commenting on an event is open
7. Settings for who can comment on your event
8. Address or website URL box for giving the location of your event. Includes a link to Google Maps for directions.
9. Rich text editor for detailed event descriptions with image uploading.
10. 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;

1. Event Photo tagging allowing users to post photos from your events and display the photos on the event view.
2. Event Preview Photo Selector (Coming Really Soon)
3. Exportable Calendar ICS file for automatically adding an event to your own calendar on programs like Outlook.
4. Event Inviting Features
5. Mass Message Attendees
6. 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!!

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.

As with any update please report bugs and issues in a support ticket, we request your feedback about how the new management system operates to be posted on our New Website Administration Bar Feedback topic in our Owner Support Community Forums.

We are really looking forward to your feedback so that we may get this completed and continue rolling out the new features we have instore.

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.

Please post all feedback, bugs, and suggestions in our Website Administration Bar topic on our Owner Community Forums.

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.

You will notice that we have added an auto complete function that searches your members as you type to make it much easier to set the default friend and default profile template user account. More information on the setting the default profile page element arrangement go to http://my.spruz.com/?page=content&cid=32021&show_id=40570

Important If you had previously set a UID number for the default profile template you need to go back and use the new by name for the default profile template for your default profile to get copied to newly created member profiles.

Remember you can change your site and profile settings from the Settings link located in your website management area.

Comment Boxes have a new look

We have changed the styling of the comment boxes so that blend better with websites. The new look takes out the rounding and we kept it open for 3 slicing so that with CSS you can customize the comment boxes to have rounding if you chose.

Basic Content Editor the default

A while ago we released a new basic version of our content editor and the editor for Free websites. Now free and upgraded sites can use the Advanced editor and we have set the basic editor as the default content editor in admin. If you rather use the old editor (Advanced Editor) just click the advanced button and it should remember your setting.

Please make sure to report any bugs you see in support tickets to help us improve current features.

Site Properties on website administration has been renamed and revamped.

To make it easier for people to find where to change core site settings we have updated the Site Properties link with the label of Settings and on that page you can access your global website settings and update the site profile settings. These areas provide you with a number of options to further tailor your community to your liking.

New Display options on the Members Box Element

Our goal has and always will be to provide our users with an incredible level of customization. That is why you will now see a new Display Style option when editing some elements. The display types will change the look of the information within the element. Right now there are 4 display styles (List, Card, Small and Tile) for you to play with. To check this out just click on any members element on your website.

Profile Comment Notifications

With the shout box element users can set an option to get an email every time someone comments directly on their profile. This can be turned off from the element settings on the shout box element if added to their profile page.

Customize the default profile elements members start with

Be default all profiles normally start with a Friends box and a Shout box, but now you can create a custom profile arrangement for your members to start with when they first join your website. More information on this can be found by going to http://my.spruz.com/?page=content&cid=32021&show_id=40570

New Themes Added to the Theme Library

Want to try a new look for your website? We have a theme library that allows you to quickly install new themes to your website. To check out the theme selection go to your theme library by going to your website, login, then click on Manage Site, then the red design tab. You will see an option in the menu for Theme Library, new themes are added all the time.

Blog Preview Element Changes

On the Blog Preview element that you can add to your home page you can now set the number of words to display and it will automatically post the first Image or Video from you post to display in the preview.

Blog Changes

We have removed the large date block next to the title of a blog entry when viewing and replaced that with the Picture of the person that posted the blog entry. We have also corrected an issue when editing a blog where the category box was not keeping the category selection properly.

Some new SPI codes have been added.

$code_off - $member_profile_image will return the URL of the members profile image, and we have added #load_xmlpost(http://example.com)# that is designed to allow you to post to another server page information. Thus allowing developers to really intergrate 3rd party features into our platform. More information about SPI

In addition to the above we have made a number of other small fixes and adjustments.

New Videos Page, this page allows people to add, view and search videos added from Youtube. If you are using the old video search page please delete it, and click on add new page then select Videos Page.

New Group page, we have revamped the group page to make it a little easier to use, to update your current group page delete the one you have and then go to add pages and select groups. Don't worry you won't lose anything in the process.

In addition these pages are fully element based, thus allowing them to be customized with addition supporting elements.

A few fixes that we have applied:

• Link Directory - We have corrected an issue with the link directory where if the page was set to allow anyone to add links they would get a access denied type of message when submitting there entry. The page should now follow the correct access rules. We have also addressed the problem with deleting link categories.
• Members Photos and Video Pages - We have added options directly on the photo or video view to make it easier to delete, and edit the video or photo. This is also where the new featured option will be soon where you can pick photos and videos to be featured in a photos or videos box element.
• Profiles - Profile shouts no longer will show in the main site activity. It was intended that those should be more private and not broadcasted to the world.
• File and Uploading Speed Improvements - In some cases sites with alot of files would see slow downs when loading any file uploader, such as when uploading a photo to profiles or going to the file manager. This has been improved so those things should load up much quicker now.
• Elements - When you leave the header text blank on an element it will no longer draw the top header row. Thus making a much cleaner look, so if you do not want to have a title header on an element you can leave it blank and it will now draw correctly.

A snap shot of what you will see in the next few weeks:

New and Improved Event System, Member Search Page, Site Settings page and member titles

Also in this update:

• Fix for the Change Layout tool to make the saving the new layout beheive more consistantly.
• Fix for Chrome and Safari title positioning in the Design editor.
• Front end edit options now display on all elements even if they do not have header text.
• Content editor nav buttons now display options in a cleaner format that is easier to use.

And many more bug fixes and styling tweaks.

With our free websites we have decided to take a new direction in regards to supporting their service. Today we released a new update that puts more focus on Site Sponsorship. As part of this adjustment we have added a top Sponsor bar to all free websites. The bar does brand the website and provides a spot for a site sponsor of the free website.

Here is a website where you can see an example of how the sponsorship bar looks http://disneychannelstarz.myfanwebsite.com/

Don't pay any attention to that websites colors, but notice at the top of the site is a Grey Bar that we will use to promote more of our services and rather then loading a free site up with advertisements we want to offer a simple up to 40 characters Text Link next to Sponsored By:

What does this mean for you? If you are one of our many paying customers we are now going to give you a 10 website block to sponsor for Free where you will have text and a URL link of your choice in the Sponsored by:

The Sponsor Bar displays on every page of a Free Website and up to 4 sponsors will be displayed per active free website.

When you get your 10 site sponsorship block you then would customize your advertisement by entering your Text such as you site name, then enter your sites URL, and finally pick the site categories you want our system to pick the sites you are sponsoring. Our system then picks 10 sites for you to sponsor based on their recent site activity.

To get started visit our Site Sponsorship page, remember you are the site sponsor as a paying customer of ours. The page it not for seeking sponsors. Anyone can purchase site sponsorship blocks for an very affordable, low cost way to purchase true text links.

Getting Started

Building and growing a website takes time, patience and some dedication, but it does not have to be work. It should be fun and exciting, and the website should be about what you like to do.

The first key to creating a successful website is to think small. To often people try create social websites thinking they will be the next MySpace or Facebook. The need for those communities is already filled, but you can be very successful filling different more targeted needs, this brings us to the beauty of niche social networking and social websites. A niche is a smaller targeted group of people that may share your interests.

Now that you can take advantage of DIY (Do it Yourself) Social Platforms, you can create a community that will attract a strong following if done correctly. The great thing about a Social Website is once you offer your visitors something that they are interested in, those members will grow your site for you. All you need to do is define your website, setup the framework, add some information and begin using it.

You are asking now what do you mean "If Done Correctly"? Just like anything in life, making the least amount of mistakes and using your time effectively is very important. That is why we put together 5 steps to getting started with a social website from a person with extensive experience in the field, Jay Roberts Co-Founder of Spruz Inc

Step 1. Decided your focus

Your websites focus is extremely important, would you get in your car before knowing where you are going? Nor should you begin you website without first thinking about your target. What need is your site filling for your visitors through information, social interaction, and/or e-commerce channels.

Example 1: Lets say you want to create a website about dogs, Well there are already many sites about how to care for your dog, find a dog, etc. But there are not many sites about a certain type of Dog, So lets start with a website about German Shepherds. On Google over 250,000 people search just the using the term German Shepherds just last month. So when you begin building the site it should have information very focused about German Shepherds You can use the Google Keyword Tool to find search volume of a key term. Now just imagine if you just had 10% of those people searching using only the words German Shepherds clicking to your website that would turn into 1000's of dollars a month is just ad revenue. Important to note that search engines favor sites with very focused content and will rank higher then sites about many different things.

What's great about a focused site is people like Niche networks that are only about just want they are into and does not present them with information they just plainly don't care about, plus advertisers will pay you 10X more for advertising on a site that has a focused demographic of users.

You have filled your first need! By giving a place where people can meet and share their interest with other German Shepherd Owners. BTW there is not a social community online that is just about German Shepherds. This is just one example on how you can focus on just one small segment and in turn build a large following around it.

Step. 2 Setup your website and pick a good name you can stick with.

Rome was not built in a day, nether will your website. While getting your site started on the Spruz Platform is quick and easy, configuring it to your needs and focus will take a little time. The same goes for any other website platform, but Spruz is by far the most flexible for expandability for you. It is important that you pick a social platform and a domain name for your website and stick with it.

The single biggest mistake people make after they setup their website, they want to change it out or delete it and start over. DO NOT START OVER. If you get bored or tired just create a new website and come back to your first site later. Search engines rank your website first and foremost based on the domain name and how long your site has been up and accessible. To learn more about how to get a good ranking in Google, read our "How to get your site in search engines like Google" article that has some great information.

Step. 3 Add Information about the site

It is important that, when your German Shepherd Fans visit your website they need to know that your site is just about German Shepherds and nothing else. Don't worry about not being able to expand upon this later. All to often we see sites that get created and they miss the most important part (A Clear Description). Making your site description obvious to your visitors is very important! Your site description should be no more then a paragraph long, with maybe a link to your about us page for your visitors to read more about you, your website, and maybe a mission statement. About you and your site should not be something that is left out.

By making the description clear and telling others about your site clearly, helps you in 2 ways.

1. When people find your site they can tell right away what this site is about.
2. Search Engines Rank you higher and quicker if you have focused content.

Think about how you use the internet, how many sites do you visit in a day and what captures your interest to browse a few pages on a site you found. The goal is to keep your site visitors from bouncing. Bouncing happens when the visitor only visits one page of your website. We recommend adding Google Analytics to your site so you can see how long your visitors are saying and make changes.

Step. 4 Begin Adding Content - continue to do it regularly

Use the blog, photo and forums modules to build content at first, you must start using your site first before anyone else will. Make it a goal to spend 1 hour a week making some form of update to your website, This is often the hardest part, it is hard sometimes when we feel the only person we are talking to is the wall. However what you are doing is building content, letting search engines know your site is active, and when you post content it is automatically syndicated and used by our system, to assist you in getting traffic. If you are dedicated to adding blogs, forum posts, and images to your website regularly traffic will come! Trust me!

Future "Your Social Website" Series articles will go into more detail about content ideas you can apply to your website.

Step. 5 Spread the word!

This is the last key in getting building the success channel people to your site, that in turn will promote and grow it for you.

Here are 5 things you can do quickly, easily and for little to no $$ that will start opening the flood gates to your website.

1. Invite your friends! We have built in inviting features that allow you to import your address book and send everyone a message with everything they need to know in order to get to your website and help you build content.
2. Post your web address on your Facebook, Blog, twitter, and your other social places. This will let your friends know what you are doing and will help search engines find your website quicker. Remember every place you post your website address is another place for people and search engines to find you. Any place you are posting information to, try to mention your website address as a place where people can contact you.
3. Put a free ad on Craigslist with information about your website, and why people should visit it. They have categories like services, and so on, that are for the most part free to post and will get a lot of views.
4. Link Exchange! There are a lot of small sites that will exchange links with you if you ask them and you have information that would be useful for them to link to. In a lot of cases they will just add a link to their website without a link back from yours
5. Advertise on Google or Yahoo Search, if you have a very focused website in the way of content and structure your keywords the same in your ad campaign, you can buy a lot of traffic for just 5 cents a click.

The key here is building your website about one interest you have and finding others that share that interest. It is all about you and what you are going to do. If you follow these Getting Started Steps, and you stay dedicated to your goals you are really off to a good start at building that successful website you are dreaming about.

Good Luck and Best Wishes!

Please feel free to post your questions and comments. Your success is our success as well!

On the Shopping Cart we have added some new options, including Quality Control for items and we have added a new Save and New Button when saving a new item that makes it easier to go right to the next item you are adding.

Some fixes and updates:

• We have carried over design 9 slicing so that on themes with 9 slicing the style will apply to the event calendar, forums, knowledge base system, search pages, and so on in order to give a more consistent look to websites.
• Corrected a problem that still pops up with image uploading where on occasion some images won't process correctly. (Please report if you still see issues)
• Updated the member email confirmation process to make it easier to understand and we added an option right on the confirmation page for the member to change his email address just in case it was miss typed when registering. When the email is changed it automatically confirms the account as well. Remember you can change how long a member is on your site before they must confirm their email address by going to your site properties page and setting the require email confirmation option.
• We addressed a couple other usability issues that mainly would apply to people first creating a website.

Remember to visit our Owner Community at http://my.spruz.com and post your suggestions, ask for help, and check out the knowledge base. If you see something off, or have a suggestion on small improvements we can make to existing features then post them in our idea room forum at http://my.spruz.com/forums.

Follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/spruz for fast notifications when new updates are released or to get the inside scoop!

Our Idea Room is located on our Official Platform Community website (http://my.spruz.com). Our Platform Community Website was created for all site owners of sites powered by the Spruz Platform to meet, exchange ideas, and build relationships. One of the most important aspects of our community is how we want to listen to your needs, in order to bring new features, improvements, and help you grow or earn a living from your website powered by our platform.

Give it a visit, share your ideas, and grow!

We have made some overall improvements to the dragging and dropping on the Content Builder. Now when you pick up to move a box it collapses to make it much easy to see where you are dragging the box to. This along with some other minor adjustments to make editing your dynamic pages a little easier.

The support ticket system has been moved to function from our main website. All the links and they ways you get to support tickets is the same. But this improvement solves an issue where if a site is erroring or has other issues there really was no way to enter a ticket on the problem outside of your website. We have also added a full text editor for entering your ticket details. This way you can easily insert images for us to see!

The knowledge base adding and editing of content has been greatly improved. We have added a full editor for updating content and the admin options for adding content, deleting content, etc has been made more clear.

The profile info option has been split into 2 pages.

Personal information Page: This will collect basic account details, and such. Including the setting for changing rather or not the member wants updates from the website.

Profile Settings Page: On this page users will control more of their profile display settings, and options.

In addition to these changes we have made a few other smaller adjustments.

Some of these changes are new and may have bugs. Please report bugs as they occur via support ticket.

Here is a list of recent updates that have been applied to your website released moments ago;

• Cleaner Welcome Bar: We are testing out a new look to the top bar that used to say Welcome Name. This account menu bar has been changed a bit to give a cleaner look to your website when you member logs in. We are still working on the best format and options to present in that space when a member logs in.
• Forums Edit Options - The edit options that control editing, moving and deleting forums will now be visible by default if you are an admin you can toggle them by clicking on the sort/manage button. This was done due to a large number of complaints from new users because they were unable to find out how to add moderators. We have identified this as the controls being hidden by default for admins.
• New Member Activity Box Option - You will not notice that on your member activity box a new option when you edit it that will allow you to select different activity display options. We noticed on sites with heavy forum activity it often drowned out the member profile activity. Now you can select to display all activity, forum activity or just profile activity.
• Streamlined the process for new users when they first create there website and go through the content wizard process.
• We made improvements to the Social Content Wizard Template by changing the page layout, added a login box instead of login text and a number of other tweeks.
• Theme Revamps - We have updated all themes from our basic theme series to give them all a very clean look with rounded corners for the boxes and added 3 new themes to that series.

We have so many new things we are working on as posted in other annoucments! Please give us your feedback.

This change will phase out the current help forums that were part of your websites administration area, as well as allow us to make better use of the site administration welcome area for new help and resources to assist you in growing your website/communities.

The reasons for this change is many;

• We wanted to create a common community space for website creators to meet each other, get tips and access information about taking advantage of allot of the really advanced things you can do with your site powered by the Spruz Platform.
• By implementing an active community space of our own (A Company Social Website) allows our development team to work with the social features that we develop on a regular basis for you to use and to see first hand ways we can improve functionality, features, and show you different ways to use these features.
• The forums in the welcome area lacked features that allowed us to effectively moderate or even assign moderators to help us out. We are a very small team working night and day to not only support you, but develop the greatest website platform with social features on the net. Thus we are always looking for ways to free up our support time so we can spend our time planning and developing for you.
• The new community allows us to directly link new users to information quicker and more effectively.
• On the new community site we want to take advantage of our new member profile features so everyone can build new friendships that share interests about building and working on their own websites.
• The new owner/support community is built from our Developer Website and never really seemed to get the activity we wanted because of the welcome page forum area. Thus we felt while the welcome area forums were great, it took away from being able to explore development features.
• With our own community we can now and we will be assigning special moderator and admin status to select people in our community that want to help out, have great common sense when dealing with problems, etc.

You will notice that we have added and updated links on your site administration welcome page to quickly link you to the discussions on the new website and show you information on how many new posts since you last visited the support website. In addition the knowledge base information now directly links to the new community website. We will be adding more features to the welcome page that directly tie into the new support community website.

As for the old forums on the site administration welcome area, they will be completely phased out in a few days. We will have them archived for our own personal reference. So do not worry you old posts still have value to us.

When joining http://my.spruz.com make sure you do not register a new account, because you already have one. Just login with your current account and click the Join button to become part of the network.

We hope our new community website we be a very friendly and welcoming space for new and old users alike. I look forward to seeing you next on my.spruz.com

Improvements

New Member Videos Element - This element will display recently added videos to member profiles or you can chose to display videos with the views. You can select a range of videos to display at one time.

New Member Photos Element - Now you can show recently uploaded photos and photos with the most recent comments. The Members Photos element replaced current member blogs element because with the new member profile system we released, member blogging is now done on the main website. Thus the member blog element was a dead element that we needed to replace. If you had this element still on your website you will find it is now replaced with a members photo element.

Member Box Element Improvement - The member box element that allows you to display members based on different types of activity has got a new activity selection to show top bloggers. This selection will list your most active members that use the blog along with their post counts.

More Member Activity Logged - We are now logging when someone adds a new profile photo and when someone makes a change to their profile page. Profile update activity is still new and will be expanded or modified base on our user feedback.

Coming Soon...

Event/Calendar System overhaul (Slated for release end of next month);

• An improved user-friendly structure for finding, viewing and adding events
• Ability to charge a fee for someone to register for an event that will be paid directly to your PayPal account
• Better RSVP options where a member can select that they will be attending, not attending or might attend.
• When posting an event their will be an option to set if an event is personal or public.
• An area that lists events you or your members have RSVP for.

Wiki/Content System (Slated for release end of next month); (Replacement to the current knowledge base system)

• Completely page based system where you can allow your members to add pages and edit pages.
• Ability to roll back or approve page changes
• Unlimited page depth, meaning new pages can be created within other pages and so on.
• Full tag support, content searching and new elements to show top authors, editors, and so on.

Member Points System (Slated for release around October 1st)

• Customizable points for rewarding member site activity
• An option to name points whatever you would like. Thus points could be EXP, or whatever
• Points will be based on activity recorded by the member activity site features. Thus anything that would normally appear in the member activity feed could have a point value attached to it.
• Points position system so that members can see how they rank against other members on your website.

In addition to the main features mentioned for the above platform improvements/additions there will be number of other features of the above systems that will be announced at a later date. So stay tuned!

Over the next several weeks you will also see added functionality to some of our other areas as we work to bring you the best in over all functionality and features in one platform. Please follow us at http://twitter.com/spruz for up to the minute announcements on smaller but big changes over the next several weeks.

One of these small but big changes, includes the option to change the format of the information displayed in the Member Box element. How would you like to decide how to format the member picture? Chose from list, tile, and full detail format types on the Members Box Element!

Announcements on smaller changes will be done every week to 2 weeks to summarize updates that have taken place since the last announcement, but for the latest updates make sure to follow us on Twitter!

How this new program works is starting on July 20th all theme designers that submit themes that meet our new quality standards will earn cash or credit each time a theme is installed to a website. So if you have some design talent, and you know CSS, this will be a great way to earn additional revenue.

Each time a theme is installed you will earn .25 cents, plus you still have the opportunity to optionally charge for your theme design and earn 70% of the theme price.

Terms and Conditions of theme library submissions:

Upon submitting a theme for review to the theme library you acknowledged you are the owner or copyright holder of any graphical content used in a theme. You do not need to formally enroll into the theme design program until first payment is due. Payments are paid once you have a payment due balance of greater than $100.00 and are issued to you within 30 days of your payment request. Upon your first payment request we will require you to complete and sign additional documentation for tax and accounting purposes. Themes submitted by the designer are subject to review, themes submitted are added to the theme library at the discretion of Spruz Inc and may be pulled at anytime from the library for any reason.

More information about submitting a theme for review can be found at http://my.spruz.com/?page=content&cid=38498

Get your updates from us at twitter! We will no longer put out updates on small improvements, updates or fixes. Instead we will be posting smaller changes and improvements on http://www.twitter.com/spruz

We will hover occasionally do posts that summarize changes, improvements, and new features on more of a monthly basis rather then when those updates or changes occur. To stay more informed please follow us on http://www.twitter.com/spruz 

Our Lite plan is our most affordable plan option. Upgrading to Lite removes advertisements, expands your file space by 10X or more and gives you priority support ticket response times.

Other recent changes include;

• Adding content to profiles has just gotten much more apparent. We have removed the Plus Sign to go with more of an inline menu for things like adding elements, widgets, photos and videos. This was done based on feedback from members that contact us about how to add things to their profile. We noticed the + sign was not an apparent way to display how members can add things to their profile pages.
• Free sites now have an Edit This Page option that makes it easier to know where to go to customize a page. The edit this page will not show on upgraded sites.
• We have made some adjustments to the blogging system to make it easier for users to share your posts on sites like Facebook, Email, Digg and so on.
• New Share Options have been added to the bottom of pages on Free websites, we will have a how-to for our upgraded members so you can optionally add a share this at the bottom of all your pages.
• The Blogging system is still getting reworked to add post approval options, make it easier to edit and delete categories and much more.
• New and Improved Community Search page to give active communities more focus. We have 1000's of visitors per month that are just looking for networks to join. Check it out by going to http://$creator_domain_name/?page=spruz&cmd=search

We have some many cool things that we are working on for release over the next few months.