We just launched over 20 brand new, handcrafted themes to give your site a fresh look. Check them out and let us know what you think!
Today is an exciting day. For the past few months, we’ve been hard at work building an amazing set of features to make your sites more powerful, more professional, and more effective than ever before. Now, we get to show you what we’ve been working on!
This release includes both an awesome set of improvements to the Pro package as well as great updates for free users. In January, we’ll also be making some changes to our plans and pricing so be sure to read below for details. Our latest set of updates is all about making your sites look amazing! With the introduction of over 20 gorgeous themes, 100+ color variations, and an expanded selection of beautiful HTML5 web fonts, your sites will now look more professional than ever before. And not only that, we’ve made it faster to upload files and photos with drag & drop uploading! Let’s dig in.
We are always striving to provide the easiest and most powerful website building experience available. To help us better understand your needs, we've created a short survey that shouldn't take more than a few minutes to complete. Your answers will really help us prioritize our improvements going forward. In return, we want to give away some awesome Weebly schwag! Of the people who fill out the survey, we're going to choose 10 at random to pick their choice of the following prizes!
After many months of hard work, we're incredibly excited to release one of the biggest updates in the history of Weebly. This update includes 25 brand new, modern themes, a complete rewrite of our theme engine to support a variety of page layouts, a new button element, as well as support for social media icons and phone numbers at the top of your sites.
Only a day after our new theme beta test, we're excited to announce the immediate availability of Weebly for iPhone! Now you can post to your blog and manage your site on the go. Here are a few of the exciting features:
Click here to download Weebly for iPhone, and if you like it, be sure to give us a 5 star rating in the App Store! We'd love to hear what you think.
A note to Andriod users: We haven't forgotten about you! We're working on an Android app, but we want to make sure we get it perfect and it's going to take some time before we have anything to show you. Stay tuned! We choose what to build next by listening to your feedback very closely, and improvements to themes and additional flexibility are your top requested features. Our team has literally been working around the clock to get these features to you as fast as possible. Today, we're excited to finally introduce them for testing! Page Types With your existing theme, all the pages of your site share the same layout. This means that if you choose a theme with a large header image, every page is required to have a large header image. With page types, the layout of each page is configurable between 4 choices: a landing page, large header image, short header image, or no header image. This gives you greater flexibility and allows a more professional look. Button Element The new button element is simple, but powerful. Drag it on, hover over it, choose the desired style, and set the destination link. Each theme has button styles designed to match its look and feel and all buttons have hover and pressed states. Check out the examples below. Social Media Icons & Phone Numbers All themes now have areas for social media icons and phone numbers at the top of your site. Just hover over the icons to link them to your social media profiles and click the text to type your phone number or other message. These fields can be turned off under the "Design Options" area if desired. All the themes in Weebly have been rebuilt from the ground up to support these new page types and features. It was a massive undertaking, and there's the possibility we missed a few things that would result in minor inconsistencies between the old and new versions of your theme. Due to this risk, we've placed these features into a beta state that you can activate by clicking the button below. We'll be keeping a close eye on any issues that arise to ensure full stability before introducing these features across the millions of websites on Weebly.
In addition to these features, we're putting the final touches on 20+ new, gorgeous themes that incorporate visually appealing, modern design styles. We're excited to release these themes alongside the official theme relaunch, coming soon after this beta period. If you're feeling a bit adventurous, activate the beta now and be sure to send your feedback to [email protected]! Did you know that over 10% of your website traffic visits from a mobile device? We were ahead of the curve when we introduced automatic mobile versions of your websites, and today, we're taking things a step further by upgrading your slideshows and photo galleries for mobile optimized viewing and interaction. Now, when people are viewing photo galleries or slideshows from a mobile device, the photos open full screen and allow native touch and swipe gestures. This works extremely well not only on iPhones and iPads, but the wide range of Android devices as well. Check it out for yourself. Just click a photo in the gallery below from your smartphone or tablet to see these updates in action. You'll also notice the following improvements when viewing photo galleries from a computer:
We're excited to get these updates into your hands, and it should be just a few more weeks before we have some major news to announce on this front. Stay tuned! Our users inspire us to make Weebly better every single day. And when someone inspires us through an exceptionally good cause? Well, we simply can't resist expressing our gratitude in a slightly bigger way. Four days ago our CEO stumbled upon a posting on Reddit outlining the story of Omari, a young man who cares for children at the Faraja Orphanage in Ngong, Kenya. Omari was slashed in the face while he attempted to protect the children and ward off intruders who had broken into the orphanage, earning him a large facial wound and a stint in the hospital. This man is one of those rare real-life heroes. The Longonot Education Initiative was looking to raise $2,000 to help erect a concrete and barbed wire fence to protect Omari and the children. To our surprise, we found that they had built their site using Weebly... and just knew we had to get involved. At that point, the Reddit community had raised $10,000, and Weebly donated another $10,000 to match. Since then, over $80,000 has been raised for the cause! With the surplus funds the LEI plans to continue providing food and supplies for the children and ultimately hopes to purchase the title deed for the land and home. How could anyone resist this crew? We are honored to have people like the folks at Longonot Education Initiative using Weebly to aid others and hope this story inspires you as much as it did us.
And to the children sending their thanks in the photo above, we just want to say -- you're so welcome! UPDATE 2/16/12: The wall has been built! They say that communication is the key to a successful relationship and we know that first hand -- we're constantly listening to your feedback to decide what to work on next. That’s why today we are excited to introduce our newest features: threaded blog comments, moderate by email, and a better look and feel. Threaded commenting was a big request from our avid bloggers and we're glad it's finally live. Now when you comment on a blog post, you have the ability to directly respond to other comments and have your reply appear in-line below the original comment: We also snuck in a few other features, just in time for the holidays. You now have the ability to delete or mark comments as spam directly from the comment notification email you receive, saving you time you can now spend drinking more eggnog. And we've improved the design of our blog comments with a fresh new look, adding more style and class to your blog.
2011 was a great year for Weebly, and many of you responded to our many improvements by building some of best websites we've ever seen, and spreading the word to friends and family. We're excited about everything we're working on for 2012, and can't wait to get it in your hands! |
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