We released a new free design skin that we hope you love. Part museum exhibit, part fashion spread, the Siggstein is designed to show off beautiful images and is ideal for portfolios, retail and anyone who wants a site with a lot of visual impact. The name is old Norse from "siggr" meaning victory and "stein" meaning stone. The design is clean, image-based, a little edgy and comes in 5 colors including an exceptionally sexy black version. Visit our design page to try the different colors.

Great news for those of you that lack grand Pixar-esque imaginations. We've revamped the Switch Design Skins page in the Admin, so you can see the designs better and choose color themes. We've also added a button that let's you preview the design on your site before you save. This lets you browse through your website and see how everything looks in the context of your own content.

One thing to note, is that there could be some elements that will need to be adjusted once you switch designs, because different designs have different module areas and image sizes. But that's easy to fix by reassigning module areas and uploading different images for the home page or shell header if necessary. Easy.

The preview mode will last for one day, and then revert back to the original design. Or you can click the big "Exit Preview Mode" button to return to your existing design. No one else can see the preview, but you could send the link to a friend if you were so inclined.

So... we redesigned the Design Preview controls so that they float on the top of the page. We're also showing the colors of the different themes for each design skin (it's more visual). Have a look and play around with the different designs. It's all kinds of fun. Once you find a design you like, you can click the "Make a Site Like This!" button and you'll be taken to our Start form with that design combination already selected.

We've add Design Preview controls on all our demo sites, which let you see the same website in different design skins. Some of our skins have several theme options, and you can toggle between these as well. This is a great way to imagine how your site might look in different designs.

We've done a ton of updates to old and new design skins, and released them as 2.0 versions that are now the defaults. But if you are using a version of the free designs skins from before 1 week ago, or you have an old custom design that is perhaps getting out of date, is not HTML5 compliant for mobile devices, etc., we really recommend that you switch the design on your site to one of our updated free design skins. They have been given a lot of attention to detail at ever level, e.g. the modules are styled to look good in every context, there are modules were they weren't availalbe before, the code is overhauled and more HTML5 compliant, etc.

We are in the process of adding more features to integrate your site with Google Analytics' powerful tracking capabilities. We've just added some standard conversion tracking for account creation, store sales, and form submissions, as well as Split A/B testing. We'll blog about that more shortly.

But we realize that we have a lot of analytics functionality already available that most people don't know about. In particular, you should be aware that Gutensite has direct integration with Google Analytics' Ecommerce Tracking system.

View our FAQ to read the super easy setup instructions. Once you've got it setup, the data will start pouring into Google Analytics and you can create Custom Segments, Conversion Goals, and various filters and reporting to help you improve your marketing and reach your goals.

Happy analyzing!

We've added the ability for you to preview your blogs before they publish.

Batching your work is a great idea, so it is a common (and recommended) practice to write a week's worth of blogs and then schedule them to publish on specific days. The blog articles will not show up on your site until that date. But often times you want to see what it looks like before hand, or you want to schedule a third party social media tool like HootSuite to tweet and facebook the blog post on that day.

So we've added a link in the List and Edit view that lets you preview the article. Simply use that link to allow the third party to access the article, images, etc.

Voilà!

Gutensite is a powerful Content Management System, with lots of industry-specific, niche functionality, as well as a lot of advanced settings that give you a lot of control over various aspects of your site. But our goal is to keep things as simple as possible so that it's intuitive and easy to use.

One of the ways we do this, is by allowing you to specify which features you want on your site. So we have a features page that lets you toggle features on/off as you need them. This will hide unnecessary fetures in the Admin, so if you don't need "communities", "service directories", "links", etc., just toggle them off. You can reactive them if you change your mind.

We've gone through the entire CMS and replaced the old Flash slideshows with new HTML5 compatible slideshows that look much nicer and best of all will display on iPads, iPhones, and other Mobile Devices that support HTML5.

We've also simplified the way slideshows are created throughout all the content types. Before you had to create a slideshow and then select it in the page you wanted to display it on. But now, you just select the images you want for whatever content type you are editing, e.g. blog, news, portfolio, etc. And if there are multiple images, we automatically turn it into a slideshow. It's super easy!

We've upgraded all the maps on your site to look much nicer, and they now include street view as well as the ability for visitors to find directions to your location.

And if you have a business or church with multiple locations, we now have a great way of displaying all your locations on the same map, and letting people choose which location they want to directions for. The Map and Directions page also displays the contact information for each of your locations so it's conveniently available without any customization.

To activate the multiple locations, simply add new "Location" modules with the contact information for each location. Then the Map and Directions page will pull that information and display it on the map. Done.

We've revamped our entire sign up process so it's easier than ever to make a brilliant site and get started personalizing it for your needs.

• Simple Fields. Now we only requires the most basic information required to create an account. We don't require you to enter a credit card, or all your personal information.
• Free 30 Day Trial. We now sign you up for a free 30 day trial of our Pro Site, so that everyone can take advantage of our free support to help you get started. You can downgrade to a free lite site at any time if you don't see the value of the professional features and support long term.
• Design Picker. We have a much nicer design picker now so that it's easier to see what the designs look like (home and secondary pages).
• Prepopulated Site. We now automatically build you a simple website based on the niche that you select. So if you are a polka band, we automatically create a portfolio to showcase photos and a media library to showcase your videos, etc. This lets you personalize things much quicker, by just reading the page on your site which has instructions of how to update the content in the Admin. Later when you get familiar with our Admin, you can edit/add as much as you want, but this way you have a good foundation to start from.