As we develop more and more partnerships with third party designers, we are opening up our platform to give designers greater control over every aspect of a website. We are excited to announce the new Design File Editor which is now live and available to any Admin account with the "Design" access key.

The new code editor enables any professional designer with knowledge of HTML and CSS, to customize the code for any design file, for any content type, on any website. You can grant access to an in-house designer or any third party designer you trust, and you can easily edit every element of your website. You can rearrange the order of elements on the page, add new elements, change css classes, edit CSS, make your design mobile friendly and responsive, implement Twitter Bootstrap, or whatever you want!

This is a powerful new feature which makes Gutensite a great platform for third-party design partners to develop websites for their own clients.

To learn more about your how it works, as well as tips for basic and advanced customizations, head over to our How-To article about customizing your website design files.

This is just the first step, but let us know if you have any feedback or ideas for improvement!

Two days ago, we spoke with a client that called to cancel their Gutensite because the Control Panel was too difficult for them to use. This represents a failure on our part. Our robust platform has grown to meet your advanced needs, but we know it has a learning curve that is not immediately intuitive to many people. And many of you are still on grandfathered packages that didn’t previously include proactive support, so you may feel like you can’t ask for help. But we have learned that proactive support is one of the most valuable things you need. Which is why we now provide unlimited free support to every paid package.

Switch to the New Package

We hope that you will consider the benefits of switching to our new packages, which include unlimited email and phone support. And we really hope that if you are having any difficulties you will please call us and let us help you, no matter what package you’re currently on. Making sure you are thrilled with your Gutensite is the most important thing for us.

Simple vs. Powerful

There is a balance that must be maintained between making things simple and making things powerful, because everyone is at a different skill level and needs different features. Fortunately, with our support team available to help you at every step, we are sure you can have the best of both worlds (if you let us help). Making our CMS easier to use is a huge priority, and we are now embarking on a total overhaul. But in the meantime, even with the learning curve of Gutensite 1.0, you can still be sure that you are using one of the best CMS on the market for managing a full featured website that looks great to your visitors.

Separating Professional Design from Content Management

Our approach to website management has always been to separate content creation from design. We do this because the number one goal is to make sure that you have a powerful and beautiful website that represents you professionally to the world. This makes Gutensite 1.0 a bit old fashioned, compared to many of the new visual editors that encourage everyone (whether or not they are qualified to make design decisions) to get “creative” with their layouts. But we still believe that the result of our strategy is that it's easier to delegate content management roles to anyone on your team, and you get a consistently better looking website.

But we know that’s not enough, and we aren’t resting there. We know you want the control panel to be easier to use, more drag and drop, easier to edit content visually, and more intuitive to add content and organize your website structure. So hang in there while we build something amazing.

We're excited to announce our recent Design Partnership with Mazzarello Media and Arts! Gutensite has just put the finishing touches on Mazzarello's latest design, DiggityDog.com, the premier pet sitting/walking company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mazzarello's design is as brilliantly cute as it is functional. We are proud to be able to support talented designers like Mazzarello Media and Arts and are glad to help businesses get the most ROI from their website.

If you're a designer and are interested in joining a partnership, powered by one of the industry's leading Content Management Systems, check out the details of our Designer Partnership Program here!

Our tireless creative department has just released another free design skin. A creamy French menu layout called the French 75 with subtle color accents and a tasty combination of serif and sans-serif fonts. This design comes in Provencial Blue, Crème Brûlée, Rooftop Grey and a Petit Café version that includes striped awnings and a chalkboard side menu. The French 75 pairs well with any Bordeaux or full bodied red. But then what doesn't?

Our designers have created a new free design template-- "Seven & Seven" is ready for use! Elegant, polished and smart, this design offers a highly visual way to engage with your audience. Great for retail, growing churches, portfolios, or anyone who wants to make a great impression from the start. Seven & Seven also has some new features such as a site map in the footer and a full width promotional image area with large dynamic text overlay that makes your site both professional and extra engaging.

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the first article "Content Management Systems vs. Visual Website Builders".

Gutensite is a flexible platform that lets organizations grow. Our platform is powerful right out of the box, with built in functionality, predesigned content types, and industry specific functionality. Websites can start simple, and then as businesses grow the website design and functionality can be customized to meet changing needs.

Most of the big competitors are super simple platforms that allow minimal design customization, and no functionality customization. One size fits all functionality does not allow businesses to optimize their website for their market, their workflow, their customers, etc. There is no growth potential on these other platforms. They have limited functionality and don't organize and manage large amounts of data or content well. For $10/mo they may seem like a great idea, but they are a dead end. They won't make your business successful. In contrast, with Gutensite you can start simple if you need to, and then you can keep growing and customizing as your budget allows and your business needs dictate. And the powerful framework of our platform makes development fast and affordable.

See the next article in the series about what makes Gutensite special, "Proactive and Empowered Support"

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special.

Gutensite is unapologetically a Content Management System. We are not a "visual website builder" like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc. Those platforms are great for what they do. Their visual interface is appealing to first time users that want to express their creativity. However, the creative options can be overwhelming and for non-designers they have a huge potential to be destructive to the website. They can be frustrating for publishers that need to organize a lot of content, extremely limited for websites that need advanced functionality, and they are not appropriate for businesses that want to delegate updating roles to members of their organization who are not qualified to be messing with design.

Content Management Systems on the other hand are optimized to allow anyone to edit content within a powerful website without messing anything up. CMSs may not be as sexy for the administrator, but they keep the website looking it's best for visitors. CMSs should have tools that make managing the content easy and dare we say "fun", and they should empower the administrator to publish content without worrying about critical design decisions.

Gutensite is developing the next version of its platform that will make it much more visual to do in-context editing and allow you to drag content around to combine in protected ways. But our philosophy has always been to build beautiful and powerful websites that clients can manage easily—to separate design from content management. This is what Gutensite is, and what it's good at. And despite all the competition in the visual builder market, professional organizations actually need "old fashioned" content management systems like Gutensite, Drupal, etc.

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the next article in the series "Flexibility to Grow".

Branding is much more than creating a logo or a clever ad. It's a Venn diagram where your personality, your values, your customers' experiences and your graphic identity overlap. A good branding design can reinforce your strengths for current customers and give a snapshot feel to potential customers. And in turn your reputation will affect your visual branding. The company with terrible customer service and a beautiful logo and the company with great service and an outdated, client-repelling logo are both in some trouble. Like friends that vote for opposing candidates and cancel each other out. If you want the perpetual, chicken-egg, life-giving synergy that comes from a good reputation-good visual branding combo, it's important to give some thought to both.

Before Creating a Brand

1. Back to the basics. Start from scratch and re-evaluate what you do and how you do it. Make sure your intangible ethos is strong before trying to create a visual symbol of your brand.

2. Know when to pivot. What niche is contributing the most to your success? Are you focusing on the right part of your audience? If your business is widgets, but 90% of your sales are from your widget lubricant, maybe it's time to pivot.

3. Your vs. Customers' Tastes. Try to distinguish between what you like and what your clients like. Communicate as much as possible about your target audience to your branding firm and recognize that the visual style that keeps the short attention-span of your audience may not be exactly what draws you in.

4. Trust. Find a branding company you can trust and trust them.

The Branding Process

1. Capitalize on your best features. The key to good branding is to understand what value you provide and then find a way to summarize that in your design and marketing. Apple branding says that they engineer high quality, beautifully designed products that are not cheap but are easy and fun to use and will make you cool and happy. Dell, on the other hand, appeals to people who want a solid computer at a good value and are less concerned with design and personal ego. Each brand is successful because they know their market niche and they are communicating their value proposition to their customers. What makes you unique?

2. Don't try to tell the whole story. Some branding is very overt like Target and Apple and Shell. Some branding is very simple like Pottery Barn and American Apparel. And some corporations have embraced a symbol that doesn't really illustrate what they do or sell like Nike and Starbucks. All of them are professional and memorable and clearly very successful. It's good to know if you want your logo to evoke a feeling or actually illustrate what your company is about. But remember that in either case it doesn't have to say everything about you. It's a just a tool.

3. Trust your branding firm. Did we already say that? They will do much better work for you.

Building on Your Visual Branding

1. Attract Evangelists. Whether you are a small church, a realtor, a local business or a huge corporation, you have something unique to offer. And branding is the thoughtful and necessary process of helping people understand what that is. Once you have a visual identity designed, find and develop brand evangelists that will tell others about you. Ask your biggest fans why they are passionate about your company, service or product.

2. Build on the what Works. Build on your strong points and give your clients a reason to love you more. Loyal fans will be your biggest promoters, and referrals from fans will bring more high quality fans that love you for the same reasons.

3. Keep it Fresh. The demographics of your audience may change over time, and design aesthetics certainly shift. So keep listening to your customers. Make sure you still know who they are. Check out the branding of the competition. Are they changing in their visual approach? Do a little focused testing with updated logos or messaging in your customer base. Perhaps let your customers vote on which design or logo evolution they like the best. Empower and involve them.

4. Hire Gutensite. Did we say that out loud?

It's Tuesday evening and you are scrolling through Facebook's newsfeed. What catches your eye and makes you stop and take a closer look? Odds are, the attention-capturing post had a picture. Our brains are wired to respond to images, so if you want to attract attention, you need beautiful images, evocative branding, and appealing design.

Emotion + Desire = Motivation. Good design creates an emotional response that triggers desire. Emotion and desire create the necessary motivation to act. Strategic design will channel desire with a call to action, i.e. your conversion goal.

Whether you are advertising a new line of products or drawing supporters to your non-profit work, you must have a clear goal and then work backwards:

1. Action: What do we want people to do?
2. Desire: What desire will move them to act?
3. Emotion: What kind of images will help the audience feel what they need to feel in order to desire and then do?

The holiday Crate and Barrel catalogue (above) that just landed on every American doorstep is a fantastic example of emotional marketing. And even though we all know our emotions are being intentionally provoked, the experience is so enjoyable because the images are so beautiful that we keep the catalogue around to be enticed a few more times before we throw it in recycling. And then we head over to Crate and Barrel to buy the experience.

They're not just selling ornaments. They're selling close-knit families, candle light, love and magic. If you want to reach your audience and get past the hurdles of busyness, budgets and even apathy you need images that are moving and a design that says you are professional and they can trust you. And of course, you need an obvious way to sign up, donate, buy or share.

You understand that if you want to engage your target audience, you have to know them.  Is your audience male, female, younger, older, rural, urban? Do they check Pintrest boards, watch extreme sports, subscribe to wine clubs, dress their pets up for Halloween? You need the kind of design that ignites their emotions and images that appeal to their personality or maybe ones that remind them of what they dislike and want to change.

We find that our clients often understand what makes their target audience tick but when it's time to build a website, they sometimes think in terms of their own taste. Your website has to reflect your audience and not you if it's going to be effective.  If the design isn't focused, you will lose the interest and respect of your visitors. If it isn't professional, people won't take you seriously. But great website design will win genuine respect and positive attention. Good design is worth the initial investment.

Have you ever been seduced by a beautiful gallery and a smooth interface promising you a quick and easy way to make a free website? Only to sign up and waste hours before you realize it's a lot harder than it looks, the promised functionality is lacking and you aren't a talented enough designer to keep your site from looking like a stinking pile of discarded Excel files?

Here are the top five problems you'll encounter with cheap website services.

1. Advertise our Hot Widget Sauce. If you blog about widgets, you'll start seeing ads for your competitors widgets appearing directly on your site.
2. Combo Meal #3 Please. The functionality is very limited, and there's no ordering off the menu. If your business needs things to work a special way... "go fish."
3. Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky. You will have a website... just like millions of other businesses. And they'll all look just the same. You want to have a custom design, that supports your brand? Don't be silly.
4. I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up! If you get stuck, because you aren't an expert at everything, you'll really want to know that you can get devoted phone time with the top talent. Too bad, the service is cheap because it's designed to be automated and scalable. You are on your own.
5. You Get What You Pay for. If you want your website to bring your business real value, your ROI will be proportional to how much you invest. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money, but you must be willing to at least get help planning your goals, and commit to developing good content and services that appeal to your visitors over the long run.