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.

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!

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.

We're excited to let you know that we've added a very handy feature that lets you filter long drop-down select lists in the Admin. So for example: next time you need to add a menu link, and you have to choose the page to link to, you don't need to scroll through a huge list of all your pages. Instead, just start typing one of the words in the page title, and we'll filter the list.

We search for matches anywhere in the title, so you could search for "love" and we'll return "Why Clients Love Us", as well as "Love Is a Marvelous Thing". You can use the up and down arrows to highlight the option you want and hit enter, or choose the option with your mouse.

We hope you like it!

You may have noticed, we've made some changes to our website design and organization. Over time, we've added a lot of great information on our site, but it has ended up cluttering the navigation and being overwhelming for first time visitors. So we're in the process of simplifying the menus and streamlining the design a bit. We're also updating a lot of pages, and adding links to some demos, etc.

We hope it's helpful.

We've got a great new free design skin that just launched called "Brockmann". If your site is ready for a refreshing new look, you should consider this new design. We'll be introducing a lot of new designs in the coming months, and retiring many of the old designs (you can keep using them, but they will be no longer promoted for new use).

The template is inspired by and named after Swiss graphic designer Josef Müller-Brockmann, who is known for clean and simple design, masterful use of typography, and for advocating the use of the grid system.

We've spent a lot of time making sure that all the modules are custom designed specifically for this template, and the template allows you to upload your own logo, in order to create a more finished look right out of the box without the need for custom design. The home page features a large promo area slideshow with controls and the ability for each image to link to a featured page on your site. We've given a lot of attention to detail, at every level.

We've designed specific versions of this template for different types of organizations, e.g. businesses, realtors, churches, etc. This modern design is flexible enough to be approprate for nearly any client, and it's free! Enjoy.

We've improved our algorithm for truncating text. There is always the danger that the preview version of the text you are shortening may have HTML in it, and if we simply truncate after X characters it can break the HTML (sometimes with ugly consequences). We had an imperfect work around for a while (that would strip the HTML in those cases just to be safe), but that meant sometimes the preview wouldn't have desired styling. So we just upgraded the function so that it detects and closes the HTML tags so that they are no longer broken. Nice little improvement.

One of our biggest problems is finding enough time to promote ourselves. We are adding powerful new features to Gutensite all the time, which meet client needs or wishes, but we don't have time to brag about them because we're off to the next project. But over the years we've created a very powerful eCommerce Store with loads of options for customization. We have some companies with highly complex product requirements that stretch us to innovate features that meet their demands.

This week we added some brand new features and revamped some old ones. Existing functionality allowed you to create Custom Fields that could be attached to products. These fields could be admin-facing (require input from the administrator when the product is created and later display static content to the customer) or they could be customer-facing (require input from the customer when they checkout). Well, we just recently added the ability for customer-facing Custom Fields to have specific Price Modifications for each option.

So lets say you sell t-shirts, and you want people to choose a size. You can create a customer-facing select field with options for small, medium, large and XXL. And then for the XXL option, you may want to specify that it costs $2.50 extra. So when they choose XXL the cart adjusts the price. You also have the option of specifying whether or not the price modification is effected by discounts and/or if it should flag for manual processing for some business reason. If the person uses a coupon for 10% discount, you may not want the price modification to adjust but remain a flat $2.50 because the extra cost is related to an external non-discountable factor, so they would get 10% on the base t-shirt price and then another $2.50 added on if they choose XXL. Price Modifications can also be negative numbers, so when a customer selects an option with a negative price modification, their total is reduced (comes in handy sometimes).

While we were at it, we revamped the cart so that the subtotals update with the complex combinations of coupon and membership discounts, quantity, and custom field price modifications. We also revamped the custom delivery options, which allow for a lot of complex user and product specific checks to determine eligibility for specific shipping options.

We believe these new features will come in real handy to a lot of clients. If you have your own ideas on how we can improve things, let us know.