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!

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?

We've just released a new free design skin called, "Oak Grove", named after one of our local streets here in Walnut Creek. It's a warm and inviting design, with rustic undertones, and a trustworthy ethos.

There are a lot of extra touches that make this design polished and allow for further customization for each client. There are 3 main image areas on the home page. The third image area can be swapped out with a promo module, so you could have it be an image rotator with links, or any other module.

The name automatically adjusts to fit in the area, but of course smaller names work best. If you have your own logo, you may upload it into that area. We recommend a transparent PNG file so that it merges with the background, or you can have us customize it to look nice.

On the secondary pages if you are writing an article, you can select a paragraph and mark it as a "blockquote" style. This will turn it into a nicely designed pullout quote that adds depth to the page.

All the promo modues have been carefully designed to match the style of the site.

The menu spans the title area in an elegant way, so we recommend 6 links to keep things balanced. If you put more than 6 links they will not display. So if you must have more, it's time to request a hybrid design.

There are a lot of other great features that we hope you enjoy. Let us know what you think.

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.

As I reported previously, we've been in the process of overhauling all our designs templates for different default content type pages. Well, we just went live today with an updated version of the Communities home page. If you have communities listed on your site, you may want to check out your communities page or this sample. It's a vast improvement to the old default template, and it gives visitors a visual look at all the communities (rather than a tiny drop down menu). If you haven't selected an image for that community (in your Admin Control Panel), we include a default image of a park bench as a place holder. But, we recommend you upload a unique image for each community to maximize the effectiveness of this design.

Several versions of the Librarian design skin are now public. Like most templates we offer automatic design elements or features that are relevant to the organizational type. It's a nice addition to our library and a good contrast with some of the more modern, techy designs we've done recently. We've already had several people choose it for their site, as well as others launch off on customized versions of their own.

We've been on a roll lately and that has meant a lot of upgrades and new features for our clients. Our goal is to increase the number of options people have for Free Design Skins, so that everyone can find something that is both professional and a good fit for their website. We're getting there. The new Folsom Series includes 4 different color schemes: red, purple, blue and green. It has plenty of areas for personalization, including: a large standard sized image slideshow area, welcome text, quotes, and modules on the home page, and customizable secondary page images for each page if desired. The light versions of the template are so different in feel, they are hardly recognizable as the same design.

We finished up a new set of free designs last week. In keeping with our San Francisco street naming motif, these ones are called "Laurel" and there are three options for color and accents. They are a high end, modern but elegant design with a prominent image promotional area on the home page, as well as the option for individual unique images on each subsequent page (for those who really want to customize the design). Anyone who uses this template will instantly look like a very established, well funded organization. So go get started!