January 31, 2012 - 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.

January 30, 2012 - We've made some important changes to the portfolio that make it much easier to create/manage your portfolio, and also added features that help the portfolio better looking for your visitors. Easy Slideshows. If you want a portfolio piece to display a slideshow of images, we no longer require the additional step to create an independent slideshow. Instead, you can just select or upload multiple images directly. HTML5 Slideshow. We've gotten rid of the old Flash slideshow, and we now use our standard HTML5 compatible, mobile friendly ...

October 13, 2011 - As promised, we're working on creating several new free design skins so that you have more choices. We believe in the importance of great design, but we know that not everyone can afford the labor intensive creative process of a custom design. So we want to make sure that there are plenty of good alternative options for clients on a budget. These free skins work great, exactly as they are, or for a couple thousand you can customize them to meet your specific needs, and still save a lot over a fully custom design.< > < > We've just released a ...

September 26, 2011 - 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 ...

June 17, 2011 - We are in the process of installing a new Admin Interface for Gutensite, which will be much cleaner, and hopefully refreshing to all our clients that have been editing their sites for years. One of the exciting new features that we will be implementing is a visual "Site View", which will function as a way to see and edit all the pages of your site in a more visual and hiearchical way. You'll be able to use drag and drop reordering and we'll be simplifying the way you add pages and content to your site. Many people who first start building a ...

April 29, 2011 - Facebook Connect is now integrated into Gutensite's account system. You can allow all your customers to create accounts on your site, with the click of a button, by importing their basic information from Facebook. This can greatly increase your conversion numbers, by making it super easy to join your website. If they are already logged into Facebook, they will immediately be logged into your site as well. You can also take advantage of Facebook's many social features which can make your website more interactive and viral. It's good for ...

March 01, 2011 - UPDATE: There seems to bee some confusion regarding the severity of the events described in this article. Before reading further, please take note that our server was not hacked, nor was any hacking attempt detected during this event (yes, we monitor for that). This event was simply the result of a sudden and directed increase in the number of connections being made to our server. It's never a fair fight when a group gangs up on one guy; unfortunately, that's exactly what happened to us, twice, today. It's called DDoS, which stands for ...

January 26, 2011 - We don't say it enough, but I want you to know we are very grateful for your loyal support of Gutensite over the years. You make our world go around. Through these recent economic hard times, we've labored to keep our costs low so that Gutensite could be affordable to even the smallest business and organization. And we're proud of the fact that we've been able to tailor packages that fit every budget. We plan on continuing this commitment, while still finding ways to innovate and make improvements to the CMS for the benefit of ...

January 21, 2011 - A new App launched today called Park Circa, which will redefine neighborhood parking in urban areas. Not a day goes by in a city like San Francisco where anyone who owns a car doesn't think about parking. Everywhere you go, everything you do, parking is a consideration. There are simply not enough spaces for everyone... at least that's what we think when we accept the status quo. But overnight, factors change and suddenly new possibilities open up. A few months ago I blogged about this concept of rethinking outside the box. Park Circa has ...

January 20, 2011 - We've tried for many years to keep our billing rate as affordable as possible. But despite our low overhead and efficient processes, it has become clear that our current billing rates are not a realistic reflection of the costs for paying a competitive salary for the excellent work our team does. When we were just a small design firm with the two co-founders doing all the design and programming work for a combined, below-market-value salary (in exchange for the long term promise of profit from the business), we could squeak by on peanuts. But ...

January 20, 2011 - Oh Joy, let the licensing wars begin. You may be wondering how Google Chrome's recent decision to abandon MP4 affects us? No one knows. Chrome is still a small percent of the browser market, but we would still like to support Chrome if we can. However, there is not a good alternative to MP4 that has universal support, so web developers' options are limited. Their WebM format will not play on mobile devices yet, so unless a site offers both MP4 and WebM formats, mobile browsers won't be able to play the videos! Unfortunately it is not cost ...

January 10, 2011 - We just completed a total overhaul to our Audio and Video players so that they now take advantage of built in HTML5 support for audio and video. This makes our player compatible with all modern web browsers, including mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. For older browsers like Internet Explorer 8 (which does not support HTML5 video), and Firefox (which supports HTML5 video but is not licensed to play the MP4 format yet), we will still provide the old Flash audio/video player (but with a new skin), so your visitors will not lose any ...

January 07, 2011 - 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 ...

December 15, 2010 - We now have a default "Coming Soon" page that lists your basic contact information and a message to visitors that the site is under development. This page can be customized if a client needs it to be more branded. It's useful for clients that have an extensive development cycle and don't want their new site to be found by the public. When the site is in development, it will automatically redirect all page requests to this coming soon page, unless the site is being viewed in our secure development mode. The site is also set to turn away ...

December 15, 2010 - We've had requests from several clients for a simple way to add effects to their pages, e.g. to allow a button to toggle open or close additional paragraphs of information. So we've created a simple Javascript Library called Gutensite FX, based on the Mootools Library that is already running on every site. If Gutensite FX is enabled, you can add a CSS class to any element, and it becomes a toggle button. Add another CSS class to any other element, and that becomes the area that opens or closes. It's that simple. We only have a couple ...

December 13, 2010 - We have added additional module areas throughout the site, so you can now add modules to any sidebar, and any header or footer of a page. Plus on any basic page, you can put a module in the main column (above or below content) or in a side column (with the content to the side and the module in a small column). Basic pages already allow you to add a lot of extra specialty information under the "Extras" tab, such as pull-out quotes, headings, sub headings, info lists, etc. These show up in a beautiful 3/4 column layout which adds a lot of ...

December 10, 2010 - We have upgraded the default calendar functionality so that when an event is clicked in the Calendar or List view, it opens up a nicely designed "lightbox" with all the details for the event. This can be closed and the visitor is still on the original calendar page. This makes viewing calendar events more convenient. Previously we had a details preview that popped up and the visitor had to then go to another details page, then return to the calendar, etc. Our upgrade provides a much more streamlined workflow. We also took the time to upgrade ...

December 08, 2010 - We've added a new setting (accessible on the Admin > Site Info) page, to allow you to disable the Search Engine Sitemap. By default all our sites are SEO optimized, but in some cases, a client may not want the search engines to index the site (until they are ready). So this option will turn off the sitemap.xml data, which search engines use to provide a map of what pages to index. It will also add a meta tag that tells the search engine to go away for now and not index the site.

November 09, 2010 - Theoretically any access to Admin pages or Admin functionality should be initiated from the gutensite.com domain, e.g. http://www.gutensite.com/admin This has always been enforced for regular admin pages. But there were cases where this was not strictly enforced, e.g. the API used to be able to be accessed through yourdomain.com/admin/api/admin, however we are now strictly enforcing it to ensure that the administrative functionality is protected and necessarily secured by an SSL connection that we maintain. So the API URL for the ...

November 05, 2010 - We deprecated several old URL formats for accessing core pages (this does not affect Friendly URLs). The old formats included: (1) www.domain.com/index.php?ct=site.contact, (2) www.domain.com/?ct=site.contact or (3) www.domain.com/site.contact all of these methods were very old and should not be used anymore. The correct format is www.domain.com/site/contact, and so we updated all the instances where the old method was used. Our CMS will still correctly recognize the old formats 1 & 2, but not 3, until the next upgrade. But any pages using ...