October 13, 2011 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 n ...

September 26, 2011 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 a ...

January 07, 2011 - Chadwick Meyer — 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 ...