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.

Great news for those of you that lack grand Pixar-esque imaginations. We've revamped the Switch Design Skins page in the Admin, so you can see the designs better and choose color themes. We've also added a button that let's you preview the design on your site before you save. This lets you browse through your website and see how everything looks in the context of your own content.

One thing to note, is that there could be some elements that will need to be adjusted once you switch designs, because different designs have different module areas and image sizes. But that's easy to fix by reassigning module areas and uploading different images for the home page or shell header if necessary. Easy.

The preview mode will last for one day, and then revert back to the original design. Or you can click the big "Exit Preview Mode" button to return to your existing design. No one else can see the preview, but you could send the link to a friend if you were so inclined.

So... we redesigned the Design Preview controls so that they float on the top of the page. We're also showing the colors of the different themes for each design skin (it's more visual). Have a look and play around with the different designs. It's all kinds of fun. Once you find a design you like, you can click the "Make a Site Like This!" button and you'll be taken to our Start form with that design combination already selected.

We've add Design Preview controls on all our demo sites, which let you see the same website in different design skins. Some of our skins have several theme options, and you can toggle between these as well. This is a great way to imagine how your site might look in different designs.

We've done a ton of updates to old and new design skins, and released them as 2.0 versions that are now the defaults. But if you are using a version of the free designs skins from before 1 week ago, or you have an old custom design that is perhaps getting out of date, is not HTML5 compliant for mobile devices, etc., we really recommend that you switch the design on your site to one of our updated free design skins. They have been given a lot of attention to detail at ever level, e.g. the modules are styled to look good in every context, there are modules were they weren't availalbe before, the code is overhauled and more HTML5 compliant, etc.

We are in the process of adding more features to integrate your site with Google Analytics' powerful tracking capabilities. We've just added some standard conversion tracking for account creation, store sales, and form submissions, as well as Split A/B testing. We'll blog about that more shortly.

But we realize that we have a lot of analytics functionality already available that most people don't know about. In particular, you should be aware that Gutensite has direct integration with Google Analytics' Ecommerce Tracking system.

View our FAQ to read the super easy setup instructions. Once you've got it setup, the data will start pouring into Google Analytics and you can create Custom Segments, Conversion Goals, and various filters and reporting to help you improve your marketing and reach your goals.

Happy analyzing!

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!

Gutensite is a powerful Content Management System, with lots of industry-specific, niche functionality, as well as a lot of advanced settings that give you a lot of control over various aspects of your site. But our goal is to keep things as simple as possible so that it's intuitive and easy to use.

One of the ways we do this, is by allowing you to specify which features you want on your site. So we have a features page that lets you toggle features on/off as you need them. This will hide unnecessary fetures in the Admin, so if you don't need "communities", "service directories", "links", etc., just toggle them off. You can reactive them if you change your mind.

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 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 slideshow.

Slideshow or List View. Sometimes you want to show a slideshow of your images, while at other times you may want to show a list so people can see all the images in a single view. We now give you the option to choose how the slideshow appears by default, and visitors have the option of toggling between the two views if there are 4 or more images in the list. In the list view, if there are less than 12 images, we display a two column layout with larger images for a more impressive page. If there are 12 or more images, we show a three column layout with smaller images. From the list view, if a visitor selects an image, it will load the slideshow view and display the requested image in the list. Then visitors can scroll through the other images in the slideshow, or go back to the list view if they want.

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.

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 site are overwhelmed by the task of organizing all their content, creating container pages (categories), etc. The new Site View Interface will make that process more simple, by automatically creating default categories when you add new content and streaming the content to those pages automatically. This will make things simple for everyone and advanced users who later need to add further layers of organization with additional categories can do so as they need to.

This is the first part of a broader redevelopment effort which will be making content management and publishing much easier. It's part of a strategy that will begin to help you think of your website as a stream of interrelated content. Whether it's a PDF File, Video, Blog, Calendar Event, Images, etc, it doesn't matter. If it's related to other content throughout the site, based on matching labels, it should be accessible to your visitors without a manual process of tedious linking one piece of content to another. This process can and should be more dynamic and automated, so that you can simply add content to your site, and let the site publish it in multiple places where it's relevant.

More to come on these changes.

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 business and it's good for your customers.

When someone uses Facebook Connect on your site, we create a local account that is synced with their Facebook account, so you have all the data locally. Even if they decide they don't want to use Facebook anymore, they can continue using your site. If they already have a local account, they can make future logins more easy by going to their account settings and clicking the button that says "Sync with Facebook".

Right now, Gutensite's account integration with Facebook is limited to account creation and sign-in. But there are lots of other features that you can add to your site, e.g. publish announcements to someone's wall (so all their friends know about it), choose a list of friends to invite to come use your service, access photos and videos, access personal information like birthdays, interests, education, work history, etc. If you want to take advantage of these extra features, let us know and we can create a special project to implement these features with your website.

To activate Facebook Connect on your site, visit our FAQ on Facebook Connect.

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 Distributed Denial of Service, and it's what you get when a malicious hacker takes control of dozens, hundreds, thousands, sometimes even millions of computers, and directs them all to attack one server.

How does it happen?

In case you've ever wondered why people bother writing viruses, let me tell you that this is a huge reason for it. Many viruses do mainly three things:

1. Find other vulnerable computers to infect so they can spread as far and wide as possible.
2. Listen for commands from whoever created the virus.
3. Carry out those commands without question or regard for the consequences. After all, computers just do what they're told.

A computer infected with such a virus is commonly referred to as a bot. A network of such infected computers is called a botnet. There are currently about 30 known active botnets in existence, each ranging from several hundred to several million infected machines, any and all of which may be called to attack any server at any moment.

Unfortunately, due to the widespread nature of such attacks, there's no single user who can be blocked in order to stop the attack and, even if all the offending computers were blocked, the attacker would simply call on more bots to join in the attack.

Our attack appeared to be comprised of some 300 or so bots, each of which would basically open several connections to our server and just sit there until the server quit listening for a command, effectively tying up every available connection so that legitimate users could not access their sites. Since the bots never made any actual requests, we are unable to determine which site or sites the attack was being directed toward.

What can be done?

Since today's attacks, we've been in contact with network technicians at the datacenter where our server resides regarding ways to minimize the effect of any future attacks. Unfortunately, the only real solution is to disable the botnets used in the attacks and that requires the cooperation of every internet user. Have you run a virus scan lately?

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 everyone. But it takes money to pay talented people to do cool things, so we have to make sure we charge enough to cover our costs, thus the new prices publicized on our website.

We have made the price increase for all new clients effective immediately: Pro ($95), NPO ($85) and Webmaster ($55). But for existing clients, there will be no price increase until March (and not billed until April). And even at that point, existing clients will get a "Thanks for your Business" Discount of $5/mo for the next full year to soften the effect of the increase.

Reason for Price Increase
We are an old fashioned business, grown organically over time, funded out of our own shallow pockets without any external investment or borrowed money. It's actually pretty amazing that we've been able to accomplish all that we have with this simple business model. But thanks to our loyal clients (you), together with a focus on quality and a good work ethic, we've built something fantastic.

Our long term plan is to make Gutensite into an industry recognized name for professional websites, with added features, improved usability, and solid coding. To do this we need to help more clients discover what Gutensite can do for them so that we can increase our profitability to fund these goals. Most of Gutensite's costs are fixed and with more clients the profitability increases so that we can then afford to invest a lot more into the development of great new Gutensite features and industry innovations.

But we have a little way to go before we have enough clients to support full-time designers and developers that work on Gutensite alone (currently we split our time between paying custom work and non-paying Gutensite development). So in the meantime, we need to find ways to increase revenue to keep up with market costs, without adversely undermining our clients.

We will be increasing prices slightly to compensate for inflation and cover the cost of development work that makes things better for everyone. We believe that a small price increase, is affordable for all our clients and also very competitive. We provide a great service to all our clients, with unique design skills and powerful flexibility and functionality for websites. Even our most expensive package is less than what most people pay for a monthly cell phone plan, and yet the website is such an integral part of doing business and presenting a professional face to the world.

For all the effort that goes into providing these sites, we hope you agree that the value is worthwhile. If so, through your continued patronage, together we will make Gutensite even better in coming years.

Thank you,
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 illustrated this concept by rethinking what is possible in a society where mobile phones are pervasive enough to enable real-time communication and transactional capability between neighbors. Park Circa is a simple app that allows people to coordinate schedules and facilitate easy payment, so that previously un-utilized resources can now be utilized when they aren't being used, and everybody wins.

Check out the Park Circa website to learn more about the concept.

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 as we have grown to meet the demands of clients who require dependability and support, and as we try to sustain the same levels of quality, we have realized that good talent is hard to find and it comes at a premium price.

Our niche has primarily been Small Business, and yet despite our client's limited budgets, we have taken great pride in being able to provide the same level of top quality design and meticulous programming that is traditionally out of reach for all but the highest paying businesses. We are committed to keeping this quality of work within reach of even the smallest clients. But we are also adamant about being innovative and creative in everything we do, and that means we must charge enough to ensure that we can attract and keep a talented team to work on your projects. So we've been forced to make some changes to our billing. In the end though, we believe this is a change that will benefit our clients by ensuring their projects are performed with excellence.

How Billing Rates are Calculated

We have analyzed each job type and calculated the minimum billable rate needed to pay a competitive salary for each specific job. Then we added on a percentage markup to cover the operational costs that keep everything running smoothly, e.g. project management, rent, insurance, software & hardware, marketing, art direction, accounting, support, etc. All of these things are indispensable parts of keeping talented designers and programmers doing what they excel at, and making our process reliable and dependable for our clients. Our rates are in-line or below others in our industry, so we are confident they are fair for the quality we provide.

Our new rates are as follows:

• Design: $150
• Programming: $160
• HTML & CSS Layout: $115

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 effective for small content providers to double encodes every video for WebM and MP4.

It's a bad move on Google's part because the internet cannot upgrade all it's video to WebM in the amount of time Google has allowed, so Chrome users are going to start complaining that they can't watch videos and they may abandon that browser. Yes, Google should encourage a move toward open source codecs, but in an industry that has so few "standards" they shouldn't just abandon de facto standards cold turkey. It presents an onerous burden on small content providers that don't have the resources that Google has to just re-encode all their videos or encode multiple versions (just imagine how much storage space and processing power will be required for Google to re-encode all their YouTube videos into another alternative format, they already have FLV and MP4 versions in multiple resolutions sizes up to 1080p HD video).

The history of the problem is that MP4 requires a license and some open source browsers don't want to or can't pay that fee (Opera, Firefox and Chrome), so they don't support MP4 in their <video> tag. Unfortunately the license holders won't make the codec free to decode. The ridiculous part is that content providers already pay licensing fees to encode the video in the first place, so you shouldn't have to pay a second fee to decode it. It's like an airport storage locker, you put in a quarter and take the key. You shouldn't have to put another quarter in to get your stuff out.

MP3 had similar problems, but some of the patents have expired and the same license holders have basically just stopped pursuing use violations. So effectively it's become a de facto standard for audio. We can hope that the same thing happens to MP4 eventually. The owners of the license are being very short sighted and they are going to lose the game if they don't become more flexible, because MP4 will be abandoned in favor of more open source options if a solution is not found. Unfortunately MP4 is superior to WebM in quality and size, so it would be a loss for everyone.

In the end, we'll see how it plays out.

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 functionality.

The old Flash player will play both the old FLV and MP3 formats (like it used to), as well as the new MP4 format (for progressive compatibility). So for greatest compatibility we recommend using MP4 format for all videos and MP3 format for all audio files. We also recommend converting all your old videos that were uploaded as FLV to the new MP4 format, so that they will be viewable on mobile devices that don't support Flash. But if you keep old FLV files on the site, they will continue to be viewed by any browser that supports Flash (virtually all desktop browsers, but not most mobile browsers).

See our FAQ for more information about Multimedia Formats.

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 simple effects in Gutensite FX for now, but we plan to add more later. Now that the framework is created, adding new effects would be simple.

See our Gutensite FX How-To on the subject for documentation and examples of how to implement this on your own site.