We are very sorry for the downtime and we will continue to strive to improve our server infrastructure. We are in the process of migrating to Rackspace Cloud servers so that we have more redundancy and quick scalability. We hope to have that migration completed soon, but want to make sure that we do it perfectly.

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!

We are excited to release a new feature for the Control Panel that lets you visualize your entire website and add content all from one page. The page shows you the main sections of your website, along with the sub links under each section. You can drag sections and pages around, or add new pages and links to your menu. The lists are editable if you want to change the name, quickly toggle a link on/off, or delete a link. You can add new links or pages directly to a section so that the CMS already knows what section the new page belongs to.

We hope this is a helpful tool for all our experienced users, and also a great interface to help new users get active with building their website. Let us know what you think!

Two days ago, we spoke with a client that called to cancel their Gutensite because the Control Panel was too difficult for them to use. This represents a failure on our part. Our robust platform has grown to meet your advanced needs, but we know it has a learning curve that is not immediately intuitive to many people. And many of you are still on grandfathered packages that didn’t previously include proactive support, so you may feel like you can’t ask for help. But we have learned that proactive support is one of the most valuable things you need. Which is why we now provide unlimited free support to every paid package.

Switch to the New Package

We hope that you will consider the benefits of switching to our new packages, which include unlimited email and phone support. And we really hope that if you are having any difficulties you will please call us and let us help you, no matter what package you’re currently on. Making sure you are thrilled with your Gutensite is the most important thing for us.

Simple vs. Powerful

There is a balance that must be maintained between making things simple and making things powerful, because everyone is at a different skill level and needs different features. Fortunately, with our support team available to help you at every step, we are sure you can have the best of both worlds (if you let us help). Making our CMS easier to use is a huge priority, and we are now embarking on a total overhaul. But in the meantime, even with the learning curve of Gutensite 1.0, you can still be sure that you are using one of the best CMS on the market for managing a full featured website that looks great to your visitors.

Separating Professional Design from Content Management

Our approach to website management has always been to separate content creation from design. We do this because the number one goal is to make sure that you have a powerful and beautiful website that represents you professionally to the world. This makes Gutensite 1.0 a bit old fashioned, compared to many of the new visual editors that encourage everyone (whether or not they are qualified to make design decisions) to get “creative” with their layouts. But we still believe that the result of our strategy is that it's easier to delegate content management roles to anyone on your team, and you get a consistently better looking website.

But we know that’s not enough, and we aren’t resting there. We know you want the control panel to be easier to use, more drag and drop, easier to edit content visually, and more intuitive to add content and organize your website structure. So hang in there while we build something amazing.

We're excited to announce our recent Design Partnership with Mazzarello Media and Arts! Gutensite has just put the finishing touches on Mazzarello's latest design, DiggityDog.com, the premier pet sitting/walking company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mazzarello's design is as brilliantly cute as it is functional. We are proud to be able to support talented designers like Mazzarello Media and Arts and are glad to help businesses get the most ROI from their website.

If you're a designer and are interested in joining a partnership, powered by one of the industry's leading Content Management Systems, check out the details of our Designer Partnership Program here!

A successful website should lead to growth in your business. You can start with a simple site if you are on a budget, and then add features as you learn how to optimize your website for conversions and integrate your website into important business processes that save you money and improve customer satisfaction.

Flexible, Customizable and Scalable

Once you reach this point, you have already exceeded the limitations of Squarespace, Wix and Weebly. These platforms are not flexible and do not allow any customization of functionality. They will not grow with you. Wordpress is an open source platform that is flexible enough that you can hire third party developers to help you extend the CMS to meet your needs, but at its core it is still a blogging platform and you’ll need to hire and manage a team of contractors (hopefully they come well recommended).

Gutensite is designed from the ground up to make it easy and affordable to customize design and functionality from day one. The platform is built to scale. Customization is where it sets itself apart from all the other popular platforms. So when you build a simple site on Gutensite, you can know that it will grow with you.

Data Liberation & Vendor Lock-In

No platform is perfect for every website requirement. If your website outgrows the current platform, you need to think about how easy it is to migrate to a new platform. If you have a simple 5 page website, it’s not a big deal to recreate it. But if you have written one hundred blogs, and uploaded hundreds of documents and thousands of images, this is an important factor.

It is very important that you are not ever stuck with any vendor, in case your needs change or your relationship sours. Gutensite is committed to supporting you throughout the entire lifecycle of your website, because we want to see you successful, regardless if you use our platform forever. If you get to a point where Gutensite’s hosted platform is not sufficient to meet your needs, you have several options. Gutensite can port over your website to an independent dedicated server where you can continue (if desired) getting updates to the core platform and/or work with third party developers to continue growing your website on your own. Or we will export all your data, and files so that you can take your website content with you wherever you go.

Summary

So when you are trying to choose the best platform, look beyond the initial build phase and be sure to consider the entire lifecycle of your website. Remember that having a great platform only matters if you end up with a great final website. Think big, and make sure you build a website that accomplishes your goals and adds real value to your business or nonprofit. Also remember that the team that builds and helps you maintain your website is just as important as the tool you use. We would love to talk to you about your goals and offer expert suggestions about how to accomplish those goals. So if you want help, please call us!

Before asking Gutensite to help them build a website, many of our clients also look at platforms like Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix and Weebly. So although building the website is only one small part of the website's lifecycle, we will compare these platforms and the results they produce.

Control Panels

Wix and Weebly are essentially WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editors for building static websites. They take a visual drag and drop approach to help beginners create a simple website with limited functionality. If your goal is to be actively involved in building a basic website, and you want to show the world your creative talent, these platforms allow you to move stuff around and express yourself. They have an impressive collection of settings and options (sometimes five or more levels deep that are easy to get lost in). These platforms are so visual, in fact, they actually make you layout the page yourself, figure what size image looks good with the text, what colors to use, etc. If your goal is to create a professional website, and you are not a designer, you will probably find that these platforms are too empowering. From our experience, it’s highly unlikely that an average user on these platforms will end up with a website that accomplishes their goals.

Squarespace takes a similar approach to visual building, but it has a much more appealing interface and does a better job of protecting the design from your misplaced “creativity”. They have received a lot of well deserved praise, and have become a popular choice for portfolios and other photography focused websites. But they also have a pretty steep learning curve and the potential to mess up. In the hands of a good designer, this is a great tool that can make a beautiful website (albeit simple, with emphasis on photos and limited content).

Wordpress and Gutensite are not "visual website builders" but classic Content Management Systems with a friendly list-based interfaces that separate content management from design roles. So rather than editing the website visually and laying out pages yourself, the building phase focuses on creating content through simple forms that let you enter a friendly URL, page title, various information related to the content type and selecting images and other media to include on the page. The CMS takes this data and creates a beautiful page based on the layout for that content type. Then you organize your pages in a menu hierarchy and create additional modules that appear on the home page, sidebars or content areas.

This approach has a learning curve as well, since you need to think abstractly about content records in a list, instead of seeing it directly on the page. But there is a lot of freedom when you can focus on content without worrying about the design. It also enables delegation of content management roles to anyone on a team, regardless of their design qualifications. And perhaps most importantly, the final website is much more beautiful because it remains looking as beautiful as the day it was professionally designed.

Tools vs. Team

These website building platforms have all created a way to make “online publishing” accessible to the masses, who may or may not have technical HTML skills. In fact, even though technical people can build pure HTML websites from scratch, they appreciate true content management systems more than anyone else, because they understand the power of dynamic, organized, editable database driven content (particularly when it separates content and design and makes it easy to scale).

Because building a website has become so easy and accessible to everyone, people mistakenly think “building a website” equals “building a good website that brings value to your company.” But all these platforms are just tools. Like any tool, the quality of the websites produced on the platform depends on the team that employs the tool. Very few businesses or nonprofits have staff that are qualified to plan, design, and build a website on their own. And yet that is what these instant website builder platforms are asking people to do.

Gutensite has created a platform that is easy to learn and use, which makes it possible to setup a beautiful website that looks professional, all on your own. But we have learned over the years that even with the best tools most people need help figuring out what their goals are, how to organize content, what features are important, how to optimize traffic flow for conversions, how to do good SEO, etc.

The platform must meet the basic requirements for your website project, but having a qualified team create your website will make all the difference in the world. You do not have the time to become an expert in every aspect of website design and marketing. So you need to choose a platform and a team that will help you. Gutensite will consult with you and help you find a solution that meets your budget. Just call and talk to a dedicated project manager to discuss your goals and your options. The best technical tools in the world, can’t replace a talented team.

Read more about the next phase in the lifecycle of a website: Managing a Website.

Building a paper airplane is cheap, easy and fun! But it won’t fly you to your destination. When choosing which platform is best for your website, sometimes what seems like the easiest option ends up being just a waste of time.

There are three phases in every website’s life. Unfortunately when most people choose which website platform is best for their project, they only think about the first “Build” phase. As a result, CMS platforms that have instant visual appeal usually get a lot of attention and praise. But when the sugar rush wears off, sometimes you realize that the platform doesn’t work well for the long run.

Before you commit to a website platform, measure how it will perform for the full cycle of it’s life:

1. Build. A great website must first be planned so that it brings you the most value, it must be designed to look professional and optimize conversions, and it must be built to support your functionality requirements.
2. Manage. A website needs new content that is SEO optimized to attract more visitors. Analytics need to be tracked to see how your visitors are behaving and if they are doing what you want them to do. And along the way you will need a lot of support from experts to help you use all the features of your website and make tweaks if necessary.
3. Grow. As your business or nonprofit grows, you will have new ideas about how to reach a new audience, or how to serve your customers better and increase retention. The current platform will need to be upgraded to meet your changing needs or you will have to export your content to a new platform that can get the job done.

In this series we will explore each of these phases in detail, and compare how some of our competitors compare. Read on to learn more about Building a Website.

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?

Our designers have created a new free design template-- "Seven & Seven" is ready for use! Elegant, polished and smart, this design offers a highly visual way to engage with your audience. Great for retail, growing churches, portfolios, or anyone who wants to make a great impression from the start. Seven & Seven also has some new features such as a site map in the footer and a full width promotional image area with large dynamic text overlay that makes your site both professional and extra engaging.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Much Gutenlove,

The Gutensite Team

If you have a business or non-profit that serves a multi-language audience, you will want to make sure that your website has multi-language capabilities.

Gutensite can help you create a website that toggles back and forth between two or more languages without creating an overly complicated administrative headache.

The control panel does not allow each piece of content to have two (or more) different translations, or promo images (since many graphics have text), etc. There are many reasons for this purposeful limitation:

• Multi-Language support for every piece of content ends up creating an unnecessarily complicated management interface.
• When you are targetting two different countries or cultures, you will often want/need to customize your message to each group. This may require including different promoted features on the home page, different pages in your menu, different sidebar promos, etc. Often it isn't a one-for-one pure translation.
• You may want to have different members of your team, or different global offices be responsible for the content of their localized website.

So our solution is to create two (or more) websites that are linked to one another, use the same design template across both websites (customized if necessary for one or the other) and may even share the same visitor accounts. But the websites have two different administrative control panel accounts so that editing the content on the French site is done in one admin account, and the English site is edited in another admin account.

This makes a simpler approach to managing the websites, and for the visitor it's seemless. Plus you get a website that is using the local domain. The english website might be http://www.mysite.com and the french website might be http://www.mysite.fr and the website will then have some buttons in the header that lets visitors pick their preferred language.

If you need help with a project like this, let us know.

As part of the big changes we've made to our packages, we've added a lot of new website and support features to all our packages, including proactive support for everyone, and website transfer and setup for Growth and Pro packages. But one of the best new features that our Pro clients love is having their own Dedicated Webmaster Assistant. If you don't have time to set up your site or add new content, just call or send us an email and we'll set up your pages, post that blog, crop and upload photos, share videos, change your menu, add those meta tags—whatever you need. We will make sure your website does what you need it to do.

When we initially developed Gutensite, we were focused on empowering you to do things for yourself, so you didn't have to wait for a development company to make basic changes for you (after all, that's the beauty of a CMS). But over the years, it's become clear to us that not everyone has the time or interest to "do it themselves." So we decided everyone would benefit if we offered our help more proactively.

Our goal is to help you build a beautiful website that delivers a great return on investment. So we're happy to offer this personal webmaster service, and it won't cost you anything extra. See some of the other features included in our Pro package and you'll be impressed with how much value is included.

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the first article "Content Management Systems vs. Visual Website Builders".

Gutensite is working hard to become the best Content Management System on the market. And we are developing relationships with authorized third party design agencies to allow them to create beautiful, powerful websites for their clients on our robust platform. The Gutensite framework is built to allow designers to be creative and still make dynamic websites. The Control Panel can be customized to establish an administrative workflow that fits the specific needs of their clients and protects their design at the same time.

Our partnership program frees designers to do what they love and are great at: design. We seek to be the technical partner that steps in to help when design agencies meet the limits of the technical abilities and/or interests. This allows designers to serve more clients with advanced needs, and allows us to provide exceptional ongoing support for those clients. This unique design partnership program helps us continue developing and perfecting our platform to become even better for every client that relies on the Gutensite CMS.

Read more about our Design Agency Partnership Program and contact us with questions, ideas or to apply.

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the first article "Content Management Systems vs. Visual Website Builders".

If your website isn't one of the prime catalysts for your organization's success, if it doesn't provide a return on investment, then something is wrong. You are missing an opportunity. Your website should not only pay for itself, but it should be an integral part of your business strategy that generates leads, facilitates sales, reduces customer service costs, provides services and information that increases customer satisfaction, and in short makes your organization profitable with measurable ROI.

We never want organizations to spend money they can't afford on a service that doesn't bring them value. But these days the costs are low, you don't need a web developer on staff at $5,000+/mo. Our most expensive package ($95/mo) is less than the cost of a capuccino per day. If you don't think your website brings at least as much value as your daily cup of coffee, then you really need a new website! Gutensite builds websites that are designed to bring value to your business, designed to optimize traffic flow to accomplish specific conversion goals. Any other type of website is a waste of money and opportunity.

See the next article in the series about what makes Gutensite special, "Open Platform for Third Party Designers".

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the first article "Content Management Systems vs. Visual Website Builders".

Like most people we really hate calling customer service when we have a problem with our cellphones, or internet, etc. We know what it feels like to climb through a phone tree, and hassle with uninterested customer service reps that have no power to actually help solve problems. And we never, ever, ever want you to feel that way when calling us.

That's why we empower our support team to make decisions and get things done. They are not just seat warmers paid to listen to your complaints and say "I understand that you are frustrated." They are an integral part of our team. They are experts on the CMS, hosting, email, and other internet related issues. And they have direct access to our team of programmers and designers to help whenever they need to bring in advanced help. They also have direct access to our executive team to make account decisions if you need something special. We have processes, procedures and guidelines, to streamline our support, but those processes don't trump critical thinking. We are not on autopilot. In short, our goal is to solve problems as quickly as possible so that clients are happy, and our platform is improved, so we can all move on to other things.

In addition to everyday support, we have a team of experts to help you succeed at your project. Great open source platforms like Drupal, which are stand-alone installs, require independent contractors to setup and maintain. In contrast Gutensite is a completely supported ecosystem with design, branding, programming, consulting, hosting, and customer support services integrated to serve our clients. You don't need to source the best talent from each industry, we bring them all together under one service. We apply our commitment to quality to every aspect of our work, and we take care of all the details for our clients from the first day, and every day after for decades to come (yes we continue to serve the same clients that trusted us over a decade ago).

We will help you set up your site, transfer content, and even review your site and suggest improvements. In addition we are now providing a Dedicated Webmaster Assistant whom you can call or email, who will do the work for you if you are busy or prefer not to manage your website content. You are not alone, we make sure you have a beautiful, powerful website and we will do whatever we can to help you accomplish your goals.

See the next article in the series about what makes Gutensite special, "Websites that Add Value as a Vital Part of Your Business Strategy".

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the first article "Content Management Systems vs. Visual Website Builders".

Gutensite is a flexible platform that lets organizations grow. Our platform is powerful right out of the box, with built in functionality, predesigned content types, and industry specific functionality. Websites can start simple, and then as businesses grow the website design and functionality can be customized to meet changing needs.

Most of the big competitors are super simple platforms that allow minimal design customization, and no functionality customization. One size fits all functionality does not allow businesses to optimize their website for their market, their workflow, their customers, etc. There is no growth potential on these other platforms. They have limited functionality and don't organize and manage large amounts of data or content well. For $10/mo they may seem like a great idea, but they are a dead end. They won't make your business successful. In contrast, with Gutensite you can start simple if you need to, and then you can keep growing and customizing as your budget allows and your business needs dictate. And the powerful framework of our platform makes development fast and affordable.

See the next article in the series about what makes Gutensite special, "Proactive and Empowered Support"

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special.

Gutensite is unapologetically a Content Management System. We are not a "visual website builder" like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc. Those platforms are great for what they do. Their visual interface is appealing to first time users that want to express their creativity. However, the creative options can be overwhelming and for non-designers they have a huge potential to be destructive to the website. They can be frustrating for publishers that need to organize a lot of content, extremely limited for websites that need advanced functionality, and they are not appropriate for businesses that want to delegate updating roles to members of their organization who are not qualified to be messing with design.

Content Management Systems on the other hand are optimized to allow anyone to edit content within a powerful website without messing anything up. CMSs may not be as sexy for the administrator, but they keep the website looking it's best for visitors. CMSs should have tools that make managing the content easy and dare we say "fun", and they should empower the administrator to publish content without worrying about critical design decisions.

Gutensite is developing the next version of its platform that will make it much more visual to do in-context editing and allow you to drag content around to combine in protected ways. But our philosophy has always been to build beautiful and powerful websites that clients can manage easily—to separate design from content management. This is what Gutensite is, and what it's good at. And despite all the competition in the visual builder market, professional organizations actually need "old fashioned" content management systems like Gutensite, Drupal, etc.

This article is part of an ongoing series about what makes Gutensite special. See the next article in the series "Flexibility to Grow".

After a lot of research, brainstorming and programming, we are proud to announce the release of our brand new packages. These new packages are designed to help organizations of every size afford a beautiful and powerful website that helps them succeed at whatever stage they are currently operating at and give them the boost and flexibility to grow to the next level.

If you are subscribed to an old package you can stay where you are. But since most people will benefit from the changes, you can easily upgrade to a new package in the Control Panel > Admin > Billing Info > Upgrade Options.

Reason for New Packages

One of the main motivating factors was our desire to provide outstanding, proactive customer service to everyone. We have never liked restricting our customer service to only the Pro package, but we also knew that great support requires great people that commit their time to helping. This is why our previous packages were mostly differentiated by the availability of customer support and custom design options. So we had to come up with some new ways to serve each stage company with a package they could afford and features appropriate for their needs. After a lot of thought, I hope we've succeeded.

In order to provide support, we've limited features that smaller organizations don't need so that they are only available in more advanced packages. And then we've also added a lot more features included in the advanced packages so that existing Pro clients will instantly get more. And we've increased the amount of free bandwidth and disk space included in each package. So every package now has support and more space.

Philosophy for New Packages

Our new packages are focused on the type of functionality and features that different sized organizations require. If an organization can only afford $15/mo, they are really small, not making any profit yet and just need to get a starter website online, with a few pages, one admin account, etc. But a more established organization that understands the value their website can provide them, can afford $95/mo, and they are going to require a lot more functionality, unlimited pages, unlimited administrative accounts, more bandwidth, etc. And for companies in between that can only afford $55/mo, we want to give enough functionality to help them grow so that their website provides an actual return on investment that justifies a more robust package to meet their needs in the future.

Value of New Packages

When you think about the cost of the packages, we really encourage you to think of your website as one of the prime catalysts for your organization's success. If your website doesn't provide a return on investment, then something is wrong. You are missing an opportunity. Your website should not only pay for itself, but it should be an integral part of your business strategy that generates leads, facilitates sales, reduces customer service costs, provides services and information that increases customer satisfaction, and in short makes your organization profitable with measurable ROI.

We never want organizations to spend money they can't afford on a service that doesn't bring them value. But these days the costs are low, you don't need a web developer on staff at $5,000+/mo. Our most expensive package ($95/mo) is less than the cost of a fancy cup of coffee per day. If you don't think your website brings at least as much value as your daily cup of coffee, then you really need a new website! Gutensite builds websites that are designed to bring value to your business, designed to optimize traffic flow to accomplish specific conversion goals. Any other type of website is a waste of money and opportunity.

So enough with the explanations, go checkout the new packages, and compare everything that is included and limited with each package. If you have feedback, please let us know!

Do you ever have those dreams where you need to get somewhere important or finish something on time, but you just can't seem to arrive or ever get it done? Sometimes that's the way it feels to run a business, like you are trying to run a race with feet that weigh a thousand pounds. Everyday there are endless interruptions that keep you from your projects. And when you get to your projects they take four times longer than you planned.

This sense of stagnation can sap your energy and discourage you. And if you really don't make progress, your business will fail. Fortunately, you aren't alone and there are some simple things you can do to make your business more productive.

Priorities

You can only do so much in a day. You must make peace with the fact that not everything is going to get done. Things will fall through the cracks. Opportunities will be missed. The question is, which things will get done? You must explicitly understand what your goals are and create priorities that advance those goals. Be zealous about protecting your priorities, and be unapologetic about ignoring things that aren't priorities. You can't do it all, so don't feel emotionally responsible for things you can't control.

Track Your Time

Use a free software like toggl.com to track your time throughout the day. Look at where you and your team spend your time and evaluate whether you are advancing your priorities. If not, figure out what is causing the distraction. Fix the problems that consistently sideline you, and recommit yourselves to your priorities.

Go to the Root

If you spend a large chunk of your time always responding to the same problems, find ways to automate those solutions. Also ask yourself if those problems are caused by another factor and figure out how to address the root of the problem, rather than just dealing with the symptoms. It may take longer to deal with the root, but in the long run it’s better for everyone.

Budget & Batch

Budget your time so you can pace yourself on each project and batch your activities so that you do similar things all at once, rather than fielding constant unrelated interruptions. Switching tasks is stressful and inefficient. Multi-tasking is the enemy of happiness and will burn out both you and your team. Maybe email demands several hours of your day. You obviously need to communicate with your team and your customers, but determine how much time is reasonable, and set a strict time budget for email. Pay attention to the approximate number of emails you respond to in a day and allot yourself a budget for each email, e.g. 2 minutes. Then batch all your email into one or two slots in the day, maybe first thing in the morning and then once in the afternoon. Urgent issues can be dealt with by phone.

80/20

Pareto's Rule, also called the 80/20 rule, is a simple principle that describes the ratio of all sorts of situations. For example:

• 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers.
• 20% of your customers do 80% of the complaining
• With 20% of the effort you can achieve 80% quality product, but it requires another 80% more effort for to go the last 20% that transforms a good product into a great product.

Understanding Pareto's Rule can help you optimize your business. Getting projects to a good spot, 80% finished and then continuing to work the last 20% over time, will encourage your team and create momentum. If it takes 2 minutes to write a “good enough” response to an email, don’t spend 10 minutes writing a longer email. Pareto’s Rule shouldn’t be a way to excuse poor quality. You should still have high standards, but just understand the return on investment. Sometimes you need to go 100%, but often times you don’t.

Take some time to evaluate your business priorities right now. Track where you are spending your time and then figure out where you get the highest return on your investment of time and resources based on the 80/20 rule. Budget your work to stay on track with your priorities and have other people hold you accountable to your priorities. Then batch your activities so you can grow and make more progress. Let us know how it goes!

Connecting social media profiles with your Gutensite has never been easier! Now, all of our free design skins are social-ready. All you need to do is enter the address of your profile into the labeled box and boom-- you're connected. You'll automatically have familiar icons of the profiles you entered at the top and bottom of your pages. Social networks featured are Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And If you want even more, just let us know and we'd be happy to work together and make this happen. We understand staying connected is super important and with our easier-than-ever social media integration, this only takes a few seconds to set up.

Recently we've had a lot of clients asking us about a scam letter they have received from a untrustworthy company with the wonderfully generic name "DNS Services" located in Vancouver, WA. The invoice looks like a bill for $65, and is sent to businesses in hopes that busy administrators will just pay it.

This is a ridiculous offer since Gutensite already provides DNS services for free. Not only do you not need this service, you shouldn't trust a company like this to manage your DNS.

If you are a Gutensite client, you have the peace of mind that we handle all the technical aspects of your website. You can safely ignore any letters that come in the mail or email. If you manage your own domain, then you'll only need to pay attention to emails from the domain registrar where you bought the domain (to make sure you renew that every year). But that's it. No other company should be contacting you about your website.

If you ever have questions, call or email us and we'll help.

We are excited to announce a powerful new "Staging" feature that allows you to preview exactly what your website will look like without actually revealing the changes to the general public. This allows you to test one page or redevelop the entire site and push it all live at once. This is a simple concept, but it comes in really handy.

The process is simple and can be utilized with any content, e.g. My Pages, Blogs, News, Promo Modules, Menu Items, etc. Whenever you are editing content you can set the status to "Offline" or "Live". This is located either in the "General" tab or the "Page Settings" tab. But in the status options you can also select several other options:

• "Staging": you will only be able to view this content item when you are browsing your site in "staging mode".
• "Live, but Inactivate on Staging-Sync": you will be able to view this content on the live site, but it will not appear when browsing the site in "staging mode" and when you push the staging content live this content will be inactivated.
• "Live but Delete on Staging-Sync": you will be able to view this content on the live site, but it will not appear when browsing the site in "staging mode" and when you push the staging content live this content will be deleted completely.

Anything that is "Live" status will appear on both the live site and the site when browsing in "staging mode".

Preview Site in Staging Mode

If you want to browse your site in Staging Mode so you can preview the new content alongside the current live content, simply click the big blue "View Your Site" button at the top of the Control Panel. This will open up your site and toggle on Staging Mode. You know you are in Staging Mode because there will be a small blue button at the top left of your site that says "exit staging mode". If you want to see the live site again, just exit staging mode and you are back to the live site.

Pushing Staging Content Live

Once you have everything looking exactly how you want it, you can either set individual content status to "live" or if you are a pro client and have made a lot of changes and you want to push it live all at once, you can use our one-click publishing to perform a "Staging Sync". This option is available under Admin > Tools > Staging.

Use Case

For example, if you are replacing a module on your home page and want it to still appear on the live site, but you want to test how it will look in staging mode, you can switch the current live module to "Live, but Inactive on Staging-Sync". This way, the old module turns to inactive when you decide to go live with your new module. (This keeps the two modules from fighting over which one gets to show up).

We're committed to making sure Gutensite is compatible with the latest recommendations for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that your website has every advantage possible to achieve the best rankings that your content can earn.

Below are a few of the most recent updates to our SEO features:

• Redirect to Remove Trailing Slashes. Search engines see the urls http://www.domain.com/blog/ and http://www.domain.com/blog as two different pages. This can trigger a warning for having duplicate content which dilutes your rankings. So we do a permanent 301 redirect to remove the trailing slash, in case someone ever accidentally links to a page in that way.
• Redirect to Correct Capitalization. For the same reason mentioned above, we also will redirect http://www.domain.com/blog to http://www.domain.com/Blog with the correct capitalization so that you don't get penalized for "duplicate content".
• Add Unique Page Titles to Calendars. We added month and year to the page title on calendar list and details pages so that your site doesn't get penalized for duplicate page titles.
• Prevent Duplicate Indexing of Pages. Whenever there is more than one URL structure to access a page, and the page content remains the same, we don't want search engines to index the same page twice. For example, /blog/archives?page=1 is the same as /blog/archives. So we add a meta tag that tells the search engine not to index and not to follow: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />. We've also told search engines to ignore a lot of other common URL variables that we don't need them to index.
• Add Relative Attributes to all Pagers. We added add rel="next" and rel="prev" to all pagers so that search engines know which page is previous and which is next.

As we become aware of other ways to improve default SEO, we'll be sure to update them as well. We use our own platform and we want our website to be as optimized as possible as well!

Branding is much more than creating a logo or a clever ad. It's a Venn diagram where your personality, your values, your customers' experiences and your graphic identity overlap. A good branding design can reinforce your strengths for current customers and give a snapshot feel to potential customers. And in turn your reputation will affect your visual branding. The company with terrible customer service and a beautiful logo and the company with great service and an outdated, client-repelling logo are both in some trouble. Like friends that vote for opposing candidates and cancel each other out. If you want the perpetual, chicken-egg, life-giving synergy that comes from a good reputation-good visual branding combo, it's important to give some thought to both.

Before Creating a Brand

1. Back to the basics. Start from scratch and re-evaluate what you do and how you do it. Make sure your intangible ethos is strong before trying to create a visual symbol of your brand.

2. Know when to pivot. What niche is contributing the most to your success? Are you focusing on the right part of your audience? If your business is widgets, but 90% of your sales are from your widget lubricant, maybe it's time to pivot.

3. Your vs. Customers' Tastes. Try to distinguish between what you like and what your clients like. Communicate as much as possible about your target audience to your branding firm and recognize that the visual style that keeps the short attention-span of your audience may not be exactly what draws you in.

4. Trust. Find a branding company you can trust and trust them.

The Branding Process

1. Capitalize on your best features. The key to good branding is to understand what value you provide and then find a way to summarize that in your design and marketing. Apple branding says that they engineer high quality, beautifully designed products that are not cheap but are easy and fun to use and will make you cool and happy. Dell, on the other hand, appeals to people who want a solid computer at a good value and are less concerned with design and personal ego. Each brand is successful because they know their market niche and they are communicating their value proposition to their customers. What makes you unique?

2. Don't try to tell the whole story. Some branding is very overt like Target and Apple and Shell. Some branding is very simple like Pottery Barn and American Apparel. And some corporations have embraced a symbol that doesn't really illustrate what they do or sell like Nike and Starbucks. All of them are professional and memorable and clearly very successful. It's good to know if you want your logo to evoke a feeling or actually illustrate what your company is about. But remember that in either case it doesn't have to say everything about you. It's a just a tool.

3. Trust your branding firm. Did we already say that? They will do much better work for you.

Building on Your Visual Branding

1. Attract Evangelists. Whether you are a small church, a realtor, a local business or a huge corporation, you have something unique to offer. And branding is the thoughtful and necessary process of helping people understand what that is. Once you have a visual identity designed, find and develop brand evangelists that will tell others about you. Ask your biggest fans why they are passionate about your company, service or product.

2. Build on the what Works. Build on your strong points and give your clients a reason to love you more. Loyal fans will be your biggest promoters, and referrals from fans will bring more high quality fans that love you for the same reasons.

3. Keep it Fresh. The demographics of your audience may change over time, and design aesthetics certainly shift. So keep listening to your customers. Make sure you still know who they are. Check out the branding of the competition. Are they changing in their visual approach? Do a little focused testing with updated logos or messaging in your customer base. Perhaps let your customers vote on which design or logo evolution they like the best. Empower and involve them.

4. Hire Gutensite. Did we say that out loud?