Moonfruit Lounge - SiteMaker features

The Moonfruit blog preview

Joe — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:58:00 +0000

A few of you have been asking about getting a bit of a blog preview so you can see how it will fit into your existing sites. Given we're still a few weeks away from being able to release this we thought it was about time to show you how it works and give you a bit of a sneak preview of the current work in progress. So here it is.

Blog view

The blog article stream will sit in your site just like a piece of content on any other page and will allow you to place other objects around the stream just like you would on any other page.

Blog stream in site

So that just looks like a blog steam, so what? The reason our blog is so special is that it will work just like any other piece of content within Moonfruit which means you can customise its appearance yourself using the editor without getting involved in templates or CSS or HTML. If you want to make it bigger or smaller, just drag the scale handles. If you want to drag your blog around the page and move the other objects too, then that is also possible.

Moving objects around the page

If you want to change the font/colour/size of the text used in the blog, just click into the blog object, select the text you want to modify and then change it. If you change the 'title' field, it will change every 'title' on each blog page. Cool.

Styling blog elements

And here's what the article page looks like. It works the same way in terms of positioning the objects and styling the elements. Change it on one page and all articles will change. Simple.

Blog article view

Blog editor

So that's where you style and view your articles, just like any other page in Moonfruit. But it's not where you add an article or edit the content. This is the major difference between the 'blog pages' and other pages in your site. The content that populates the blog stream and the article content comes from your database of articles. So here is the blog editor.

Blog editor dashboard

The dashboard shows a quick post view, plus recent comments and posts. You can publish a number of different article types ranging from the quick micro-blog style, to the full article editor. Audio and Video posts will not be in blog V1, but you can capture images from your webcam. We've got Audio and Video working in R&D, but need to build some new players to do them justice.

Blog article editor

When you add a new post it will automatically jump to the top of your post stream and create a new page for it. Each page will have its own URL including meta data for SEO.

Some extra cool stuff we need to finish first before we can release it, includes the unlimited page length so that your blog page and comments can just extend the page rather than scroll. And we're also aiming to remove the '/numbers' in your page URLs and blog URLs too.

So we really are working on it, and it really is coming. Really. Much of the technology we've produced to make this work will be used directly for the e-commerce too. So imagine being able to do this with your shop as well!

Your site on different devices and how the mobile version works

Joe — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:29:00 +0000

A major part of the last release was addressing the way your site is displayed on different devices. A key part of this was the mobile HTML view, but more than that we had to put in place a plan to cater for all devices that let us decide which version they should see based on their screen size and Flash capabilities. Generally mobile devices will see the mobile HTML, while large non-Flash devices (e.g. iPad) will see the desktop HTML and Flash enabled devices will see the Flash. As the new Andriod tablets start hitting the market in larger volumes this year, we'll see how they perform and choose either the Flash or non-Flash view appropriately as the default.

Snooty fox website

Snooty fox on 3 HTML devices

Snooty fox on Galaxy Tab (Andriod with Flash)

Mobile HTML

So version 1.0 of our mobile HTML is now live. It is optimised for small screen mobile devices in that the content of each page is ordered in a single column for ease of reading, images are resized for the device size, links are made larger for ease of use and the navigation uses a roll out menu leaving more space for the content.

It's definitely a version 1.0 for us because we already have a list of improvements we want to make, but we also want to gather your feedback to understand things you think it doesn't do well and get ideas on other improvements you'd like to see.

How it currently works

When you build a site with us you are allowed to lay out your content in any way you like. You can move any object to any position, you can layer objects on top of each other and you can change the colour, size or rotation of nearly anything. This is great as a free form design package, but it can be hard to see what the underlying 'structure' of the page is. As a human looking at your site it's obvious, but as a piece of code 'looking' at your site and trying to figure out what is important and what isn't, then it's not always easy.

The challenge for us in creating this mobile version was to write an algorithm that analyses your Flash page, 'understands' the logical order of your content and then lay this out in a single column for mobile. The code seeks to prioritise the 'important' content and make sure this is displayed without 'noise'. So our code makes a few assumptions about what is important and how objects relate to each other.

Columns, groups, headers and footers

To create a structure for your content we try to group things into rows and columns and then identify a header and a footer. When we look at an individual page the content of that page is combined with the content of the page master so we look at all objects together.

We first attempt to group objects that are related. This includes objects which overlay each other, or objects in close proximity to each other through the x or y axis.

TIP: If content is related, keep it lined up (e.g. Look at the x or y positions to keep them in a line) and this will help us group them correctly.

Using this technique we can identify rows and columns of content within your site. When we have to display this in a single column for mobile then we need to choose which column is the primary content (should be displayed first). We assume that the widest identified column is the key content and display this one first, then the other columns.

TIP: Make your most important content part of the widest column.

We also attempt to identify the 'header' and the 'footer' from the page and page master content. The 'header' is defined as any content that appears above the site menu, or in the case where you don't have a menu then the first 'row' is deemed to the be header. Similarly for the footer, we use the placement of certain widgets (e.g. the 'welcome/login' widget or the social media links widget) as indications of the start of the footer, or in the absence of these the last row is then deemed to be the footer. We may add explicit 'guides' for the header and footer in the future.

TIP: Experiment with the position of objects to help correctly define your header and footer.

Items that are ignored

We ignore some 'images' or empty text boxes if they are covered up by other objects. The reason we do this is that some objects are only on your site to create a visual division based on the Flash layout which will be different in the single column layout. For example putting a coloured square behind some text may be part of your design on the Flash site, but for the HTML version the text is most important and the square should be rendered as a separate image. So if you have an image or empty text box underneath other objects they will not be shown in the HTML.

TIP: If there is an image you think should be shown but isn't, make sure it's not covered by something else.

This is one area will will try to improve in future releases including one idea that may give you a specific flag on objects to say whether they should or shouldn't appear in the HTML version. We would preset these, but you could override them.

Design

At the moment the design of the mobile HTML version is reasonably generic. We take your HTML background colour and use this, but we don't apply any additional styling to text colour or menu colour for example. We experimented with taking some settings from your site and applying these (e.g. Menu colours) but found that because people build menus differently we couldn't be certain these settings were correct. Some sites looked great, some were unusable. We will work on improving this in future releases, perhaps adding specific settings for mobile styling.

Menu

For the mobile HTML, the 'menu' button at the top will always display at the top of your site even if you have 'hidden the menu from this page'. This is to ensure there is always a way to navigate the site. The menu will display all pages in your site except those that are 'hidden from the menu'.

SEO rules (H1, H2 and H3)

The first 'title' text box that appears on your page is marked up as an H1 title. Any other 'title' text boxes are marked as H2. In your body text if you have a line at the beginning of the text box that is bold and less than 120 characters long this is deemed to be an H3 title. All other text is just text.

And that's about it. I hope that makes some sense and please let us know if you have any questions.

Cool shops on Moonfruit using the HTML widget

Joe — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Well, we told you the HTML widget would open up new possibilities for e-commerce. And it looks like a few of our cutting edge users have started to integrate full-blown Amazon stores into their Moonfruit websites. Clever them ;-)

Of course this won't stop us working on our own e-commerce upgrade which is due out mid next year, but it certainly gives you something to get on with.

The Strictly Swimming home page with large shop link

So how have they done this?

The secret lies in the HTML Snippet widget and the Amazon widgets, specifically the aStore.

You can find the HTML Snippet widget in the File Manager, or on the New Toolbar, by using: 'Insert' menu -> 'Smart widgets' (side bar) there is a specific HTML widget for the 'Amazon Widgets'. Once you've added an HTML snippet to your page, the 'Setup' tab on the Editor provides a place to paste in your HTML code and in some cases a link to where to get the code from. Remember these will only work correctly for visitors with FlashPlayer 10 (about 90% market penetration and rising), so some users will not see them correctly, but that number will fall over the coming months.

So how does this look for Strictly Swimming? Well, by inserting the Amazon aStore, they can produce a full product display page as below.

Strictly Swimming product list

And finally you can see the individual product display page, which includes all the cool things from Amazon like user ratings.

Strictly Swimming product page

Check out the full site at www.strictly-swimming.com

And just to show you that there are others doing this too, check out the same from this cool website by The Food Bible.

The Food Bible homepage

The Food Bible shop page

The Food Bible product page

Check it out at www.thefoodbible.net.

New Toolbar for everyone from Feb 2010

Joe — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:10:00 +0000

Following the successful roll out of the New Toolbar for all new customers late in October, and the positive feedback from customers using it, we are now planning to phase out the old 'basic' and 'advanced' Toolbars from 1st Feb 2010.

We wanted to give you long enough to play with the New Toolbar (if you haven't already) as well as provide further feedback to us about what could make it better for you before this switch-over date. We have already received valuable feedback during the beta phase from you that helped us shape changes for the current release. We want to make sure we give further opportunity before the final version becomes the only version.

New Moonfruit Toolbar

So why are we doing this? Read on, read on...

Why we're doing it
The major drive for developing the New Toolbar was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this was an opportunity to re-present them for how they are, or can be, used today.

The New Toolbar will see the introduction of new blogging tools and the long awaited e-commerce upgrade, both of which we are aiming to deliver in the first half of next year.

The Old Toolbars (both basic and advanced versions) do not have the space or capabilities for us to integrate these new features as they are based on older version of Flash. To support both versions (Old and New) also creates overheads in the code that makes it difficult to add new features without breaking the old, and require editors to download parts of the old infrastructure that they will not use.

So for these reasons we have decided to phase out the Old Toolbars and create a single expandable New Toolbar that can cope with new additions for years to come. This has not been an easy decision, and we hope you understand that this creates a better platform for delivering new features in the future.

If you have comments or feedback on the New Toolbar, please let us know on this blog or via a support ticket.

New Toolbar highlights
You can get to the new Toolbar in the same way, e.g. 'View' --> 'New Toolbar', or if you're already using it you'll get the updates automatically.

The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help you 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects while in Edit mode (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quicker ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)
Copy site/transfer site feature - allows you to create copies of your site as the basis for a new site (not for backup)
HTML widget - add any HTML snippet to your site using our HTML widget snippet (e.g. Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more).

Here's the original beta release article if you missed it.

Let us know if you have any thoughts or comments. We're still making some improvements to the New Toolbar before 1st Feb 2010, so let us know if there's something that really doesn't work for you.

Sneak Preview: Radical Overhaul of Moonfruit Sitemaker Edit Environment

Wendy — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:24:00 +0100

We love the autumn(fall)! After a refreshing summer break everyone's 'back to school', sleeves rolled up and raring to go! The Moonfruit team is no exception: we're dying to show you the new product improvements we've been working on over the last few months.

One of the areas we've wanted to improve and simplify for several years now is the editing workspace for Moonfruit. We wanted to provide old Moonfruiters with quicker access to hidden power-user tools and to help newbies get to grips with customising their websites faster and even more intuitively. So here's a glimpse of what's coming very soon...

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

Pages section (click to enlarge image).

Admin section (click to enlarge image).

And that's not all. Our next release will have a few extra tasty goodies too (the eagle eyed will spot some in the sneaky pics). Watch this space ....

How to create members only/client only pages of your website

Joe — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:13:00 +0100

Members only areas or client only areas can be useful ways of providing privileged information to a select group of your site visitors. This can allow you to create better relationships with these people and use your website to present or distribute information privately with a guest list that you directly control. It’s one of the features that makes Moonfruit unique among other website builders, and extremely powerful.

We've also been asked about 'paid membership'. By using Groups to create a set of VIP members it is possible to charge a fee before adding a member to that group, though this has to be done manually. So here’s how to do all of these things.

Members only pages

Creating members only areas is reasonably easy and very powerful. It also means that anyone who joins your site will immediately get access to that page so there is no manual work to update the permissions with each new member.

Once again I'll be using my favourite and highly ranked taxi website www.joeslondontaxis.com. (some of you will remember this from our series of SEO articles).

To create a members only area first click on ‘People’ in the Toolbar and then the ‘Permissions’ tab. Here you will see a list of all your pages on the left, and the permissions settings of the selected page (or pages) on the right.

Every page can have its permissions set individually, or you can change the permissions for multiple pages as once (use the ‘control’ or ‘shift’ keys while selecting pages to select several at once).

I've created a page called 'members welcome page' which allows me to give a special welcome to my members. If I position this top of my pages list, then this will actually replace the normal 'welcome' page for members when they visit the site. Clever eh.

To make the page members only select the page from the list on the left, then change the ‘view’ settings for that page to ‘members only'. And that's it.

Image: creating a members only page

Client only areas

Creating and managing Groups is the key to client only areas. Groups can have permissions set as a whole, and any member who is part of that group will get those permissions. You can add or remove members from Groups at any time.

If you don’t have any Groups you will need to go to the ‘group’ tab first and set one up. I've created two groups, one called 'Clients' and one called 'Drivers'.

Image: adding groups

Next go back to the 'Permissions' tab and select the page that you wish to edit from the list on the left, then change the ‘view’ settings for that page to ‘Group’ and you can then choose which Group can see that page, e.g. Clients. I've done this for my 'clients' page, and also my 'drivers' page.

Image: assign view to Client Group

You can then add or remove individual members from that Group to control which ones can see that page. Here I have added 2 of my clients into the 'Clients' group, and selected the third in preparation to add him too (or her ;-). This would be the same process if you were creating a VIP section of selected members only.

Image: adding members to groups

You can also create members directly for clients by going to the ‘members’ tab and clicking ‘create member’. You can then define a username, password and email for the this client when you create the member. Once the member is created you can add them to a Group on your site so they have the correct permissions. Finally you can email your client with their username and password and a link to the login page. The ‘create member’ function makes it easy to setup client only areas without the client having to do anything themselves.

Image: creating members

There are numerous ways you can use this kind of functionality, so have a go and let us know what you think!

Why are members good for growing my site?

Joe — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:43:00 +0100

Members are people that have a relationship with your site, including their own login. They are users who have taken the step from being a visitor to signing up and creating their own account with you. Members can be advocates of your site and your services, along with helping you grow your site by telling other people about you (although they can also be detractors, so make sure you treat them nice!).

Your challenge is turning members into advocates. Members need to feel special and valued, so there should be good reasons why joining your site creates additional benefits for them. This might be access to members-only pages containing unique content, editing privileges allowing members to edit part of your site or being able to join in on certain discussions. It might be regular newsletters that offer them interesting or useful information on the same subject as your site.

To turn members into advocates you need to excite them and arm them with useful information. For most websites that do this well it will be about their content or services. If your site can offer them something they cannot get elsewhere, they will tell others about it. Remember you cannot force people to be advocates and trying too hard may annoy or alienate your members.

The simple rules are:

Focus on content and give your members things that they cannot get elsewhere
Make sure there is something extra for members, e.g. members-only content, discounts or communities
Communicate with your members via newsletters, Facebook/Twitter, etc.
Listen to them and give them a forum for their feedback. This helps them feel valued.

Some Moonfruit sites have already created large and successful membership bases, which support their site and business. Check out some of these.

http://extraicingonthecake.com/
1800+ members

http://extremekidrock.moonfruit.com
6500+ members

http://whitleybridge.moonfruit.com/
800+ members

http://simsgogogo.moonfruit.com/
2000+ members

HTML widget - what have you found?

Joe — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:40:00 +0000

So, it's been a month or so since we released the alpha (early testing) version of the HTML widget. We've had nearly 250 people download and try out the widget in our website builder from our site labs.moonfruit.com, so we know you've been using it. But the thing we want to know is what have you been using it for?

We're working away on getting the widget ready for a beta release (slightly more robust), which we will distribute more widely. And once we've done that we can start to produce specific versions for the things you want to use it for.

But firstly and update on the bugs. You might remember that currently the HTML widget only works correctly if you view the site using Internet Explorer 6 or above, with Flash Player 10. So for Firefox users, it displays the HTML content below the site so they can still see it, but its not ideal.

We've had some exciting news from Firefox that the bug that prevents the HTML widget correctly displaying in your site for Firefox users will be fixed in the 3.1 release of the browser, due sometime in the next couple of months (hopefully). This is great, as this bug was something we couldn't fix ourselves.

The main bug that we're looking at on our side is why some HTML snippets don't load correctly, which seems to be mainly those that use external JavaScript files in the HTML, e.g. Google AdSense or any Google Gadgets widget. Hopefully we'll be able to fix that too and open the net wider.

Once the HTML widget is fully robust we hope to be able to offer many different pre-configured flavours of it. There will always be the generic 'paste in any HTML' widget, but we'll also do some that are focused on particular services. For example a Youtube multi-video player (http://www.youtube.com/custom_player), or a twitter widget (http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/twidget). Both of these work with the current HTML alpha widget.

So which ones have you found that you like? Which HTML widgets do you think we should make available as pre-configured choices? Let us know and we'll add them to the list. Can you add a link to the widget you are using so we can see it?

As our customers you have the best idea about the things you really want to use yourselves, so if we can add them we will. Thanks for your help.

SiteMaker and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Part VII - Taxi Royal

Walt — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:21:00 +0000

Another year, another Rambo movie (yawn), another Pixar movie - Wall-E (nice), and another Batman movie (yeah!!!). So what else is 'same, same but different', as they say in Thailand, this year? A year on and it was time to revisit our favourite taxi company - Joe's West London Taxis - and see how it was doing in the Search Engine rankings.

December 12

"West London Taxi" - number 1, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (Google.com)
"West London Taxi" - number 1, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (Yahoo.com)
"West London Taxi" - number 6, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (msn.com)

So, what have we done? Well, to be honest, nothing. But this does go to show you that with some solid groundwork in the early stages of your journey to the dark side of SEO you can actually get your site or sites into a very good position on the page rankings of the major search engines. However, if you resubmit your domain name (URL), keep your content fresh and get some incoming links from popular sites then you can ensure your site has a much better chance of achieving and maintaining a top ranking.

A reminder

Just to highlight the steps Joe took all those months ago, remember that search engines do look for consistency and relevancy in a number of different areas of your in-page content and referral links. These include:

The URL (or address) of your site (or specific pages on your site), e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, or www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking, etc.
Your site name or title (and page titles) being published in the HTML, e.g. "London taxi company", or "London taxi bookings page"
Your site and page keywords meta data published in the HTML, e.g. "London taxis, London taxi, Joes taxis, West London taxi, etc."
Your site and page description meta data published in the HTML, e.g. "London taxi company provides taxi services..."
Your page content, e.g. the text that is on your page and relevant to your site name, keywords and description
Links on your page, including the anchor text, e.g. the text on which the link is set, e.g. "Book a west London taxi" links to http://www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking
Images on your page, including the name of the image file (or Alt text)
Referral links to your site or specific pages on your site, e.g. a link on another site (incoming links) referring to your site

Points 1-7 are easily within your control as they all relate to the contents of your site and all can be easily managed through your SiteMaker site. Point 8 requires linking to your site from other external sites, which is less easy to achieve, though there are a number of ways in which you can go about doing this.

If you haven't yet had a read of Joe's articles and you are interested in getting your site listed or improving the rankings of your site, then the easiest way to find the articles is just enter "SEO" in the Moonfruit Lounge search.

Finally

Just remember, as Joe has already mentioned, SEO isn't everything. It certainly plays a big part in marketing your website but traditional off-line publishing methods still play a crucial part in the overall marketing strategy of any site. Good luck, persist with your search engine optimisation, and be patient. It doesn't happen overnight but if you follow our guidelines it will happen.

New showhomes sites

Joe — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:11:00 +0000

Because our tool can be used in so many ways, the choices can often be mind-boggling. Each tool has a number of different ways that it can be customised to make it look the way you want and do the things you do, but sometimes you don't know what you want until you see it! So that's why we present to you the show homes. Here you'll find real examples of how tools can be used to stimulate your creative imagination...

The showhomes section will be coming soon to Moonfruit.com, but we wanted to give you a sneak preview of what kinds of things will be on there. So here are some of the sites that we have built.

Image tools - http://imagetoolsshowhome.moonfruit.com

The image tools show home deals with the core image features within SiteMaker which include; crop tools, pop-up galleries and the slide show. This site shows you a range of existing tools and how to change their presentation to meet particular needs, e.g. as a product catalogue, or animated image sequence. Have a look.

Clipart - http://clipartshowhome.moonfruit.com/

There's loads of clipart available to use within SiteMaker, but it's not always easy to see it bit by bit in the File Manager. So here is a complete list of what is available split between graphic elements, image cut-outs, and maps & wallpapers.

Gradient effects - http://gradientseffectsshowhome.moonfruit.com/

Gradient effects are one of those things that can be used to create a vibrant design in your site, but it's not always obvious which ones to use and how to use them. This site gives you some ideas.

Themeable widgets - http://themeablewidgetshowhome.moonfruit.com/

The new range of widgets (chat, forum, form, mail to a friend, comments) are all themeable, which means you can change the button styles and colours quickly and easily. Here are some examples of how they could look.

Video widgets - http://videowidgetshowhome.moonfruit.com/

Video widgets can be customised to look a number of different ways without or without their controls visible. This site gives you a few ideas of how you can change the way they look to fit with your site.

Let us know what you think and enjoy!!

Updating page URLs and bookmarking

Joe — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:44:00 +0000

New changes due out in Feb will make navigating around your site more intuitive and allow your customers to bookmark specific pages. For more details read on.

What are we changing?

Every page in your website e.g. yoursite.moonfruit.com, has its own URL (internet address), which is yoursite.moonfruit.com/yourpage. However when people navigate around your site the URL doesn't update. A side effect of this is that you cannot bookmark a particular page as the address bar always shows the URL that you or your customers first arrived at. Well, all that is about to change.

In February we will introduce a change that will update the URL whenever you change pages. However, it will do this without refreshing the page, so music will continue playing and there will be no interruption to content. Because every page will now update the URL in the address bar, your visitors will have a much better idea of where they are as they navigate through your site. They will also be able to bookmark a specific page in the normal way, which means having saved that page in their ‘Favorites’ they will be able to return directly to the correct point in your site. It will also mean they can email these page links to other people by cutting and pasting from the address bar.

It has only become possible to do this since we increased the minimum requirements for SiteMaker to Flash 8. This is partly why we pushed that change through a few months ago and why we are completing this work now.

So what will it look like for you?

Well, if you have a site, e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, and you click on the Taxi Booking page, the URL will update to:

www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/taxibooking/4521371523

which is the address of that page. If you then click on Airport Taxi Booking in the menu the URL will update to:

www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/airporttaxibooking/4521387384

which is the address of that page. Your visitors will be able to go 'forward' and 'back' in the browser history as normal (and the URL will keep correctly updating), and they will be able to bookmark those pages too.

If you're wondering why your page addresses have a number after them, this is the unique ID for that page. Because we permit you to have two different pages in your site with the same name, we append the page name with the unique ID to be sure that we serve up the right page. This is similar to the way many large sites work, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7178288.stm from the BBC.

As for the # character, well that's just the character we use to let the Flash site know which page it should be looking at, and to tell the browser not to refresh the page.

So there you have it! An exciting new change to improve the navigation and bookmarking of your site. Coming soon to a Moonfruit site near you...

New forum - coming soon

Joe — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:20:00 +0100

Since we didn't have a very exciting release at the end of July, we thought we'd post up some screenshots of the new forum feature that is in development and will be delivered over the next few months. It should allow a whole range of new features, plus making it far easier to browse and manage posts. So have a look...

Here are a few screens for you to see. They're not the final versions! But they should give you an idea of what to expect.

This first one is the new subject view.

Then we have a full list of topics.

And finally the posts themselves.

Like the comments, we should have an RSS feed on the topics, and the forums themselves will be searchable. Let us know what you think. Enjoy!

SiteMaker video player - news and views

Joe — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 11:33:00 +0000

The SiteMaker Video player was released two weeks ago, allowing you to upload FLV (Flash Video) files, or embed any video file you can find on YouTube or Google Video directly in your site. And unlike any other in-site video player, you can drag, scale and manipulate the video just by dragging and clicking. We reckon it's very cool! (and there's more to come).

So what do you think about it? Are you using it? Post a link to your video site and let us know what you think about it.

But before you suggest a range of enhancements, let me tell you about some of the ones we've already got in the pipeline, which should be released later this month. They include:

Auto-play option added
Option to hide controls
Option to maintain the 4:3 aspect ratio of the video - when enabled the video is padded out with black space, like Windows Media player; when disabled, video occupies entire screen and scales with screen
Clicking on screen toggles play state between play/pause
Hovering over the screen fades in either a play/pause icon on the screen, depending on the play state - icon fades out when mouse leaves screen
Pausing the video now dims the screen with 50% alpha black
Clicking the provider link on the screen now takes user to actual video’s site, rather than just Google Video or YouTube
Volume icon responds to different levels of sound, showing no bars, one bar or 2 bars - first sound wave is now smaller than second to give illusion of increasing sound.

So there you have it, SiteMaker finally has a video player. And not a bad one too.