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Sep 17, 2008 | |
For small companies like us (read, no marketing budget), we know how valuable good press is. Because sadly, just having a great product doesn't mean the world will beat a path to your door. So we are tickled pink when we get good press coverage. Yesterday, we were covered in Mashable, here: http://mashable.com/2008/09/16/websketch/ And today, we were covered by KillerStartups, here: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/websketch-com-customize-your-web If you like our service, please vote us up on KillerStartups. We want to see if we can get on the Top 10 list and stay there :) | |
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Sep 16, 2008 | |
We had an opportunity to showcase our service at the TechCrunch50 Conference in San Francisco last week. Along with that, we had a show-only drawing for a brand new Apple iPod touch. We are happy to announce that the winner of the iPod touch drawing is Ben Choi. A hearty thanks goes to everyone who participated.
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Sep 16, 2008 | |
Internet radio, that is. We were recently interviewed for the PricewaterhouseCoopers Startup Show regarding our launch of the WebSketch service. You can catch it here. http://wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/PricewaterhouseCoopers-Start-Up-Show/archives/date/selected/09-04-2008.html
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Aug 26, 2008 | |
Comments Plus Comments just got a whole lot more fun because when someone leaves a comment on one of your sites, we now let you know! New email notifications let you know as soon as someone comments on one of your site. And when you log in you can see all the new comments since your last login, or in the last day, week, or month even. You can even see comments you've left on other people's sites in case you want to keep an eye on the ones you've commented on. We also figured out that dates are pretty much useless for communicating how recent a comment is, so we ditched the date and replaced it with when a comment was left. So now you'll see comments as being left "25 minutes ago", "2 days ago", "1 week ago", etc. :-) Featured Sites You told us that seeing features sites on the home page is cool but that you wanted to see them when you logged in too. That made sense to us, so we did it. Of course we don't want to make you see them if you don't want to, so you can hide or show them whenever you feel like it. New Page Properties Now you can set the link color, underline style, hover color, and hover underline style so your links will stand out and look great! We also picked a new default line height that works better for a wider variety of Web content. But don't worry, if what you really want is to be able to change it yourself, now you can. ;-) That's it for this post. As usual, we're already busy working on more cool stuff, so check back again for more updates from the team! | |
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Aug 22, 2008 | |
It's bound to happen at least once right? Well, tonight it happened to us. Our dev team was testing a new opt-in email service we are developing that will keep you informed of the latest and greatest from WebSketch. Something new like this is supposed to be a great thing! The problem: the team inadvertently performed tonight's testing on a server that had a copy of our production database on it. What that means is that many of you probably received two test email messages from us tonight that made no sense whatsoever. Of course they weren't supposed to make sense because you weren't supposed to receive them. No dancing around this one – we goofed! Please accept our sincere apology. We will do our best to ensure that mishaps like this one don't happen again. ;-) | |
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Aug 11, 2008 | |
It's a new week. We're back with another site update. And we're here to tell you about it. Who said that Mondays aren't fun days? Wasn't us! Comments It's no secret that we believe in choice - your choice - so we made sure we added in a little bit of that when we did the new Comments object. "What kind of choice?" you ask. Well, maybe you want comments at the bottom of your page. Maybe you don't. Maybe you want them on the left. Perhaps on the right. Middle anyone? Maybe you want to let only WebSketch users leave comments. Or maybe you want to let anyone leave comments. Of course they have to fit in with the rest of your page design so they probably should automatically adjust to the choices you make for your page text - things like the font, size, and color. Then again, maybe we should just let you pick the font, size, and color yourself. Oh, and maybe you like dividers between comments - Maybe you don't. Or maybe you like them so long as they go well with the color of other stuff on your page which means you get to pick the color! Well, you get all that choice and more with the new Comments object. So have at it, and have some fun with it. Speaking of text.. We realized that we sort of left font size out of the text section in the page properties. And that means that when you wanted to use something other than the default font size, you had to, you know, change it on every text object on your page. Can you say "Whoops!"? We can. We did. We fixed it. You can now set the default text size in the page properties. Ask and ye shall receive! Some of you asked us for colored dividers. We thought that was a pretty cool idea. So we added that in this week too - with a twist! We're not saying what twist. We're going to let you find that one all by yourself. And when you do, you'll probably think it's pretty cool. That's it for this post. As usual, we're already busy working on more cool stuff, so check back again for more updates from the team!
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Aug 4, 2008 | |
Over the past two months we've improved WebSketch at a blistering pace. Last week was no exception. We updated the home page to better show you WebSketch, released support for making and editing sites in Internet Explorer 7, and made some improvements to the new look we rolled out just a couple of weeks ago.. New Home Page It sort of hit us in last week's staff meeting that our home page hadn't kept up with all the new stuff we've added recently. Then came an idea... Let's throw it out, work up some new graphics, put the drag & drop Flickr & YouTube stuff front and center (because they're sweet), add in some live samples of sites our users have made, and do all-new Learn More pages that show people some of the cool stuff in WebSketch. Oh, and while we're at it, let's design, build, and serve up the new Learn More pages FOR WebSketch USING WebSketch. Then we thought - "Oh yeah.. great idea!" Well, as it turns out it wasn't such a bad idea after all because we did it, they look pretty good, and it even freed up one of our UI guys so he could work on more cool stuff! WebSketch made with WebSketch. Has a nice ring to it doesn't it? ;-)
Internet Explorer 7
No matter how you slice it, FireFox and Safari are hands-down better at running robust Web 2.0 applications than Internet Explorer 7 is. (Think day vs.night) Even so, we know there are IE 7 users who want to use WebSketch and either don't want to, or can't switch to FireFox or Safari. We took the heat and held back IE 7 support until until we could deliver an acceptable user experience. We think we reached that point so last week we released it. IE 7 users rejoice! You can now make and edit sites on WebSketch too. ;-)
And More..
Some times little things make all the difference in the world. It's called polish. And we added some to WebSketch this week. So if you notice some minor changes here and there, rest assured, you are not losing your mind. It's just us polishing things up to make them easier for you. Things like making it easier to know when you can add or edit a site title or description, calling out the privacy options for your sites on the sites page rather than hiding them behind a menu, adding a third row of thumbnails on the Sites page to make better use of screen real estate, and rearranging and changing some menu items when editing sites to be more like most people expect them to be. Stuff like that. You know - Polish.
That's it for this post. As usual, there's more good stuff coming so check back again for more updates from the team!
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Jul 17, 2008 | |
It's been a busy week. Last night we rolled out a new look for the site, added drag & drop integration with YouTube, and added objects that let you add movies and TV shows from Hulu.com, slideshows from Slide.com, and slideshows & widgets from RockYou.com. The New Look Why a new look? Well.. from day one we decided that the WebSketch experience should be about your sites, not about our user interface. We think we made a decent first attempt, but we decided we could do better. So we cleaned up the site navigation, changed our use of color so it doesn't interfere with your sites, moved all the stuff we use to communicate with you from the left side to the right side (to make sure that your stuff is always the center of attention), and we made it easier and more fun to view sites. YouTube Videos This week we added integration with YouTube to make adding videos drag and drop simple. You'll find it under the new Videos tab when you are making or editing a site. We even added the same customization choices that you find on YouTube itself (Colors, Show Border, and Include Related Videos) plus one more - you can have a video auto-start when someone views your site. Flickr Photos We integrated with Flickr last week to make adding photos drag and drop simple too. You'll find it under the new Photos tab when you are making or editing a site. We even added auto-size selection so you never have to worry about choosing the wrong size Flickr photo to use for your site. And More... This week we also added objects that let you add content from Hulu.com, Slide.com, and RockYou.com. Then we made them resize so you aren't stuck having to figure out how to edit HTML to change sizes of objects that use embed HTML. That's it for this week. As you can see it was a busy one and we are all pretty tired over here, but we hope you have as much fun using the new stuff as we had making it for you! | |
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Jul 7, 2008 | |
We just added one of the most user-friendly integration with Flickr photos. It allows users to 1) search and find photos from the asset bin, and 2) add them via a simple drag-and-drop motion. Click on the "Photo" tab in your asset bin area of the Editor. If you have pictures stored on other sites, don't despair. We will add Picasa and (maybe) Photobucket soon. | |
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Jul 6, 2008 | |
Why is this so exciting? A transparent content area allows the entire background to come through. So if you have a large picture, that picture stays in the background, and everything else in the content areas scrolls pass it. Your page appears to "float" on top of the image. Play with it. | |
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Jun 10, 2008 | |
A small change technically that will have dramatic impacts at the design level. We implemented the ability to upload images to the content area as background. You can load a large pic or a small pic and tile it. This should provide some amazing design possibilities for our users. Check out this: http://www.websketch.com/gallery/scott/419091213063630593. To access this function, hit "Page Properties" at your design editor level. | |
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Jun 9, 2008 | |
A bit redundant info, since it's already in your Home page news. But the new Friends section has just been added. It's not yet full-featured, but it will allow you to begin building your own community. Check it out. | |
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May 23, 2008 | |
At the risk of sounding corny, WebSketch is about the freedom of self-expression online.
Most of us understand that the web is an amazing vehicle to communicate and express oneself. But the whole process of building HTML codes, hosting and deploying a website is still beyond the capability or patience of most people. Frankly, even for those of us geeks, coding and creativity do not go hand in hand. So we dreamed of a place where you can build beautiful sites, do it in minutes, do it without understanding a stitch of code, and in fact, do it without being aware of the technology. Many late nights and sleepless weekends, a lot of good coffee, and more than a few computers later, here we are :) Enjoy! (Scott Tse) | |
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May 23, 2008 | |
Welcome to WebSketch.com beta.
Thank you for being part of our community. We are all very proud of what we have built, but, alas, no one is perfect. Please be patient as we go through our beta phase. Your feedback, comments, insights, observations, suggestions, or even the occasional kudos would be very helpful to us and would be very much appreciated. Feel free to send us your feedback and suggestions 24/7.
(Scott Tse) | |
