SiteKreator Development Blog

See the file upload progress and edit images with Picnik

Mark McGrady — 2010-03-16T16:38:21-07:00

When uploading a large image or video file, you have probably stopped and thought, how much longer until it will be finished loading? Stop guessing. Now you can view the file upload progress when adding new files to the Text and Image Editor and the Image Gallery.

To enhance your site-building experience even further, Image files that you have uploaded to the Text & Image Editor, and the Image Gallery, are now fully editable through a seamless integration with the leading online image editor, Picnik! (recently acquired by Google).

To start editing, just click the Edit button in the Image Properties!

With Picnik you can crop, resize, and rotate your images. You can also enhance photos, and apply special effects. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux and it does not require any download.

When you are done with your changes click Save and Close and that's it.

We will soon we will be adding these great new features to your Page Image and Site Logo as well! Please check back for updates!

New feature � Optional Containers

Mark McGrady — 2010-02-23T18:58:09-08:00

SiteKreator designs now feature an easy way to toggle different page elements. In the Page Layout menu, you will now find a list of elements which can be enabled or disabled on a per-page basis. Below is a list of designs and what you can control in each of them.

Chara � toggle Left Column, Page Title, Collapsible Panel, Page Header

Polaris, Sirius, Sirius Light, Vega, Vega Light � toggle Left Column, Page Title and the entire Page Header

Atria, AtriaX, AtriaX Light, Meissa � toggle Left Column and Page Title

Kuma � toggle Page Title

To take advantage of this new feature, you will need to reapply your design from Control Panel > Change Design > Update

Please, let us know what you think!

* as shown in Polaris

Built-in Site Statistics are Now Optional

Mark McGrady — 2010-02-03T16:46:09-08:00

Two weeks ago we announced that we were making some changes to the built-in "Site Statistics". Even though the majority of you do not use them, it was always turned on before. In order to improve the loading speed and performance of your website, we have disabled this feature unless you manually choose to use it.

If you have not already done so, and you wish continue using the built-in "Site Statistics" tool you must specifically choose to enable it according to our tutorial. Or you could get more sophisticated and start using Google Analytics, which we recommend for most sites.

Page Image Placeholder available for All Business Designs

Mark McGrady — 2010-02-03T16:01:41-08:00

Recently we introduced the Page Image Placeholder to the Admin Interface of most business designs. By having this gray rectangle on the page, you can see where the Page Image will reside, even if it is currently set to "None".

Now this feature is also available in Cocoa, Pasta, Futuretech and Charcoal

Several improvements to the editing interface!

Mark McGrady — 2010-01-22T14:39:13-08:00

This week we released several small, but very useful improvements to the editing interface:

1. Real Live Preview

While the Admin View of your website looks very similar to what your visitors would see after you publish it, it's not 100% the same. For example when you have a navigation panel that does not have any menu items or HTML snippet that does not have visible content, a gray placeholder indicates their location. This makes it possible to edit your content, but you are still left to wonder how everything will pull together in the end-user view of your site.

Now you don't have to guess. With a simple click of the Preview icon (located in the Top Admin Menu), you can see how the published version will appear without actually making anything public!

Just login to your site, apply your changes, and check the Preview. Once you are satisfied with the result, you can publish the page and your visitors will see exactly what you saw in the Preview.

2. Page Image Placeholder
Oftentimes it is decided that a Page Image will not be used on particular pages, or maybe the entire site. But even after switching the Page Image to "None", we were still left with an empty space where the image would be.

Instead, we have installed a placeholder to serve as a marker where the Page Image will reside.

Now you are not stuck with a big empty space, and if you decide to add a Page Image, just look for the box, and click the blue wrench.

3. Edit and Add icons now more accessible

When editing or adding elements, sometimes the Edit and Add icons would end up getting hidden by the Top Admin Menu buttons. This meant we would have to scroll back up the page to be able to click the icon.

Now, we've made an adjustment that moves the icons below the top menu making them always visible and allowing you to quickly edit your site content!

We hope these little upgrades will help make your website designing experience a lot better! Thanks in advance for all your valuable feedback!

Easy integration with Google Analytics, Improved Site Loading

Mark McGrady — 2010-01-15T18:54:05-08:00

The ability to track and analyze your website traffic is important for every business. The information you obtain can be used to improve your website content and structure, and in turn help you adjust your marketing activities and eventually drive more and higher-quality traffic to your site.

Every website comes with built-in Site Statistics tool, conveniently located in the Control Panel. Here can easily view basic statistics for site visitors, page hits, referrer domains, etc.

What's even better is that your site has the capability of integrating Google Analytics, one of the most powerful statistics tools available. With more than 85% of our clients using this awesome tool, we have made a few adjustments that will make it more efficient to harness this power with your SiteKreator website!

Up until now, you had to manually copy-paste an HTML snippet on your pages in order to use Google Analytics with your site. And because there wasn't any way to disable the built-in statistics, they were executed on each page load (slowing things down) even though you already have Google Analytics. By optimizing your site to use only the traffic monitoring tool you need, you will reduce loading time, and increase the performance of your site!

The option to choose the appropriate Site Statistics tool is located in Control Panel > Site Properties > Special Features.

Depending on the tool you choose to use, you will be required to make one of the following updates:

1. If you choose to continue using the built-in statistics tool, please login to your account and and select "Built-in" from the Site Statistics dropdown.

In two weeks, if you have not explicitly chosen to use our "Built-in" statistics, they will be automatically disabled in order to improve the loading speed of your site.

2. If you choose to use Google Analytics (GA):

a. Remove the current GA HTML snippet from your site (if you have one)

b. Select "Google Analytics" from the Site Statistics dropdown and fill in your Web property ID (the UA-xxxxx-x number). You can get this number from the account settings page under your Google Analytics account.

c. Verify that you do not have both the GA HTML snippet on the page and the GA setting in Site Properties, as this will execute the Google code twice and will cause errors in your statistics.

After applying these steps, the built-in statistics will no longer needlessly slow-down the loading of your site. And for added convenience, you will be able to access and login to your Google Analytics account from your website Control Panel > Site Statistics.

Preview styles in the Text and Image Editor!

Mark McGrady — 2010-01-05T08:29:53-08:00

We've just released a Style preview in the Text and Image Editor. We are confident that many of you will enjoy this added convenience.

Now you can see the real size, color and font of each Text Style before you apply it.

You no longer have to try out each individual style to find the one that best serves your needs. Now, you can just highlight the text and choose the desired style visually from the Style drop-down.

Improved Image Gallery Interface!

Mark McGrady — 2009-12-18T11:45:40-08:00

As you probably know, our team has been hard at work on the release of six brand-new gallery visualizations. We are very excited to let you know the official launch is nearly here! In preparation for it, today we released a new version of the gallery properties, which makes it very easy to work with the different gallery visualizations. In addition, the new gallery properties introduces our next style concept that will soon be applied for all editable elements in SiteKreator.

On a side note, we would also like to point out that we have improved the appearance of thumbnails so that the "white pillows" around the image are no longer visible when you turn off the Crop Thumnail checkbox (previously visible on sites with dark backgrounds). To remove any "white pillows" on an existing gallery, just change the thumbnail size and publish the page.

We hope you like this improvement as we step toward releasing the awesome new Image Galleries! Looking forward to your feedback.

Allow site visitors to Upload Files!

Mark McGrady — 2009-11-20T15:07:02-08:00

Would you like to give your visitors the ability to upload files to your site? Now you can allow anyone to contribute pictures, sounds and other binary files to your site through Forms. Any files your site visitors upload are sent to you as a click-able link for easy download. You can collect important information while providing interactive experience for your users!

Allow your visitors to Upload Files today using these easy steps:
1. Add a Text Field to any new or existing Form and set it to File
2. publish your site
3. visitors click on the Choose File field and upload!

Check out our Forms tutorial to learn more!

Customize your site colors, fonts and background with just few clicks!

Mark McGrady — 2009-11-19T15:05:34-08:00

We know that you've been asking for an easier way to customize your designs. That's why we developed the Design Customization Interface. Now you can easily change your fonts, color schemes and background images.

Today we launched this enhancement and we think you are really going to like what you can achieve with it in just few clicks. Several customizable categories allow countless design possibilities and an easy way to give your website a personal touch.

Start the interface and select the desired custom color scheme, font or background - that's all there is to it. It's fast, easy, and fun to use.

Best of all, the changes from each category are displayed instantly without page reloads, allowing live preview of different design combination's.

To start customizing your design, go to Control Panel > Customize Design.

For more information, please visit the tutorial.

The Design Customization Interface is available with our business plans.

Form Enhancements - Site referrer and Geo-location

Mark McGrady — 2009-11-16T12:00:35-08:00

To improve the value of the information you can collect with your web forms, we added to more system default variables:

$geo_location - Visitor's geographic location in the format: City, Two letter country code
$site_referrer - The site where your visitor found and clicked on a link to your site.

Their values are available as Form hidden fields. In order to receive this inofrmaion along with the visitor's input, add a new hidden field to the form and set it's 'Default Value' to either of the above mentioned variables like so:

Then inside the email, you will see them like this:

Behind the Scenes of the Upcoming New Galleries

Luba Futekova — 2009-10-08T03:10:50-07:00

Are you already pushing the envelope of the current SiteKreator galleries? You need different layouts, rich effects and a variety of navigation options? Then fasten your seat-belts! The new SiteKreator galleries are on their way with a plethora of new visualizations, navigation styles, effects, transitions and more.

Slideshow

A new version of our classic slideshow gallery with many new features. Select any of the new image effects, navigation styles and transitions. The play, pause, previous and next buttons are now inside the image by default, optimizing visual real-estate making the galleries much more flexible for integration inside your content.

Thumbnails

A classic gallery with image thumbnails displayed in a grid. Featuring a rich set of updates and options like flexible grid, thumbnail effects, page transition, selectable navigation styles.

Filmstrip

A large slideshow with small icon previews of all the images inside your gallery, arranged in an easy to use filmstrip. The strip can go at top, left, right or bottom of the slideshow.

Mosaic

Again a slideshow with small icon previews, this time the icons arranged in a mosaic. A great way to display huge collections of photos or products.

Carousel

Impressive interactive presentation of your images in a carousel. Smooth sliding and scaling provide a great way to browse through the gallery.

Slider

The gallery images arranged in a ribbon. The ribbon can automatically or manually slide revealing more images. Ideal for a photographic site header or a product display window.

New image effects are available in all visualizations. You can select from Reflection, Drop-shadow and Polaroid effects, automatically prepared and applied on page for you.

The visualizations share new navigation styles, creating a huge variety of possible configurations. Choose from Buttons, Buttons with Numbers, Numbers or Dots.

All new gallery visualizations come with a brand new large image viewer which opens inside the current page overlaying your content, as opposed to opening an irritating pop-up. The large view automatically fills the browser window revealing the biggest possible version of the large image.

You don't have patience to try all these awesome gallery visualization? Hold your horses - we are still working very hard to get them out of the door as soon as possible. We hope they will be available on SiteKreator.com within the next two months. But if you don't want to wait you can start creating your own gallery visualizations even today. Learn more how to do that here.

Many new features in Manage Pages

Nancy Jefferson — 2009-09-18T10:26:59-07:00

SiteKreator is committed to not only help you build a stunning web site, but also effectively market it and get traffic to it. Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a major role in your online marketing. Today we are very pleased to announce several changes to Manage Pages that could greatly improve your ranking in the search engines. All these changes are result of a direct collaboration with many active users who gave us ideas and provided invaluable feedback during the development.

The first feature introduced with this release is the ability to create folders and move pages to folders. This not only allows you to better arrange the pages on your site, but also significantly improves your search engine ranking, as explained in this article. We encourage you to try it.

In addition, now SiteKreator allows the creation of 301 redirects, which enables you to forward any URL within your domain to a specific page from your site or to an external site. This is especially useful if you have inbound links to a page that no longer exists and you don't want to lose the search engine juice from that link.

Watch our short video for adding folders and 301 redirects here.

Another SEO-related feature will help avoid your site being penalized for duplicate content - SiteKreator will no longer display your home page content under both its original name (usually main_page.html) and the standard index.html. Instead, all visits to index.html will be forwarded (with a 301 redirect) to the home page you have selected. If the home page is index.html, no redirect will occur.

We have also added several "convenience" features like:

Page size is now displayed in the list of pages
Delete multiple pages
Duplicate pages
Published date is in your local time zone

Also considerable effort has been put into optimizing the speed of Manage Pages, which should be noticeable any time you load it.

We want to thank our large user community for the great feedback we got while creating those important features. Without you, SiteKreator wouldn't be one of the most powerful tools for creating an attractive and effective web presence.

New Designs collection Summer 2009

Sergey Todorov — 2009-08-10T06:40:28-07:00

We are very excited to announce the availability of three new designs to compliment our already rich selection of professional designs. They are available to all SiteKreator Business subscribers.

Chara

Chara comes in 6 distinct color themes (Navy, Gray, Blue, Green and Red) and like all SiteKreator business designs it's completely customizable with your brand colors and graphics.

In addition to being one of our visually most-enticing and sleek designs, Chara comes with a few new features.

New collapsible panel at the top (see expanded panel in preview below). The content there is accessible for visitors after a click on the Expand button and visitors can reclaim the space by collapsing the panel back again. Ideal for contact information, site maps and other always-available information. Not sure you need the panel? That's taken care of - if you don't have any content inside, the panel will not appear in the end-user view of your site.

Flexible layout for wide content. Even large images and very wide tables, will not break your site, when you are using the Chara design. The content panel automatically re-sizes to accommodate wide content.

This design uses the shaped page header images, first shown with the Polaris design. This makes the design unique with a light and streamlined look for both home page - where you can use a large image and inside pages as well, where you can select from the same library of images, but smaller in size. Combine the page image with a slogan text beside it, for a complete customized appearance.

Inverted text. When you add or move text content, to an area with dark background (like the new collapsible panel or the footer) Chara will automatically detect that and display the texts inverted - white instead of dark gray, thus guaranteeing that your content is always readable and you don't end up with black-on-black text.

Pasta Oval
Another addition to the design selection is a replacement for the existing Pasta Oval design. The aesthetics and concept are pretty much the same, but the new design is better in every bit that matters.
1. You can now select the image inside the oval from a library, just like you select a page image in any other SiteKreator design.
2. The design is also completely customizable with SiteKreator Pro, so it can tie in perfectly with any established brand and colors.
3. We have an inside page layout, allowing you to create pages with the content starting right at the top - not all pages need the large image in the oval.

The design comes in 6 distinct colors - Gray shown above and 4 more previewed below

Pasta Arc
The other Pasta variation, with the arched page image, also gets a new replacement, again allowing much better flexibility - selectable header image, multiple page layouts and complete customization with SiteKreator Pro. Pasta Arc is available in 6 colors as well, Blue shown below.

Redesign of SiteKreator.com and new packages

Nancy Jefferson — 2009-06-22T12:35:50-07:00

As many of you already noticed, recently we completely redesigned our main SiteKreator.com site. With the new design, we also introduced a few new packages. The most notable is our Business Deluxe package loaded with the full set of business features, 2Gb storage and a complete custom design. As more plans are being added we needed to rename few of the existing packages. For example, the Power package is now Business Premium, the Business package is now Business Standard and the Personal package is now Personal Complete.

In addition to this, all our packages got a significant increase in the storage. For example, the Business Standard now comes with a full Gigabyte, while the Personal Complete comes with 400Mb. This will give you more space for your photos and videos.

For more information about our new packages, visit SiteKreator.com.

Make your videos visible to everyone

Laura Stern — 2009-03-26T12:30:59-07:00

With the Text and Images editor you may add video files and turn on/off a number of options like autoplay, controls and so on. However, depending on the format of the video file you uploaded, your visitor would need a browser plugin which may not be installed on his computer. This limits the visibility of your video files.

A solution we recommended until now was to add your video files to YouTube or Google Video and have the videos embedded in your site using an HTML snippet. Not anymore...

The new option to add Flash Video (FLV) files inside the Text and Images editor allows to display video using the Adobe Flash Player - available on more than 99% from all internet connected computers. You may convert any video file (MOV, AVI, etc) to FLV format by using a simple convert tool, like On2 Flix Standard for example. Then just upload the FLV file from the usual Add Media option in the Text and Images editor and your video will be visible to everyone. Learn more �

And, now you can upload files (including FLV) up to 100 MB in size. Enjoy!

New Sign-up and Change Design interface

Laura Stern — 2009-02-26T03:58:27-08:00

We are pleased to announce that we just released the official version of the new sign-up and change-design interface. Check out the new sign-up here.

The main advantages of this new interface are:

Support of a much larger number of designs. Only the designs currently visible on the screen are loaded. Expect many new designs soon.
Filter by Design, Color, Industry, Year of release or just browse all designs.
Option to see all colors for a specific design.
Convenient zoom in/out with an option to select and browse previous/next design (you can even use the arrows on your keyboard).
More control over the initial content of the site, like specifying the list of initial pages and their names, filling in the slogan, contact and about us information and more.

We hope you'll enjoy the new interface and as always, would love to get your feedback on it!

Improved Performance under Internet Explorer 6

Elliott Cox — 2008-12-26T09:35:55-08:00

We just released a new version of SiteKreator that significantly improves the performance of the new editing interface on slow machines and Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). This was achieved by disabling some of the animation effects visible when adding/moving content elements or opening edit windows.�

We automatically disable the animations on IE6 and slow machines�only, but you can also manually disable them from Control Panel > My Account > Editing Interface Options.

SiteKreator at Web Design World, Boston, 8-9 Dec 2008

Emma Weisz — 2008-12-08T03:33:33-08:00

Today and tomorrow, SiteKreator will be presenting at the Web Design World Conference in Westin Copley Place, Boston. On Tue, 9 Dec, 9 AM EST, SiteKreator's CEO Ivaylo Lenkov will open the second conference day with a keynote on "Web Design in the Cloud".

The keynote will touch upon the history of cloud-based business apps, productivity tools and CMS and will pose an important question: why has the web design creation process been left behind? Lenkov will present the latest advancements, benefits and limitations in taking this process to the cloud and will attempt to draw the road-map ahead, introducing SiteKreator Pro as one of the possible answers to the growing demand for cloud-based web design.

We can still arrange for some free or discounted conference passes, so please contact us if you are in the vicinity of Boston these two days and would like to visit. We'll be glad to meet you and walk you through SiteKreator Pro, or just chat with you over the latest web trends.

The new SiteKreator editing user interface is live!

Emma Weisz — 2008-12-04T11:52:53-08:00

We are very excited to share the news that SiteKreator's brand-new editing user interface is already live on SiteKreator.com and hosted private labels.

The benefits it brings are many:

no more confusing edit icons
visual indication for all places where content may be added
admin view is now fully identical to end-user view
you now have an option to edit the page title, site title, logo, page image directly from the page
you see what exactly you are going to edit before you start editing it
you see what content you are going to delete before deleting it
content may be moved everywhere, not just up and down

For a brief introduction on editing content with the new interface, please check this quick video. Try out for yourself how easy it is to edit content now and let us know how you find the new UI. Any reports on issues you encounter after the upgrade would be also most appreciated and quickly addressed. Please use the Help button in Admin view of your site to report them to our Support team.

Thanks to all of you for the continued support on making SiteKreator even better!