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| FRIDAY, JANUARY 09, 2009 | |
Store Improvements |
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The RunYourWebsite store module continues to evolve into a powerful e-commerce platform, and recently we have released a variety of new features. The order management now has fields for the shipping method, date, and tracking number and a checkbox to email a shipping confirmation to the customer. You can also create a pdf invoice or packing slip for each order with one click. The invoice and packing slips are also available for batches of orders for higher volume stores, and you can also export order details in a .csv file to help bulk order fulfillment. Additionally you can import back in a .csv file with tracking numbers and ship dates and have your store automatically mark those orders as complete and send out tracking emails to each customer. Our customer registration system has been expanded, and you can choose to have your store require registration or have it be optional. The customer system has been merged with the contact manager so you can use the contact manager to stay in touch with all of your customers with specials, promotions, and more. Registered customers can view their order history along with status and tracking numbers, and soon the registered user feature will be used as a platform for more interactivity and features, such as comments on blogs, password protected features, and more. Additionally the registration confirmation email, order confirmation, and shipping notification emails can all be sent on an HTML email stationary branded to your website. We have lots more planned, so stay tuned, and as always we welcome requests and suggestions from our customers along the way. |
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| Posted At 12:01 AM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| SUNDAY, JULY 13, 2008 | |
Column Controls Moved |
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As a part of our continuing effort to make the control panel simpler without taking away any of the flexibility and advanced features of our system, we have removed the Columns control panel. The two features prevously found in this control panel (Column Layout and Site Alignment) have been moved to the Customize control panel. Most users will want to use the Column Layout and Site Alignment that goes with the Theme they select, so these features are really more for the advanced user, and no longer warrant a control panel of their own, but are of course still available for anyone who would like to take advantage of them. |
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| Posted At 06:07 AM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| FRIDAY, JULY 04, 2008 | |
Control Panel Favorites |
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Our control panel has a lot of choices. We pride ourselves on not being a simple template site, but in being a powerful, dynamic, and flexible website creation system. Despite all our advanced controls, we want the process to be simple and prevent the choices from being too daunting or confusing to a new user. While we are in the process of reprogramming our setup wizard, we have added an important new feature to our control panel organization. When you log in, the first tab you now see is "Favorites". This tab will show a couple of the most important and frequently used controls, and it will also show automatically any of our main modules you are currently using without showing ones you may not care about. In the coming weeks we will be improving this further to include any of the controls you use most frequently, and eventually to become even more configurable so you can have all of your essentials at your fingertips. It is all part of our ongoing commitment to making our system easy for anyone to use in the very first minutes, but deeply powerful and flexible for the experienced or advanced user. |
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| Posted At 07:07 AM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 2008 | |
Store Updates |
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We have made lots of updates to our Store module and have several more big improvements coming soon. You can now track store customers who can register and manage their account, check order status, and more. You now have two new options in your store settings to configure your store visualizations. We used to handle these automatically, and still give an automatic options, but the rock band selling two CDs and a T-Shirt has different needs from the office supply company selling 200 models of toner. You can now choose which of our layouts users see when initially viewing the store, and separately choose what layout users see when navigating to a specific category of products. You can also now specify if you allow different shipping and billing addresses or if you want to always ship to the billing address. And our international customers can select an alternative currency to use in their store. We have also expanded the options each product can have. The interface is easier to use, and each product can have more options than before. Additionally, upon special request each option can affect the price of the product. So if your wedding cake store offers hazelnut filling for an extra $5, or if your computer store charges differently for each of five hard drives available, you can now do that directly in the single product. Be sure to look for many other improvements in our store, including managing categories and subcategories, and many more features coming soon! |
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| Posted At 06:06 AM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| SATURDAY, JANUARY 05, 2008 | |
Our new name: RunYourWebsite.com |
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We are starting the new year with a new name. HybridSites.com is now known as RunYourWebsite.com. This change of brand is designed to make clearer what we do and what our main goal is: to help you be able to run your website. We hope it will also be easier to share with others and you can spread the word about RunYourWebsite.com! |
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| Posted At 01:01 PM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2007 | |
Photo Gallery Upgrade |
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We are pleased to announce a major upgrade to our photo gallery feature. Having long been one of our established and most used features, the photo gallery needed some sprucing up, and we decided to recreate it from the ground up while making sure all existing photos and features kept working exactly as they had been. The new photo gallery has a greatly improved front end, giving you more choices, making navigation easier, and allowing larger images to be viewed as a slide show. Now that the new structure is in place, you should expect to see more improvements and new features to be rolled out shortly. The control panel is also considerably more advanced and easy to use. Creating and managing and organizing galleries is easier than ever, which makes a big difference especially for those who make updates regularly and have lots of images. There are also now gallery settings where you can choose one of several options for how your galleries appear visually. Again with the new structure in place, there will be many improvements coming up here too. We welcome any feedback or further suggestions. While we aren't quite ready to put Flickr out of business, we strive to make adding pictures to your website easier and more feature filled, and as with every aspect of our system, tightly integrated into our service. |
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| Posted At 03:11 PM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| MONDAY, JUNE 25, 2007 | |
Blog Improvements: CAPTCHA and more. |
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We have put some exciting new improvements into our Blog Cube module making it more flexible, more powerful, and easier to use. The first change is optionally adding in a CAPTCHA to eliminate automated junk comments. A CAPTCHA is that image of squiggly letters that you are asked to type below when submitting something to verify that you are an actual human being and not an automated spam computer. By requiring a user to quickly type these five characters, your blog is protected from junk "spam bots" which can often attempt to put hundreds of junk comments on your blog a day. The second improvement also regards potentially unwanted comments, and also is optional. You can now choose to have your blog moderated or not. If you choose to have it moderated, new comments will not appear on your blog until you approve them. If you choose to have your blog not moderated new comments will appear instantly as usual. In either case you will receive an email notification of the comment with options to click a link to approve, block, or delete the comment instantly without having to log in to your control panel and locate it. The third improvement is a new automated RSS feed which puts a "subscribe" link on your blog and allows readers to subscribe and be notified in their RSS reader instantly of any new posts to your blog. In connection with these three new features, the fourth addition to the blog is a blog settings section in your blog control panel where you can select all the options you want, including specifying a title for your blog. We hope you enjoy the new additions, and we have many more improvements already planned! |
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| Posted At 02:06 AM | Link 0 Comments |
| THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 2007 | |
New Themes, New Colors, CSS Menus |
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We have added several new themes using some new color technology. In addition to adding some features that make our themes more flexible and allow for greater design variation, we also have added some new color features. The color control panel has a new color selector which includes two new options: custom color 1 and custom color 2. These custom colors will control color schemes for a growing number of our cube modules, with the calendar the first to feature this. Additionally several new headers and footers are special chameleon elements which will automatically adjust to the two custom colors allowing you to pick one of our new themes, and then modify the colors if you choose to match your company logo, match your t-shirt, or just find a combination that you like. There are nearly limitless color combinations! Additionally some of the new themes use our new CSS menus which also can take on your custom colors to match the look and feel of your site. These CSS menus will also have the option to have sub-menus soon. Now that the new technologies are in place we plan on rolling out more of these flexible themes regularly to give you an ever growing number of choices for the look of your website. |
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| Posted At 10:01 PM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2006 | |
Understanding Style Sheets: Why we don't have a font menu |
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One of the harder things to understand at first for our customers is why there is not a font menu in the Webpage Editor, and how Style Sheets work on our system. Style sheets play a very important role in web design, and are used by virtually every professional web designer and every well made website. The basic idea is to take certain design aspects and put them in one easily editable place that can be used by any page on the website. In the case we are talking about here, we take text formatting and fonts and put all that information into the style sheet, instead of page by page and line by line throughout your entire website. This makes your website easier to build, more professional in appearance, and easier to change. When editing a page, you do not have to select a particular font and font size for each thing, remembering what you used on other pages or ending up with inconsistencies that make your website look amature. Instead you leave most of your text the default, and apply styles to certain parts that should be different from the default. You can apply "Headline" to your first line to make it bigger and bold, you can apply "Small Print" to a paragraph at the bottom which you want smaller than normal, and more. This tells the browser to put that headline in the font and size and format that the style sheet says headlines should be, the same concept for the small print, and everything else to format as the style sheet says the default should be. You do not have to make the style sheet or know much about their inner workings, because our builder takes care of all of that for you. Each theme has a style sheet attached when you select it, and you can change this at any time by selecting another option in the style sheet control panel. The amazing thing is that if you want to use style sheet with a larger font, or a different font, you change the style sheet with one click, and every page on your site is instantly updated to the new look. You do not have to go back and edit individual pages, and all of the automatic parts of your site will update to the new look as well. It might take some getting used to, especially for many of us that have been using word processors one document at a time, but the results are clear. You end up with a better website which you can build and manage more easily, and that is what HybridSites.com is all about. |
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| Posted At 11:11 AM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
| SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2006 | |
Webpage Editor Updates |
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We have recently launched some exciting improvements to our Webpage Editor and the process of creating and managing the pages on your website. For starters, when creating a page you no longer start with a blank canvas. You now choose from one of several templates as a starting point. A blank option is still available and the default, but you can more easily pick a general direction you want your page to go in and edit it, instead of starting the process from scratch each time. This should not be confused with your overall website layout and design, and just control what goes in the main content section of each page individually. The next major improvement is that the Webpage Editor is not more tightly integrated with your website. The editor now appears in the context of your total site design, in the exact width that will be available to your finished page. It also automatically adjusts to your center background color (for those of you not using white) as well as to your body margin setting for the same spacing you will see on your live page. Additionally the Webpage Editor code has been updated behind the scenes which should help everything just work faster and better. We hope these improvements help you build a better website more easily, and welcome any feedback. We have many more changes under development as we strive to constantly improve our service. |
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| Posted At 10:11 AM by Michael | Link 0 Comments |
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