Social media services are a big part of any modern marketing strategy, and Facebook is the biggest of these by far.  Many businesses jumped early and with both feet on Facebook, often marketing their Facebook page and URL even more than their own website.  We have always stressed a more balanced approach, and the ongoing changes to Facebook policy show just how crucial it is to stay in control of your online presence.

The most valuable aspect of a Facebook presence for a business has been a communications channel to customers that they listen to.  The Facebook news feed receives more attention than an email inbox for many people, especially in younger demographics, and a message in a news feed tends to be read and not ignored, where many email marketing messages will be skipped just based on the sender and subject, with the contents never having been seen.

When someone "Likes" your facebook business page (which many businesses have put a lot of energy into encouraging), your business gains permission from that person to take some of their attention.  This is the most important aspect of any communication: that your recipient receives the message and is not bothered because they consider the message something that they want.  With Facebook Pages, this used to be a simple proposition: someone likes your Page, and then whenever you post an announcement or a promotion, Facebook becomes a communication channel and these customers happily see your updates mixed in with updates from their friends.  It is not an intrusion or junk, because they have specifically sought you out and engaged you first, and are interested in your marketing message.

That recently changed, when Facebook decided to close this communication channel most of the way and make you pay to open it again, which we at RunYourWebsite consider a bad decision for business, and a strong warning sign not to rely too much on Facebook or any other specific social platform for your marketing strategy.  While once you could reach all of your followers in an instant, now only a fraction will get your messages.  The specifics vary based on a number of factors, but for Pages with larger numbers of followers the estimate is 16% will see your message for free.  If you want to reach more than that, you have to pay Facebook.  Currently the cost is from $5 to $300 per post, but all of these specifics are completely up to Facebook, and are likely to change more over time.

We consider this change a bad deal for businesses of course, but also a bad deal for Facebook users.  When I clicked "Like" on Joe's Pizzeria, I did so with the understanding that Joe was going to post his specials, but also probably offer his core fans like me special offers and promotions from time to time, and I wanted these and was interested in these.  Now when he posts his next deal, I probably won't see it, and Facebook has closed that communications channel (unless Joe pays to reopen it), hurting Joe and hurting me.

So while we encourage our clients to continue to have a Facebook Page, and to continue to use Facebook among other communciation channels to reach your customers, we caution you not to become too dependent on any one service, and to make sure YOU are in charge of your web presence, something we always place importance on as our name RunYourWebsite implies.  We hope this message reaches you, but since we are posting it but not paying to promote it on Facebook, some of our clients who "Like" us, may never see it, and that hurts our business, our clients, and in the long run Facebook.

We have added some new themes to our system and removed many of our older themes.  In the process, we now have only HTML5 web designs to choose from.  Existing users using older HTML4 designs will still have their sites work normally, but moving forward can either keep their existing design how it is, or switch to one of our new themes.

The benefits of HTML5 are many, and it has become one of the recent trendy buzzwords that isn't always understood.  For our system, the key is it allows us to build consistent flexible website designs that work predictably across many different browsers and devices, and can take advantage of many more modern design effects directly in the html and css code without relying on as many static images.

Several of our newest themes add another exciting feature, which is responsive design.  These themes do not have just a regular version and a mobile version of the website, but instead adapt to whatever screen they are viewed on.  This is crucial for the future of the web, as people begin viewing your website on more and more different devices of different sizes.  Having a website that works great on a desktop, a laptop, an iPad, a Kindle Fire, an iPhone, a Blackberry, and Android, along with new things that come along is so important as your customers become more connected and expect to access information wherever they are and using whatever device they have on hand.

We have added automatic sharing links for LinkedIn and Google+ to our Blog page.  We will be adding deeper integration with these systems across our features in the coming weeks.

We have updated our File Manager to support drag and drop uploading, as well as a wide variety of minor improvements.  We are going to be phasing in another series of minor updates and new features over the next several weeks as we strive to make our control panels easier to use and more powerful.

We have added a feature to RunYourWebsite.com which allows you to have our system automatically generate a Sitemap for your website and update it any time you add or remove content.  A Sitemap is a specially formatted list of the pages on your website, designed to help search engines find their way around your site more easily and completely than just automatically following links.

Additionally, with one click you can submit your Sitemap to the major search engines and have your site showing up in searches even faster and with no extra work!

The feature is optional, so once your site is set up how you want it, you can just click to turn it on in the Search Engine Optimization control panel.

As always, we will be constantly working to refine and improve the feature, and we welcome any feedback or questions you have.

We have updated the layout of our control panel to use larger buttons and show the full text description only when you mouse over.

This change makes it much easier to get around your control panel quickly, as well as work on a smaller screen like a smartphone, tablet, or netbook.

Take a minute to familiarize yourself with the change. The organization of the control panels is unchanged, just the graphical presentation of each button.

With RunYourWebsite.com you now have a mobile version of your site automatically!

Smartphones and other mobile devices are becoming a more and more important way for people to access the internet, but with their smaller screens the best website design for a computer user is not always the best website design for a mobile user.

Many large professional websites have their design teams craft completely separate versions of their site designs for mobile users at great expense. You now have that same great feature automatically as part of your RunYourWebsite.com service. The best part is that you don't need to do anything at all to start using it.

Starting today, when a visitor comes to your site from an iPhone or other smartphone, our system will automatically detect it and show them a slightly modified version of your site that is friendlier to the small screen size, but is still based on your full sized website design. Every time you update your regular website design, the mobile design is updated instantly as well.

By default the visitor will see the mobile website when on a smartphone, and at the bottom of the page will have a link to view the standard version of the site instead. While this configuration is ideal for most users, we also have added a Mobile Website control panel where you can adjust your settings, and choose one of several different options.

Please let us know if you have any questions, and if you have a smartphone check out the new feature by visiting your website from your phone!

We have updated our Social Media control panel, allowing you to directly link your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and to post updates to them directly from your control panel.  We will be adding some more great features to take advantage of these tools over the next several weeks.

Inspired by Tom's Shoes program where for every pair of shoes purchased they give one pair to a child in need, today we are happy to announce our Sites For Good program.

For every normal user we have building their website with our RunYourWebsite.com system, we will be giving away a free website on our system to any individual or group trying to make their community or our world a better place.

These donated websites will be our full featured Professional package including all features and the same great dedicated support our paying users receive, and will include domain registration and annual renewal at our expense.

This is a program we have been running unofficially for some time, but it is now officially part of our business and is available for anyone.  We will be providing some more details on the guidelines and more in the coming days, but in the meantime anybody can sign up for a 30 day trial and let us know that they are interested in having their site provided by our Sites For Good program.

So if you know anyone who is working to make the world a better place and could use our great website builder service for FREE, let them know.  We are making this retroactive to count all of our current users, so we have website to give away immediately, and we will keep adding them as our regular user base grows.

RunYourWebsite.com is very pleased to announce a major control panel revision which we just launched.

New Organization

The control panel is now organized around the main things you will do rather than how you do them.  This means that in addition to our Design tab, we now have a Content tab and a Marketing tab.

Content Tab

The Content tab replaces both My Web Pages and the Cube Modules tab, and shows you all of your content in one place regardless of what kind of content it is.  You can add new content to your site here, either selecting one of our advanced modules (Blog, Store, etc.) or by creating a new editable page which you can now build in seconds with our Page Wizard templates rather than having to start from scratch each time.  Also, when editing a page manually, we have upgraded our editor significantly, and moved the toolbar to the top so you can see your page as it will look while editing.

Marketing Tab

The Marketing tab puts all of our existing marketing features like your Contact Manager and Website Reports together with some great new features, most noticeably our Newsletter feature.  This great new tool allows you to send out HTML email newsletters to people who subscribe on your site, and uses the new Email Stationary feature which automatically creates an email look based on your overall site design.  New marketing features are coming soon, including Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Autoresponders, and more!

Easier Than Ever

We hope the changes make managing a great website easier than ever, and allow you to stay in contact with your customers more than ever before!