Column Controls Moved

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.

Control Panel Favorites

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.

Store Updates

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!

Our new name: RunYourWebsite.com

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!

Photo Gallery Upgrade

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.

Blog Improvements: CAPTCHA and more.

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!