Development Blog

DCI Beta available for testing by Resellers

Siteria.com — 2009-11-10T21:06:30-08:00

The design customization interface allows the site owner to change elements of the design like backgrounds, colors, fonts, ornaments, etc. The design customization interface does not require Siteria Pro and can be applied to the majority of our current designs. The color schemes and customization options may vary depending on the design being used, and its features.

If you would like to try the Design Customization Interface please contact us to configure your account. After we configure it, you can enable it for a specific package from Manage Packages > CSS Customization.

Once enabled, the design customization will be available from the Control Panel > Customize Design.

Note: As this feature is still in beta, we do not recommend enabling it on a package used by production sites.

We look forward for your feedback!

Design Customization Interface

Siteria.com — 2009-11-10T20:49:32-08:00

We are very excited to announce the official beta release of our Design Customization Interface(DCI). From client and reseller requests we have seen that there is need for a middle ground between the stock Siteria designs and the full control that Siteria Pro (Layout & Style Manager) allows. Something that would be quicker and easier to use than the Siteria Pro editors, won't require the $120 one-time license fee, and that can be made available to all regular site owners (non-designers).

We have been working on and will soon introduce a new interface which we have dubbed Design Customization Interface. The Design Customization Interface interface will overlay the admin view of an account and provide stock options for customizing different customization categories like the overall color palette, background color and image, site font family and much more.

For each customizable category, we are also allowing custom settings, so you can upload your own background image, set your own font, or define a custom color.

See below mock-ups for the interface of 2 categories � Color Palette and Site Background (showing both stock items and custom options) and a preview showing side-by-side a stock Chara design site, and one where the Background, Color Palette and Font Family have been changed with the Design Customization Interface.

Category Color Palette

Category Site Background (stock items)

Category Site Background (custom options)

Chara � original at left, customized (background, color palette, font family) at right

The changes from each category are previewed instantly with a click with no page reloads, allowing very quick review of different options and giving prompt visual feedback to the user or designer.

The interface will be made available in all recent Siteria stock designs: Sirius, Vega, Atria, AtriaX, Meissa, Chara, Kuma, Polaris, Pasta Arc, Pasta Oval. And also we are working on new designs created specifically with customization in mind, allowing extreme degree of control � more on this soon.

Behind the Scenes of the Upcoming New Galleries

Siteria.com — 2009-11-04T18:08:18-08:00

Are you already pushing the envelope of the current Siteria galleries? You need different layouts, rich effects and a variety of navigation options? Then fasten your seat-belts! The new Siteria 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.

Many new features in Manage Pages

Siteria.com — 2009-11-04T17:57:12-08:00

Siteria 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 Siteria 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 - Siteria 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.

New Designs collection Fall 2009

Siteria.com — 2009-11-04T17:15:29-08:00

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 Siteria subscribers.

Chara

Chara comes in 6 distinct color themes (Navy, Gray, Blue, Green and Red) and like all Siteria 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 Siteria design.
2. The design is also completely customizable with Siteria 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 Siteria Pro. Pasta Arc is available in 6 colors as well, Blue shown below.

Make your videos visible to everyone

Siteria.com — 2009-11-04T17:10:26-08:00

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 �

New Sign-Up and Change Design Interface

Siteria.com — 2009-11-04T17:03:21-08:00

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.

Improved Performance under Internet Explorer 6

Siteria.com — 2009-11-04T16:49:38-08:00

We just released a new version of Siteria 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.

The new Siteria editing user interface is live!

Siteria.com — 2009-11-04T16:46:24-08:00

We are very excited to share the news that Siteria's brand-new editing user interface is already live on Siteria.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 Siteria even better!