New and updated features

Work is continuing at a feverish pace on updating doomby's free website maker to bring you a refreshed, revitalized and reworked manager for your website builder ASAP (that'd be next week, providing the coffee keeps flowing). As I mentioned last time, our website builder tools are currently getting a major overhaul to make your website management even easier than before. Today's tour of doomby's new and improved free website builder tools explores the website manager homepage and it's enhanced management and site monitoring feature set: the dashboard.

As I mentioned yesterday, the doomby site manager is undergoing a pretty radical facelift at the moment, in order help you make a website easier than ever before. We also thought it was about time we brought the visual design of your site management and web page builder tools into line with the public doomby website design. Today, we'll take the first of our tours behind the scenes of your updated free website maker tools, to help you familiarize yourself with the new site layout.

First up: site navigation. As you can see from the screenshot below, your new website manager is radically different (visually) from the current interface. Yet once you've familiarized yourself with the main changes to the menu layout, you'll soon feel right at home.

I really have to hand it to Apple, and not just because they have mastered the art of simple and effective website design. Lately, their very excellent marketing team has given me a good run with the word “magical”. I don't think a single day has gone by in the last month that I haven't been reminded of just how “magical” the ordinary can be.

Bus is on time? Magical. Shirt doesn't need ironing? Magical. Hair that's stopped growing? Magical. Water from a tap, toilets that flush, shoe laces that tie … magical, magical, magical.

Yes, just like certain advertising execs, I too have a slight tendency to exaggerate things at times (and to overuse already-overused words ...), but I promise you that what follows is no exaggeration: your favorite free website maker is about to undergo a transformation that really is magical*, and will completely change the way you make a website.

It's been a few weeks since we released the new doomby video gallery, making it even easier to make a website that rocks, complete with your choice of video content. But if you were thinking it just couldn't possibly get any simpler to publish your video content with your favorite free website builder, you're in for a big surprise. Yes, we've got some great news for those of you who aren't fans of YouTube, or are looking to extend their search for jedi cats beyond Google's immediate sphere of influence. You can now import videos and expand your video gallery with content from Dailymotion as well. And if that isn't enough, we've also added a few extras and tweaked some existing elements to make what was already amazing … truly magical.

In spite of the pretty major hurdle represented by a missing API (apparently it's important), Sid* has came up trumps yet again. The resulting technical triumph means you can now search for and import Dailymotion videos to add to your website, without leaving your site manager.

It's rare these days that you come across free things online that are genuinely useful. I mean, sure, there's free stuff that's also neat, handy or interesting (like jedi cats). But little of what you'll find online manages to combine usefulness and gratuity, without you running the risk of ending up with a hefty fine, jailed, or both. Unsatisfied with that sad status quo, today's Earth-shattering doomby annoucement is our response. Today, we're giving you something for nothing that will actually make you money, won't see you in jail¹, and is super-useful². Ever since our e-commerce solution came out (you know, the thing you can add to doomby's free website builder to make an e-commerce website that rocks), we've been all like "ohhh" and "awww" (but you hadn't noticed, right?), because we've been really pleased with what we developed. Well, we like it so much that we wanted to share it with everyone. Free. Yes, now everyone can create a website and make an

online store, and rest soundly knowing it won't cost a dime.

Call us crazy, but we were partly inspired by the vertiginous drop in the euro, figuring if we didn't make it free, the new peso of the north would soon be at a level where – for the price – we'd practically be giving it away anyway. So that's just what we decided to do.

I've been thinking a lot about Jedi cats since last week, and about how I'd been living with a master of the Force for all these years without my even noticing it (though, with hindsight, his name – Yoda – was a fairly obvious clue). With just a stare, he can stop anyone dead in their tracks, forcing them - against their will - to drop everything and rub his belly. Like his namesake, he is truly a Jedi master.

Disappointing to me though it may be, not everyone seems to share my passion for feline mysticism. Nicolas is one such individual, and rather than spending his time pondering the levels of midichlorians in the blood of domestic pets, he's actually been doing something useful this past week, and has preferred spending his time thinking about online store stock management.

Imagine it: your online store looks great, you've set up your killer products with unbeatable pricing to leave the competition in your wake. You've spent hours taking multiple images of each and every item against a white sheet you hung up on your living room wall, so your customers can get a good look at them from every possible angle. You've painstakingly adjusted every single aspect of your product page design to fit perfectly with your website design, and have now built the world's most amazing (dare I say, magical) online store; not only have you learnt how to make a website that rocks, but you now have an equally brillant e-commerce website.

You are an overnight e-commerce success story.

Until you run out of stock, that is.

The internet is truly remarkable. Just think about it: 99% of what you'll find online serves no practical purpose at all. Yet that's the stuff most people spend their time watching - a lot like TV. If you want to make a website an overnight success, forget about adding free forums or wondering how to make a blog and build a following; it'll take way more than a couple of hours to build a sizable audience.

Got a great idea for how to make an online store a roaring success? Well, sorry, but that isn't going to get you millions of hits before sunrise. And no, if you're out to break a world record for building a massive following for your free website in as little time as possible, you don't have to take your clothes off, nor anyone else's for that matter.

To make your own website a true internet super phenomenon, you just need one thing: Jedi cats.

It's been a busy week here at doomby, and not only for our awesome website development team, fantastic support staff and brilliant managers. Even Starey the cat has been out and about, celebrating the end of a long winter (though it may actually have been fear of the great Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, or the substantial volume of fresh neighborhood roadkill, that did it).

Most of the productive buzz emanating from the far side of our offices these last few days has centered on the latest updates to our e-commerce website solution. The focus of these updates has been on improving the online store experience for your e-commerce clients, and on facilitating store management and layout to better leverage sales opportunities. As always, the goal of these latest additions is to provide new ways to create a website to really maximize revenue growth and opportunities.

Given the rapid pace of my colleague's recent programming exploits improving our free website builder, you could be forgiven for thinking he was either:

1. junked up on caffeine (or worse), or
2. a truly conscientious workaholic.

Although he does drink more coffee than I do, I couldn't reasonably describe his consumption as excessive. And as I'm not convinced he's the type who'd take illicit drugs (nor have I really taken the time to examine his pupils lately, what with being busy and all), I'll go for the second option (maybe he wants a raise – a car that old must cost a fortune to repair).

In any case, he's been feverishly working on fleshing out improvements to our e-commerce website tools and online store website manager, and it's really starting to bear fruit: yes, it's now even easier than ever to make a website with doomby. We really like what he's done - in fact, I'm even tempted to make a business website and build my very own little online shopping mall. Well, almost – it's a little hard, since I really haven't got a clue, and have nothing to sell*, save for a billion or so cottony hydrangea scale and about as many cat hairs (wanna buy some, cheap?).

As I mentioned at the end of last week, our development team has been feverishly working away on additions and overhauls to doomby.com and our free website builder tools. In last Friday's post, I detailed doomby's latest social networking additions (or social bookmarking, if you prefer), enabling you to create a website with easily sharable content through Facebook and Twitter integration.

This week we'll have a quick look at the latest improvements to our e-commerce website module, designed to help you make an online store that looks just the way you want it to, with a stack of new web design tools to provide greater control over the look and feel of your store's product presentation.

Our new online store website design editor is all about enabling you to make a business website that looks even better, by editing your store's CSS without needing to have the slightest idea of what CSS is, and giving your store a easy makeover you can be proud of (and that will keep your customers coming back for more!).

For those of you who actually do have an in-depth understanding of CSS, you can edit your store's CSS code directly - just as you can with your website design CSS - to achieve the same effect (and feel a whole lot cleverer).