New and updated features

It's pretty clear that spring has arrived with a bang – not only have temperatures skyrocketed (much to my cats' delight), but after last week's emyspot website makeover, our hyperactive team this week got stuck into developing some really great additions to our members' website builder tools. The team's efforts weren't limited to subscribers to our pro website development offers – if you're one of our members who enjoy the opportunity to make a free website with doomby, you haven't been left out either, and can already take advantage of the latest additions to your favorite free website builder.

This week's development efforts have concentrated on how to make a website better through social networking integration. Though we've long provided an access to social bookmarking services for your website content directly from the site manager, allowing you to publish your page links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, this week we added a few menu gadgets to let your site visitors do the sharing for you. Though simple to set up, they really help improve your SERP ranking – or web presence – exponentially. All without you lifting a finger (almost).

I'm sure our millions of avid readers would have noticed my absence last week, and have probably been suffering in agony ever since. Sorry for that. But there was a very, very good reason, and as I am now back, you can all breathe a collective sigh of relief (and take down that Facebook vigil). For those of you who've dropped by your favorite free website builder in the last few days, you'll probably already have figured out why – for those who haven't, you soon will.

In any case, you'll probably all agree that after four months it was time for doomby to get a little dressed-up (inspired, no doubt, by this image from a few weeks back, to aim for bigger and better things) - both to encourage you to strive for webmastering excellence, and to create a website that rocks. So kudos to Pascal and Florian for some really fantastic work on getting the site up and looking great (I knew they had pretty genes in there somewhere ...).

As I said last week, the guys over at the computers with the big screens (a.k.a. the developers) have been busy lately - especially Nicolas - and the second big thing they've been feverishly working on is now online.

Yes, doomby's e-commerce website solution is finally here, so now you can not only make your own website with your favorite website builder, you can also use it to sell stuff too with your very own online store.

Neat, eh?

I was lazy last week. Really lazy. I didn't even get around to posting "Happy New Year" to the blog or our Facebook page during Thursday night's champagne-athon (though I meant to), a terrible faux pas for which I will now most humbly apologize.

"I'm really rather quite sorry. Seriously."

To be honest, last week was a whole week of nothingness for me: I didn't make a website, I didn't post to a blog, I barely skimmed Facebook, and I spent most of the week sitting around watching my cat (she was sick).

Fortunately for you, everyone else here at doomby was actually busy doing very important things last week (unlike me), and that means a whole bunch of stuff has, or is about to, change with your favorite free website builder. Today we'll focus on one of the things they were busy working on: menus (you know, those über-important navigational aids for helping others visit your website).

Noticed anything red, green and/or sparkly around town lately? It's that time of the year again - decorations are out in force, and so are the crowds. Folks are learning how to make a website decorated with animated snowflakes ... even I've succumbed to the spirit of the season and started menu planning for the family do (I'm doing vegetables, because I'm lazy). Ah, the holiday season: that special time of the year when family members try to let bygones be bygones, and retailers try to make their reserves for the year ahead. A little like squirrels (I saw one this morning while Dearie-spotting, and just had to mention it), but taller, and with more clothes and less fur.

In the spirit of giving, this year we're getting ready to bring you a very special gift that we know you're going to love. I mentioned it last week, and thought I might devote a little time to outlining some of the features our e-commerce add-on will soon provide to happy online store owners the world over.

Crafted painstakingly by our talented developer Nicolas, the administration interface is really taking form and will be heading off for select beta-testing in the next couple of weeks. He's not one to brag, so let me do it for him: it's shaping up to be an infinitely adaptable, feature-packed, scalable solution for businesses large and small.

Parents can be such a disappointment. Here I was, convinced my mother would become a key part of our marketing strategy: living proof that doomby makes it easy to make a website. “Don't believe me?” I'd say. “It's so easy, even my mother can make a website with doomby!”. I'm sure I even used that as the central pitch of my job interview, and is very probably the reason why I got hired: “buy one, get one free!”.  Several months later, I even went so far as to ask her if that was OK, and decided that I would respect her wishes (unless she said no).

Then she had to go and ruin everything by having “technical problems”.

She often does, so it shouldn't have surprised me. Like sometimes, she can't quite figure out how to switch things on. It was power sockets the last time I dropped by for a visit - that should have set the alarm bells off but no, I had to persist. “Growing pains,” I thought. “She'll learn”. When I got the phone call last week - “I went on the website, but I couldn't see where you wrote anything about me” - it started becoming all too clear. My mother was either consciously rebelling (a family trait, so highly likely) or slightly … technically challenged.

Either way, it was just so disappointing. I mean, you try to get them off to a good start by giving them the best years of your life, then this is how they treat you …

For our Facebook fans, you'll be pleasantly surprised to know that you didn't have to wait “a few days” for an update: it's already here, and the waiting is over!

We've had a big week at doomby. Lots of new things have been going on, including the addition of some much-requested features to help you make a website even more quickly and easily.

Here's some of the more interesting new features we've added to the doomby free website builder: