News

It's been another busy week here at doomby, with new luxury lodgings for the support team (lucky guys!) and a new team member, Benjamin (aka Ben #2), joining us. Amidst all the excitement, we've still found time to come up with some fantastic new additions to one of our beginner webmasters' all-time favorite add-ons: the Photo Album.

Some of the feature additions to the album were directly inspired by your feedback – we liked your ideas so much, we just had to make them a reality!

Amazing? Yes, we very probably are. But we don't like to brag too much, so here's a quick overview of what's new with your favorite free website builder:

Website development can be a whole lot of fun, but does your website management ever get you down? Do you find yourself spending a lot less time these days doing useful stuff with your free website maker than you do cleaning up the messy leftovers of serial spammers? Like most of us, lately you've probably found out a whole lot more about Viagra, online pharmacies, fake watches, handbags and shoes than you'd really care to know. Not that these aren't potentially fascinating topics, it's just that you've probably got more important things to do with your time, like staring at navel lint, doing laundry or checking out the neighborhood wildlife. If it makes you feel a little better, you should know that you're not alone in your suffering: estimates are that around 80% of all emails sent worldwide are spam, and dealing with them has become a multi-billion dollar business.

Wouldn't it be great if you could manage the spam that starts seeping in when you create a website or make an online shop, via comments posted on your forum or blog, your online store or in web page comments? And wouldn't it be even better if you didn't have to do anything at all to manage spam, and if your website just took care of it all for you?

Monday was a pretty big day at the office. First there were the usual "how was your weekend" and a whole lot of "what, you still don't have an iPhone 4?" to get through. After that, there was the new free website maker (your site manager) to get out the door, or rather up and online. It took the better part of the day (it was heavy) but we finally sent it on it's way, and the consensus at the office is unanimous: we like it ... which isn't that surprising.

However, if the feedback we've received over the last couple of days is anything to go by, apparently so do you, our member community of beginner webmasters and experienced web designers alike. Well, we're just tickled pink to hear it, and we're all feeling pretty chuffed.

In this, the third installment of our series exploring the updated doomby site manager, we'll be checking out one of the central pillars of our website builder: the redesigned free website development tools. The changes we've been making have been motivated in large part by a desire to make it easier than ever to make a website. As a result, we've spent a lot of time reworking the general manager layout and the individual menus to ensure you spend less time looking for things and more time getting on with the business of website creation.

How do we know you're going to find it easier to use doomby's website builder? Because these are changes you've suggested!

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'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 ...).