I'll confess that my southern-hemisphere roots often leave me feeling a little perplexed around Christmas time. The December cold and the lack of sunshine of my adopted northern-hemisphere home have little to do with my own memories of Christmas, which for me means BBQs, cold cuts and air conditioning. These days, figuring out just how best to celebrate the holiday season is still somewhat a work in progress.

This year, my colleagues and I here at doomby - the home of your very own free website builder – have compromised by deciding to celebrate Christmas a little early. As October isn't the right time for secret Santa in the workplace, we thought we'd give you the gifts instead, to help ensure you make a website that's just right for you.

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:

Over the last few weeks, we've taken a look at getting started with improving your site's search engine ranking. Obtaining a good position in search engine result pages is a vital part of ensuring your website is a success; doing so will significantly increase the number of new visitors your site attracts, and help position you as an authority in your field, thus greatly enhancing your ability to communicate effectively with your audience.

If you've decided to make a free website to share a few holiday snaps with family and friends, then you needn't worry too much about search engines – your audience is sufficiently limited that you can simply email your site details to those that are likely to be interested.

On the other hand, if your potential audience extends beyond those in your immediate circle, then you need to think about building links to ensure your site gets noticed in search results, whether you've chosen to use a free website builder or invested in an on-site website development team for your company. This is especially true is you are looking to develop a widely successful website or online business.

As friends, family, neighbors and the very astute will have already gathered, over the last couple of weeks the doomby team has bid a fond farewell to Starey and friends, and a big hello to our big new offices. Though the move has meant a hectic couple of weeks around the office, we’ve still found the time to come up with some great new features and free website builder tools to make your website development experience easier and better than ever.

Best of all, the entire doomby member community can take advantage of these new and improved tools - whether you’ve chosen to make a free website or to make a pro website or online store, you’ll now get more out of your favorite free website maker.

Last week, we took a quick look at backlinks and how pertinence and relevancy were central to the way search engine algorithms analyze and rank pages for keywords. When you make a website, it's vital to ensure your pages can be understood by search engines and ranked correctly, to ensure the site is “visible” on the web.

We'll take a look at how you can use the website builder tools integrated into doomby's free website maker to optimize your pages automatically a little later on, but today we'll be focusing on backlinks, and the way they are used by search engines to rank pages.

As we saw last time, one of the first things to do when you make a website is to ensure that search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, know your site exists. Although search engines routinely scour the Internet to update their databases with new sites and pages, this process isn't instantaneous: the fact that you have chosen to make a free website (or to make a pro website for that matter) doesn't mean you'll instantly appear in search engine results once it's online. And it won't make a difference whether you use a free website maker or have invested huge sums of money in expensive website builder software and hosting – search engines will include your website in their results pages when they're good and ready.

Though submitting you website and its sitemap* to search engines is one part of ensuring your site gets listed as quickly as possible, being listed is only the first step on the road to search engine success: it's one thing to figure in Google's database, and quite another to get to the number one spot, on the very first page. One of the ways to get there is to build backlinks.

We've often discussed the importance of SEO techniques when you make a website. We've seen, for example, how you can use the website builder tools that are part of doomby's free website maker to help optimize your website for search engine results. Today, we're going to get back to basics and answer some of the questions beginner webmasters often ask.

This is the first in a series of articles on SEO and search engine basics, and is the perfect starting point for those who've just begun to create a website, and are wondering how search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu go about deciding what to list, and where to list it. The aim of the these articles is less about how to make a website, and more about how to get your website found on the web.

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?

I'm kinda old, so by now I've been on the internet for a while (yes, mother, believe it or not it was around before 2005). But even so, like most people, sometimes I still get a little lost in cyberspace. You probably do too – I mean, how many times have you wandered around a website only to find yourself at the end of a now-broken link, or made a typo when entering that page URL? If only I had a dollar for every time I'd come across the infamous 404 error page … It's almost unavoidable – no matter how conscientious you are when you make a website, or how fantastic and versatile your favorite free website maker is, inevitably someone, someday is going to try to access something on your website that just doesn't exist.

Thankfully, you don't have to let their experience be a painful one. It's easy to personalize your 404 error page using the free website builder tools included with your doomby website – just head to the page manager menu of your site manager, and away you go. And if you're looking for a way to turn simple navigational mistakes – or worse, broken links – into pleasant, positive experiences for your visitors, check out the following examples for a little creative inspiration.

One of the neat things about working behind the scenes at doomby is getting to chat with our members. Whilst it's always great to connect with someone new, it's also – dare I say it – fun to find out something new every day about what drives our webmasters, about how to make a website, or just to discover new website builder tools.

We often get asked for advice on how to edit a photo, make an online form or the best website to make a favicon. And not a day goes by that we don't give tips on how to find webmaster tools or other free webmaster resources.

Here are a some of our favorites: