We have been putting our heads down, and working hard to push out the next release (soon!). Then we noticed a surge in traffic and users from the Czech Republic. We haven’t done any marketing over there, of course. In fact, we haven’t done much in terms of marketing, period. So it’s quite interesting to see.

Apparently, we got coverage from one of the Czech blogs, and the rest is history. The article is all in Czech, but we got the gist of it thanks to Google’s translator. It goes to show the power of the blogosphere, and how far-reaching Internet apps can be.

So to our Czech friends, and especially the author of the blog: Welcome and thank you.  If there’s enough interests like this, we may just have to put a mirrored site in Europe to facilitate your access.  But that’s a later story…

Sometimes the best way to show off what your product can really do is through video. With that in mind, we are producing a series of videos to help showcase our service. Here’s our first one, which we think will show you just how easy it is to create a stunning looking site in a matter of minutes.

We had an opportunity to showcase our service at the TechCrunch50 Conference in San Francisco last week. Along with that, we had a show-only drawing for a brand new Apple iPod touch. We are happy to announce that the winner of the iPod touch drawing is Ben Choi. A hearty thanks goes to everyone who participated.

Comments Plus

Comments just got a whole lot more fun because when someone leaves a comment on one of your sites, we now let you know! New email notifications let you know as soon as someone comments on one of your site. And when you log in you can see all the new comments since your last login, or in the last day, week, or month even. You can even see comments you’ve left on other people’s sites in case you want to keep an eye on the ones you’ve commented on. We also figured out that dates are pretty much useless for communicating how recent a comment is, so we ditched the date and replaced it with when a comment was left. So now you’ll see comments as being left “25 minutes ago”, “2 days ago”, “1 week ago”, etc.

Featured Sites

You told us that seeing featured sites on the home page is cool but that you wanted to see them when you logged in too. That made sense to us, so we did it. Of course we don’t want to make you see them if you don’t want to, so you can hide or show them whenever you feel like it.

New Page Properties

Now you can set the link color, underline style, hover color, and hover underline style so your links will stand out and look great! We also picked a new default line height that works better for a wider variety of Web content. But don’t worry, if what you really want is to be able to change it yourself, now you can.

That’s it for this post. As usual, we’re already busy working on more cool stuff, so check back again for more updates from the team!

A bit redundant info, since it’s already in your Home page news. But the new Friends section has just been added. It’s not yet full-featured, but it will allow you to begin building your own community. Check it out.

Welcome to WebSketch.com beta. Thank you for being part of our community. We are all very proud of what we have built, but, alas, no one is perfect. Please be patient as we go through our beta phase. Your feedback, comments, insights, observations, suggestions, or even the occasional kudos would be very helpful to us and would be very much appreciated. Feel free to send us your feedback and suggestions 24/7. (Scott Tse)