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.
Over the past two months we’ve improved WebSketch at a blistering pace. Last week was no exception. We updated the home page to better show you WebSketch, released support for making and editing sites in Internet Explorer 7, and made some improvements to the new look we rolled out just a couple of weeks ago..
New Home Page
It sort of hit us in last week’s staff meeting that our home page hadn’t kept up with all the new stuff we’ve added recently. Then came an idea… Let’s throw it out, work up some new graphics, put the drag & drop
Flickr & YouTube stuff front and center (because they’re sweet), add in some live samples of sites our users have made, and do all-new Learn More pages that show people some of the cool stuff in WebSketch. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s design, build, and serve up the new Learn More pages FOR WebSketch USING WebSketch. Then we thought - “Oh yeah.. great idea!” Well, as it turns out it wasn’t such a bad idea after all because we did it, they look pretty good, and it even freed up one of our UI guys so he could work on more cool stuff! WebSketch made with WebSketch. Has a nice ring to it doesn’t it? 
Internet Explorer 7
No matter how you slice it, FireFox and Safari are hands-down better at running robust Web 2.0 applications than Internet Explorer 7 is. (Think day vs.night) Even so, we know there are IE 7 users who want to use WebSketch and either don’t want to, or can’t switch to FireFox or Safari. We took the heat and held back IE 7 support until until we could deliver an acceptable user experience. We think we reached that point so last week we released it. IE 7 users rejoice! You can now make and edit sites on WebSketch too.
And More..
Some times little things make all the difference in the world. It’s called polish. And we added some to WebSketch this week. So if you notice some minor changes here and there, rest assured, you are not losing your mind. It’s just us polishing things up to make them easier for you. Things like making it easier to know when you can add or edit a site title or description, calling out the privacy options for your sites on the sites page rather than hiding them behind a menu, adding a third row of thumbnails on the Sites page to make better use of screen real estate, and rearranging and changing some menu items when editing sites to be more like most people expect them to be. Stuff like that. You know - Polish.
That’s it for this post. As usual, there’s more good stuff coming so check back again for more updates from the team!
Why is this so exciting?
A transparent content area allows the entire background to come through. So if you have a large picture, that picture stays in the background, and everything else in the content areas scrolls pass it. Your page appears to “float” on top of the image. Play with it.
A small change technically that will have dramatic impacts at the design level. We implemented the ability to upload images to the content area as background. You can load a large pic or a small pic and tile it. This should provide some amazing design possibilities for our users. Check out this: http://www.websketch.com/gallery/scott/419091213063630593. To access this function, hit “Page Properties” at your design editor level.