We have a new blog - well, blogging software anyway. You may not notice it; it looks kind of like our old blog. But for geeks, that’s pretty exciting. Now we have all the features you would expect from a blogging platform. Specifically, anyone can comment now - plus other bells & whistles, such as adding image/video to the posts.

So….will our blog posts get better? Hey, miracles do happen - we will see But feel free to send us your thoughts.

Just last month, Google released their new open source web browser named Chrome. It has been recognized as having incredible speed performance, especially when using robust Web 2.0 apps like WebSketch. As a result, we have recently updated our application to support Chrome, and are happy to say it’s quite a speed improvement over other browsers, particularly when editing WebSketch sites. If you haven’t already, give WebSketch on Chrome a try.

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!

It’s a new week. We’re back with another site update. And we’re here to tell you about it. Who said that Mondays aren’t fun days? Wasn’t us!

Comments

It’s no secret that we believe in choice - your choice - so we made sure we added in a little bit of that when we did the new Comments object. “What kind of choice?” you ask. Well, maybe you want comments at the bottom of your page. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you want them on the left. Perhaps on the right. Middle anyone? Maybe you want to let only WebSketch users leave comments. Or maybe you want to let anyone leave comments. Of course they have to fit in with the rest of your page design so they probably should automatically adjust to the choices you make for your page text - things like the font, size, and color. Then again, maybe we should just let you pick the font, size, and color yourself. Oh, and maybe you like dividers between comments - Maybe you don’t. Or maybe you like them so long as they go well with the color of other stuff on your page which means you get to pick the color! Well, you get all that choice and more with the new Comments object. So have at it, and have some fun with it.

Speaking of text..

We realized that we sort of left font size out of the text section in the page properties. And that means that when you wanted to use something other than the default font size, you had to, you know, change it on every text object on your page. Can you say “Whoops!”? We can. We did. We fixed it. You can now set the default text size in the page properties.

Ask and ye shall receive!

Some of you asked us for colored dividers. We thought that was a pretty cool idea. So we added that in this week too - with a twist! We’re not saying what twist. We’re going to let you find that one all by yourself. And when you do, you’ll probably think it’s pretty cool.

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!

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!

We just added one of the most user-friendly integration with Flickr photos. It allows users to 1) search and find photos from the asset bin, and 2) add them via a simple drag-and-drop motion. Click on the “Photo” tab in your asset bin area of the Editor. If you have pictures stored on other sites, don’t despair. We will add Picasa and (maybe) Photobucket soon.

Hint: If you are like me, you may have hundreds of photos stored in your Flickr account. Use tags to group your pics. Our tag search function allows you to narrow down your set of photos very fast.

Enjoy!

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.

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.