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.

At the risk of sounding corny, WebSketch is about the freedom of self-expression online. Most of us understand that the web is an amazing vehicle to communicate and express oneself. But the whole process of building HTML codes, hosting and deploying a website is still beyond the capability or patience of most people. Frankly, even for those of us geeks, coding and creativity do not go hand in hand. So we dreamed of a place where you can build beautiful sites, do it in minutes, do it without understanding a stitch of code, and in fact, do it without being aware of the technology. Many late nights and sleepless weekends, a lot of good coffee, and more than a few computers later, here we are Enjoy! (Scott Tse)

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)