Edicy blog

100,000th page created with Edicy!

kajar@edicy.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So we made it. As of today 100,000 websites have been created with Edicy. To accommodate the fact we had to add a digit to the counter on our front page - and in the process also ended up giving it a facelift. We decided to give the 100 000th user, our very own Märt Kelder a gift - a voucher for Edicy Pro for a whole year. We can't confirm this, but it might be the first time when the words: "Congratulations! You are the 100,000... user of our site! You have won..." actually are not a false promise.

We want to thank all our other users as well. Many of you have been extraordinarily helpful - giving feedback and suggesting features that would make Edicy even better. Thank you for sticking with us! We are especially grateful to our Pro users that have worked through the start-up-y phase of our development.

It took us a year and a couple of month since launching in July 08 to reach this milestone. And of course we are aware that there is still a steep mountain to climb to reach our goal. There are quite a few very exciting improvements to Edicy in the pipeline and we hope to bring you news of them soon. This week we released three new designs, several bug fixes, a new home page and this is only the start.

The next celebration is going to be 1,000,000.

Looking for first-to-see eyes

priit@fraktal.ee — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:27:38 +0000

Edicy is about to reveal it's next improvement and we're looking for some volunteers who would like to test the whole thing first from end-user point of view. Since this time our new feature does great amount of user interaction, we find it very important to test the current prototype thoroughly.

Here's what you need to do. If you're willing to spend around 30 minutes to play around with the new toy, send us an e-mail to support@edicy.com and we will respond with the further instructions. No obligations, just fun and games.

This time we need around 15 people so hurry up if you want to see the latest and greatest of Edicy.

We've moved servers

kajar@edicy.com — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend in an heroic working spree our developers moved all of Edicy's content into new servers. If you have an Edicy site go ahead and get yourself (or us, we won't mind) a little housewarming gift - you've moved without even knowing about it.

The only way this really affects you is if the domain that you have connected to your Edicy site is bought from another service provider (GoDaddy.com etc). In that case it's probably forwarded domain to our old ip. You should forward it to our new one (82.129.24.69). The old address will still work for a couple of months and we'll be in touch to remind you personally as well.

Why we did it?

The reason we moved was that we wanted to offer a more secure, fast and reliable experience for creating websites. Our data is now with HaVirtual, the guys that, among other things, built up the server infrastructure behind the little known tech start-up Skype. We feel that we are not experts in data hosting ourselves, but the service they are offering will benefit all of our users. If you're interested in the technical details of how they do their thing, check out this presentation.

For the users of your sites all this should mean that the sites will never (knock on wood) be down for any significant amount of time and they will be faster to use for your visitors.

Edicy won the grand prix at Estonian Internet Awards!

tonu@fraktal.ee — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Great news to all Edicy users -- we received the grand prix at Estonian Internet Awards competition! Why would you care? Because it states, loud and clear, that Edicy is the right tool to build websites with. Revolutionary, super simple and sporting a special coolness factor.

But still, Estonia -- who cares? it's the country Skype's from, raising the bar for other new digital tools pretty high. We felt it ourselves today, as the competition wasn’t an easy one. The harder the prize came, the more pleased and happy we are.

Please send us suggestions of competitions and events where Edicy should participate in your country. We want to get more of your fellow countrymen to know about us. Estonia is just one of the first steps as you can guess

How to get feedback from your users by using Edicy forms

kajar@edicy.com — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Edicy has had forms as one of our improvements for a long while, but so far there hasn't been a post telling you about all of their wonderful features. Well, this time is finally over, you can find out how to get the most out of your forms right here.

Basically you can add a form field to any content page (we're working on a way to also enable you to add them to blogposts). You need to hover with you mouse over the bottom of the text area on the page and a toolbar will appear, which lets you add either another text area, a gallery or a form field to the page.

Once you've added a form field click on it and a form toolbar will appear. From there you can create any kind of form you need by adding different form fields: text areas, check boxes or mandatory selections between choices (radio buttons for shorter, a drop-down menu for longer lists), e-mail or file fields. There is no limit in how many form fields one form can have.

If you messed something up and need to delete or move a part of the form, hover your mouse over the top left corner of that field and a menu will appear with an icon with arrows for moving the part of the form around or a trash can for deleting it.

To access the info in your forms you don't need to log into your Edicy site. If you click on the settings button on the form toolbar (top right) you will see that the replies to the form (we call them tickets) can also be forwarded to your e-mail. Also, if you got to 'Site' full view and select 'See all tickets' you can export all the results in a CSV format and do whatever complicated number-crunching you have in mind.

So whatever interactivity you need for your users -- a feedback form, a poll or a full-fledged survey, Edicy has got you covered. If you have any ideas how we could make our forms better, let us know in the comments.

How to squeeze most out of the designs, pt. 2

tajo@fraktal.ee — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about choosing the right design and filling it up with good content. This time I will give you a few tips on how to customize your design with code.

Take a dip in the HTML

Let's say you love a certain design but would like to change a headline colour or change the background image. Making these small adjustments is easy, just look under the hood - switch to the design customize mode from Design full view ("Site" → "Site settings" → "Design"). There is "Customize current design" button on the right. Clicking this will open all the nuts and bolts behind an Edicy design for you to tinker around. You can now change the images (via familiar media organizer), layout and text colours (via editing the CSS). Sounds scary? Don't worry, our design team is most happy to help you with simple customizations at very reasonable prices.

Code your own

There are times, when standard design is simply not enough - maybe you want an 6 column layout for a local newspaper or a something unique for your best friends wedding. Getting a design run on Edicy is amazingly simple: even I, armed only with basic knowledge of HTML and our handy Edicy Developer Docs, managed to do it in half an hour. And with the new Designer Toolkit for both PC and Mac, you can craft gorgeous designs even faster.

Want to see what some of our users have created with either customizing Edicy designs or building their own? Our ever growing gallery of some of our users' sites will surely inspire you.

Give feedback

We are currently working on many new improvements which allow you to change and adjust the designs on the fly and on page without the need to code at all. Have some ideas on that? Desperately in need of that one single feature that could make your life oh-so-much-more-easier? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Leave IE6 alone!

priit@fraktal.ee — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

One of the more popular bandwagons rolling around the net these days is "Kill Internet Explorer 6". It started with some cool tech companies like Digg and Youtube announcing that they will drop IE6 support. Now everybody and their mother is trying to climb aboard. Well, count us out. Here are few reasons, why we won't be begging our users to switch from IE6.

Whining about browser incompatibility is not a very professional thing to do

A few weeks ago I tweeted this. I cannot see a valid point in all the hoopla around browser incompatibility issues. If you're whining about it, it means that there are things for you to learn. Now, this doesn't mean that I'm a fan of Internet Explorer but when you get your site to work on it, it just feels right. And for us IE6 isn't even the worst. It may be a surprise but we have most issues with Opera (Don't worry, I have spoken to both Opera users and they said it's fine for them to use Firefox sometimes... Just kidding :).

It's not our job to tell the customers which browser to use

Users come to your website to complete their own tasks and not complete your mission to kick some browser's butt. If you want them to upgrade a browser before they can move on, you're doing it wrong. Just keep in mind all the trouble user must go through when upgrading IE. We want Edicy to work for all people, no matter what their computer literacy is - so why would we want to make them install and uninstall programs?

Some of the people don't have an alternative

Much has been made of a Digg survey that showed, that a great majority of IE6 users can't switch because it's mandated by their IT departments (frankly if I owned a company, people not being able to use Digg and YouTube during work hours would be a pretty good argument against upgrading too. More here).

But also, let's talk about countries. Edicy has been quite popular in China. And 65% of our Chinese users are using IE6. In general we see that IE6 is more popular in economically less well-off countries. So we've decided we don't want to block the next billion internet users coming from the part of the world that will lead civilization for the foreseeable future.

A website does not have to look the same in every browser.

And here's the proof. It's OK to have sites look worse in IE because I believe that people who use it don't care about the looks of your website anyway -- otherwise they would have migrated years ago. So if you want to create stunning effects with just a couple of lines of CSS, do it in other browsers and spend the time you save from work with your family. Create a version that works best with browser features that are available for free. Do not waste time replicating pixel-accurate version that image you got from web designer.

If you try, you can make it work

Here are some ideas for web developers to follow:

Know the basics about how browsers work, how they lay out elements. This makes you almost good to go.
Learn the history of web browsers to understand why things are the way they are. If you don't know where to start, watch some Douglas Crockford talks and you'll be enlightened.
Make yourself familiar with capabilities of CSS rendering in different browsers. If you know these "little differences", you'll be able to make use of the common part very professionally.
Use a Javascript library that will abstract out the differences of event management and DOM manipulation in browsers.

More coverage on the topic: Mashable, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb

How to squeeze most out of the designs, pt 1

tajo@fraktal.ee — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When we started working on Edicy we wanted it to be the simplest and most beautiful way to create a website. You don't have to be a code or design guru to have an exceptional online presence for yourself or your business. Although our designs usually look great with any content right out of the box, there are a few ways to make your site really shine. Here's how.

Choose the right design

Own a small bakery? In charge of a large non-governmental organization with hundreds of members? Edicy has got you covered - a growing number of fresh and unique designs cater to all kinds of different needs. Take a few minutes to browse through our selection and find the right one for you.

Keep in mind that different content works best with different designs - a big corporate website might need a different approach than a photo-rich personal blog. Feel free to experiment, switch designs and find the suitable one. Want some inspiration? See what other Edicy users have created.

Have great content

A good design is nothing without some quality content. Take pride in your writing and try to fill your page with relevant content - texts, news, photos, maps and other widgets. All visitors love a frequently updated website with plenty of information so go that extra mile and provide more than just the bare necessities. Don't worry, nobody expects you to create a 2000-page website. But a small map with the location of your business would be nice and thoughtful.

Use photos

You might remember from your childhood that books with pictures were always more fascinating than books without them. Same goes for internet - people prefer illustration-rich sites to dull, texty ones. So whip out your digital camera and take a few shots out there to give your Edicy page some personal touch and flare.

Don't have any good photos or not confident in your shooting skills? The web is full of high-quality royalty free photos and illustrations of virtually everything. And I'm not talking about Google Images - virtually all of the images found there are copyrighted by their owners. As an great alternative, search from Flickr photos licensed for commercial work. Browse through some awesome submissions from people all over the world, make sure you credit them on your website and squeeze yet more oomph out of your Edicy design template.

In the next part: I'll show you how to take the extra step further and customize existing Edicy's stock designs. I'll also give tips how to build your own design. In the meanwhile, try the steps above and show your results in the comments!

Edicy designer toolkit has been released

priit@fraktal.ee — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:00:54 +0000

Edicy designer toolkit is a simple application that helps you with creating a custom design for your Edicy site. It is intended to simplify the design-code-test cycle every designer does hundreds of times while building a design. If you're a web designer or developer and interested in creating designs that work in Edicy then head on to the dedicated page at our developer site.

How does it work?

Edicy designer toolkit launches a very lightweight web server on your local computer that emulates the rendering of Edicy pages. This way you can edit the design code in your favourite text editor/IDE and see the results immediately. Once you're happy with the results, just upload the design to your site and that's all there is to it.

We're always delighted to see what our users come up with when it comes to creating a personalized design. We lised some of these user-made designs in featured sites list. Now just grab a copy of the designer toolkit and don't hesitate to show us your work later.

4wfmpcsir2 hizr9bje6a

Edicy turns one!

tonu@fraktal.ee — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:45:40 +0000

Today, Edicy turns one -- a year ago we launched Edicy public beta into the wild. What a wonderful year it has been for us all. During this year, 85 000 people have created a site with us from all around the world.

Every day hundreds and hundreds more sign up. An increasing number of them subscribe to the Pro plan. Sometimes also from exotic places like this guy from Dominican Republic yesterday.

The decision to build a community to translate and localize Edicy into a growing number of languages (15 at the moment) turned out to be the right thing to do. Hotel owners from Guatemala and hairdressers from Tunisia can now build sites for their businesses without needing to find an English-speaking tech guy to help.

What are we working on now, in the beginning of our second year? Customization! We're improving your ability to personalise your site further -- both in terms of design, content and functionality. Our development is based in part on user feedback and feature requests. So tell us what would you like to see improved in Edicy. We'd appreciate it very much.

Stay tuned and spread the word!

More web addresses now available at Edicy

kajar@edicy.com — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you are growing tired of your old edicypages.com address and are looking to get your own, we have good news for you: Edicy just expanded the number of different domains that are available for purchase through our system.

To be more precise we've expanded our selection of TLDs (top level domains), which are the combination of letters that end the web address - .com, .net etc.

Here's a list of addresses available through Edicy:

.com, .org, .net, .eu, .co.uk, .pl, .in, .li, .at, .info, .cc, .org.uk, .cz, .tv, .be, .es, .tw

To get a new address just click on addresses in the site balloon or in the right hand menu in site full view. And, of course, you are still always welcome to bring your own address with you - as long as you upgrade to Edicy Pro it will work with your site.

Edicy adds Finnish to its languages

kajar@edicy.com — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We're happy to report that in addition to Dutch and 13 other languages Edicy is now also available in Finnish. The Finnish translation, like most of the others, was done by a volunteer, Toivo Talikka.

Here's what Toivo wrote us about himself: "I have worked in IT since early 70's in different roles in Finland, England, Papua New Guinea and Australia. I work in Sydney as a web developer, customizing websites built on PHP and MySQL. I found Edicy's approach to content management very exciting. The translation gave me the opportunity to brush up on my web vocabulary in Finnish."

If you want to check out a Finnish site already running on Edicy go to graso.fi. And if you happen to have any Finnish friends - who are no doubt enjoying the short summer somewhere in their mökki - be sure to interrupt their vacation and tell them about this cool new way to create websites.

How to create a great website, pt 6: Increasing traffic

tonu@fraktal.ee — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Traffic is about attention. Attention drives sales. Sales fill pockets. So anyone wants to be popular. How to grow the traffic to your site? In the long run, it's all about adding value. Is the stuff on your site interesting / valuable / useful enough for people to reach you? And more importantly, do they want to come back and recommend it to their friends?

A lot has been said on this topic in one of my previous posts, Writing Content. So lets skip the basics -- the need to be interesting, readable, search engine friendly. Lets talk about getting attention. What are the things you can do without spending all your money?

Where do your customers hang around?

Real life. Before planning your placement in the web, think what are your potential customers doing in real life. As outdoor ads are too expensive, then be an ad yourself -- grow your authority. Speak at industry events and give university lectures, become a guy whom media contacts for comments on anything that takes place in your industry.
Search Engines. People turn to Google for help more often than they call to their moms. Times more. Up to 50% of the traffic to any popular website derives from search engines. People are looking for answers, constantly. In search results, 90% of the clicks go to the first 4-5 unpaid links. So you must be the first answer. Nothing more to say. SEO is crucial part of growing traffic. There are tons of great resources to get started. Try Copyblogger for one.
Industry specific sites. There are forums, blogs and review sites for every business niche you can think of. Some of them are popular. Get reviews or links to your company / product in the popular ones -- or become a commentator in forums yourself. Check out popularity from Alexa and Compete.
Social media. Instead of living a real life, even your grumpy old neighbour is plugged to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Among all other things people share and discuss with acquaintances there, your industry is a topic. But social media is more about recommendations from friend to friend than for you to step in from scratch. So put more effort in the previous three steps first and social media will do its part largely by itself.

What would grab their attention?

In addition to being present in mediums listed above -- hard work, honesty and devotion of course. Plus long company history and all the rest of the solid virtues one can't buy with money. But there are some tricks to speed it up.

Attract links. Write a blog with great headlines, bold statements, top10 lists, illustrative graphs and great design. Tasty and easy to digest, what more would one want.
Write newsletters. As important as attracting new visitors is to keep those who you already "won" to your site once. Make it easy for them to leave you their email addresses so you can send them your great newsletters for updates from time to time.
Run a campaign. Spend your next ad money on buying 5 iPhones and throwing them out in Twitter. You'll be rewarded with gazillion clicks :) part of them recurring if you do it right.

And finally, don't forget that it's terribly easy to go the opposite way and decrease traffic -- by stopping or pausing the hard work of attention grabbing.

Edicy is now available in Dutch!

tanel@fraktal.ee — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:23:22 +0000

We are happy to announce that today we released Edicy in Dutch, which is now the 14th language Edicy is available in. The Dutch translation was done by a volunteer, Anno de Vries-de Graaf. He writes about himself and his motivation as follows:

I am Anno de Vries-de Graaf, I am Dutchman, but I live in Germany. I work as a software- and network specialist at a small company in Holland. As a sidekick I lecture webdesign at public libraries for more then 5 years now. The participants want to make a website about a hobby, or their business, or family thing, or whatever they want to publish. They are not interested in the technical part of webdesign. They just want an easy way to do it and then go on with their hobbies.

I translated Edicy to use it in the courses I give. I like it because it is easy. There was nothing available in Dutch, so I had to do it myself.

Hope you enjoy it!

Thanks Anno!

We've also published a press release in Dutch (and another one in Spanish) on the same subject.

We are still looking for new translators who want to join us! If you would like to contribute or translate Edicy into your whatever-it-is speaking language, don't hesitate to contact us at support@edicy.com.

How to create a great website, pt 5: Building functionality

tonu@fraktal.ee — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Every day someone contacts me to discuss starting their website project. More often than not they have compiled a list of "I wanna" functionality instead of having a realistic view on how it'll be actually used. The more "I wannas" — the less likely you'll find a single existing tool matching it.

Solution? It's inevitable — someone suggests a brilliant idea to waste all your company's time and money — to set up a new server, install some all-in-one solution and develop all the missing parts from scratch. After all, that's what you wanted, isn't it? The problem is that you'll end up with a Frankenstein's monster of a website that costs a fortune and has little practical use. So, how to avoid this?

Don't do it!

Don't build from scratch. A web system developed only for you to perfectly match your needs can easily turn out very expensive and very dead. What if your needs adjust or you were wrong about them?
Don't build dead functionality. Some of the ugliest things you can find online are forums without discussions, headline news dating back to 2001 and intranets with zero users.
Don't trust all-in-one solutions. A tool that solves one problem is a good focused tool. A tool that solves all your problems, focuses on and therefore solves nothing.
Don't over-automate. You are planning to sell 50 products a month through your web store? Then why would you need the online syncing with the warehouse for?

How to do it then?

Just launch it. Being flexible with your needs saves a lot of time and money. Build your web store with Shopify, website with Edicy, blog with Wordpress, intranet with Basecamp. These are simple and basic tools that solve one of your problems at a time. But they really do it and they are ready and set up for launch.
Extend it. Even if the core system doesn't have everything included, it's rather easy to extend it for (almost) free and white label. You can add extensive galleries from Flickr, site search from Google, time scheduling from BookFresh. Use a variety of different great tools instead of one terrible all-arounder. Newsletters can be sent with CampaignMonitor, documents can be kept in GoogleDocs.
Follow real life, don't try to reinvent it. Extend and develop your site continuously instead of a) letting it rot or b) trying to build a perfect thing with the first effort. You're already getting 30 support e-mails a day? Great, time to set up a forum. You really have something new to tell more often than once a year? Nice, set up a news section on your site.
Use real people. To some extent, automating is inevitable. But to get started, real people are better. That's how you learn how and what to automate. Not to mention that real, personal and friendly support instead of automated troubleshooting helps you to grow a loyal customer base. Automate when you are likely to grow out of manpower soon.

Announcing: Edicy affiliate program

kajar@edicy.com — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Lately we've been getting quite a few questions from people who'd like to start selling Edicy websites. I'm happy to announce that this is now possible. All you have to do is sign up to our brand new affiliate program (beta) and recommend Edicy to anybody. If they sign up to Edicy and tell us you referred them, you'll receive 25% of their first subscription payment.

To get credit for the referral the client has to enter your referral code when paying for Edicy. In the future you will also be able to advertise Edicy with special links and banners that contain your referral code. When people come to our site through your link and subscribe you will receive credit for the sale. This is still some time away, but we decided to open the program now for those of you that don't need the link function.

One of the ways to get referrals is to help design a site with Edicy. The design platform is completely open so just with a little knowledge it is possible to connect any design with Edicy - or just build a site based on one of our templates. We're confident that once people see how good their site looks and how easily they can use it, they'll be happy to pay for it.

Last, but not least: although this is the beta version of the program and undoubtedly there will be some kinks to work out, we are absolutely guaranteeing that if you help us sell Edicy you will get paid. There is nothing beta about that part.

So if you’d like to be a part of Edicy's success go and sign up to the program.

New toolbar and other improvements: release notes for July 8th 2009

kajar@edicy.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We released a new version of Edicy last night and if you've visited your site today you've probably seen the changes. Most noticeably we rejigged the structure of the bottom toolbar a little bit to make its structure more logical.

Let's start with the improved bottom toolbar.

As you can see on the picture the order of the icons now reads site-page-files-etc. Basically if you want to change things on your whole website - address, users etc - you click on the "Site" icon.

If you want to change the settings of the page that you are on - layout, title whether it's displayed in the menu - you click on "Page" (previously these settings were under "Properties", all the way on the right).

And what used to be the "Media" icon, is now named "Files", because it also contains all your documents.

We also improved the gallery function: now when you click on a picture in a gallery and get a large version of it you can use the little arrows on the two sides of the picture to move to either the previous or next picture.

Also this release brings three fresh and light designs that you can use on your Edicy site: Baku, Caracas and a fresh take to an old favourite - Buenos Aires North. Feel free to try them out and let us know, how they fit!

We're hoping to bring you some more improvements with another release this week.

Complete release notes

Improved bottom toolbar
Improvements to the gallery function
Three new templates
Template authors can now use user_location object to display information based on visitor's location
"reorder" and "grouped" tags are available in template code
Improved usability of non-modal dialogs in editor
Improved flash embedding in text editor
Template editor will now give hint of a problem when trying to save incorrect template code
Fixed issues related to table editing
Fixed incorrect resizing of portrait photos in photo gallery
Fixed rendering of admin screens in Internet Explorer 6/7 and Google Chrome
Fixed issues with Internet Explorer and special characters in link href's in text editor

How to make your website show up on Google

tanel@fraktal.ee — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You just created a new website with Edicy but what next? What's the website good for when nobody knows about it? You have to let the world know that there is a new and interesting site. The easiest way to do this is to submit your site to Google because Google is the first source where your potential visitors start to look for information. This post teaches you how to do that.

How to get your website found and indexed by Google?

The easiest way is to use Google Add url service. Unfortunately it doesn't give you any control about the indexing process - the way that Google looks at every page on your site and saves them in it's server for people to search from.

Google also offers another free service called Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). We recommend using it because it allows you to:

Submit your site to Google
Control updating rate and force Google to revisit your site (by re-submitting your sitemap)
See when Google has visited and indexed your site
See how users reach your site (incoming links and keywords)
Get Google's view of your site
Diagnose problems (broken links, duplicated page title)
etc.

Submit site to Google: Webmaster Tools

To use the Google Webmaster Tools you first need to sign up. After signing up you can add the address of your site (www.mycompany.com). When the address is added Google asks verification from you to confirm that you really are the owner of the site. You have to choose HTML as verification method that gives you a code looking something like this: "googlef52f1d814b8972e9.html".

We have added an easy way into Edicy to add this Webmaster tools verification code to your Edicy website.

Using Google Webmaster Tools in Edicy

You can add the verification code to your site in the Site properties view. You will reach it if you click "Site" - "Settings" and choose "Account details" from the right menu. Scroll down and enter the verification code (something like googlef52f1d814b8972e9.html") into the "HTML verification file name" field and press Save settings. After that you can complete the verification process by pressing the "Verify" button in your Webmaster Tools account.

It is a good idea to also submit the address of your sitemap.xml to your Webmaster Tools account. Edicy generates a sitemap.xml for your site automatically. You can find it's address by adding a "sitemap.xml" to end of your site address (like www.mycompany.com/sitemap.xml). You can submit this address under the "Sitemap" section in "Site configuration" menu in your Webmaster Tools account. If you want to force Google to re-index your site after you have made some changes, just re-submit your sitemap.

Future tasks - get to the top

Once indexed you have half way to go. It requires a lot of work to get to the top in Google search results. The way to get to the top is to promote your site - promote it in popular blogs, websites and sites of your friends. Let them write about your site and link to your site. But of course the prerequisite for that is that the content of your site is valuable and interesting. We'll write more about how to make it to the top of Google in a further post.

Some useful links

First Edicy screencast is up

kajar@edicy.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to see the first ever screencast of Edicy in action - complete with soothing music and accented voice-over - check out our brand new tour page. The video is at the top on right hand side.

Frankly, making the video turned out to be a bit of a bigger hassle than we originally invisioned. But now that we have video making powers in our hands feel free to tell us if there is any other information that you'd enjoy seeing in video form, like for example tutorials on using some of the more advanced facets of Edicy. You can e-mail your wishes to me or leave them in the comments below.

Getting widgets on your website with Edicy pt. 1

kajar@edicy.com — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Widgets are a way to make your website a lot more interesting. Whether you want a clock, a counter on an RSS feed from another site on your page you can be pretty sure that someone somewhere has already built it and you don't need to start inventing a bicycle. But did you know you can use widgets with Edicy as well? Here's how.

First you need to find the widget that you want on your page. Or more precisely. you need the code that you can embed into your page. The code is something looking like this:

When you've selected the widget that you want on your page copy the code and go to your page. Then click the HTML icon on the little toolbar on your page (it's the icon on the bottom right).

Then just paste the code into the text where you want it and voilla, the widget will appear on your page.

Another option to get the widget on the page is to click on the video icon and paste the widget code into the window there. In addition to displaying videos from Youtube or Vimeo the video function can also display widgets.

So now you know how to get widgets into the text area on your page. In the next part of the series we'll show you how to embed them to other areas on your page as well.

Three good places to find widgets:

Google gadgets: This is a directory of gadgets you can add to your IGoogle page, but also on other pages anywhere. Currently there are 108673 widgets there so you can be pretty sure that you'll find something you need.

Widgetbox A large selection of very different widgets, the most popular of which is the good old Super Mario game that could be played from your homepage.

Google web elements Google recently developed their own widgets for adding your favorite Google applications like Calendar, News or conversations to your page. (note that the Google custom search element won't work with Edicy, for getting a search box on your site you have to enable it from site full view - elements tab).

Before we go, we'll leave you with a couple of wonderful widgets: