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Latest Edicy updates: more local domains on sale, monthly site reports, improved galleries and search

Tõnu Runnel — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The company behind Edicy has grown to 14 people as of today. It's twice the size it was a year ago. More importantly, it's times more development power making Edicy a better website builder every day.

In addition to the reworked form toolkit and multilingual site titles — updates that we released less than a month ago — we've put together another set of new features and fine-tunings.

New domains on sale

You can now buy local domain names for your French (.fr), Italian (.it), Portugese (.pt) and Latvian (.lv) businesses directly from us. All of them are € 15 / yr, except .pt for € 24 / yr (plus VAT, if applicable).

Monthly website activity reports

Does your site get at least 10 visits per month? It's a start! From now on, we'll send you an activity report every month. It states the progress of the site in a few key metrics, sports a graph and additional relevant info like upcoming subscription expirations.

Improved gallery viewing

With the most recent update, websites on Edicy now offer an improved photo gallery viewing experience. It's optimized for both desktop and mobile (touch) devices and it has better usability and design than before.

In addition, we've made it highly customizable for all the developers and designers building unique customer websites on Edicy.

Customizable search widget

Different Edicy themes now sport slightly differentiated search component. Attention all designers and developers — you can now deeply customize the look and feel of this widget on your customer websites as you wish.

What feature are you missing the most in Edicy? Tell us. Our development plan is derived in part from the most frequent feature requests.

New way to build forms and collect feedback

Tõnu Runnel — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We've just made it so much easier to work with the data visitors post to the forms on your website.

Whenever a visitor posts you something from a form on your website, it's sent both to your email and listed in Edicy. No news here. But the listing view itself is completely redesigned. It's all about speed — individual posts now open inside the list, by default all posts from all forms are shown and you can navigate with Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts (j, k, space).

In addition, the form builder itself is redesigned too. It is now simpler and more consistent with all the other tools in Edicy.

Back in 2009 we released the first version of our form builder. Since then, Edicy user interface has gone through a complete overhaul. Till now we didn't change the form builder tho.

How to add forms to your site?

Form area can be added beside or instead of any content area on your site. Along with text and gallery it's the third content area type. From there on, it's self explaining. You can add rows after rows of different form fields and customize the details by just clicking on each row. If you need, you can also add text blocks in between the fields. Global form settings can be found on the last row with submit button.

Oh, and did you know that all form data can be downloaded as a CSV file for the liking of your legacy software like Excel? :) And — as an industry standard, Edicy recognizes robotic spam posts and lists them separately in a trash can.

Log in to your Edicy account and enjoy the fresh new way of getting feedback from your website visitors.

Updates in language management

Priit Haamer — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:17:07 +0000

Good multi-language support has always been one of the core features in Edicy. Building a site and translating it into several languages has never been easier. Though, there were some obstacles we just removed with today's update.

First up, we added translation support to site titles and headers. Until now, changing the site header made it change on every single page on the site, without taking the languages into account. As of today, if you change the header in one language, it is kept intact in others.

Second, there is a completely new language manager in site structure view. In this screen, you can fine-tune all aspects of language settings:

Edit all languages from one place, no more need to switch between languages in order to change them.
Reorder language menu. Just grab the drag handle at the end of language row and move them around.
Force certain language to be the front page language. Edicy always tries to pick the best language for your site visitor by taking his browser preferences and country into account. Still don't trust it? You can now have it your way.

For site owners who have customized their design, there are new options to control the site title and header. Head down to our developer site to see what's changed.

Discover Small Things That Work Wonders Using Google Analytics Flow Visualization

Alex Grechanowski — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As you probably know, Edicy has a very useful one-stop statistics module that provides essential information, like unique visits, the most popular content and also a map with the location of your latest visitors.

You can easily find it on the bottom of your Edicy site. The stats engine is hassle-free because it's built-in, so you're ready to go.

However, lots of webmasters, including advanced Edicy users, want to understand what's happening on their websites beyond pretty much generic Site Usage metrics - Visits, Pageviews, Bounce Rate. They ask questions like: what kind of content should we create next? Or what are those paths through our site that are more popular than others? Are those the paths we’d like visitors to follow?

So if you’re interested in adding some analytical flavor to your website analysis, the new Google Analytics offers several toys to play with.

First things first, if you’re new to the data universe, make sure you have added Google Analytics code to your Edicy site.

In this post we'll explore Flow Visualization, an intuitive and beautiful tool that presents the ways that visitors flow through pages and thus we can analyze data visually.

Visitors Flow Means Path Analysis

Visitors Flow is a graphical visualization of the navigation paths visitors took through your website, from the source to the various destination pages.

In a nutshell, use Visitors Flow to

Compare volumes of traffic from different sources.
Analyze traffic patterns through your website.
Find a high drop-off from a new page you've created.
Check whether the design of the new page “hides” the links or buttons that let visitors move to the pages you want them to visit next.
Improve your marketing efforts, like A/B testing – see which landing pages better serves their purposes like funneling (AdWords) traffic to a conversion page.
Analyze content-related issues, including Screen Resolution and Browser – see whether there are any pages that have a drop-off with a particular screen resolution or browser.

Where do I find the Visitors Flow feature?

Make sure you’re using the new Google Analytics interface. Then go to the Standard Reporting tab > Audience > Visitors Flow.

By default, the Visitors Flow is set to Country/Territory as the starting point for the flow. But you can change it to Traffic Sources, Content or System. Use the green drop-down menu for that.

Let’s set it up to use the Source dimension. This will give you the following visualization:

In the first column, you can see the amounts of traffic from the top sources, including the different domains and direct traffic (URLs people can remember, auto-completion, bookmarked pages).

Double-click the segment/node you need (say Google or Facebook) and you’ll see the following options available:

One More Neat Option

Move the Connections slider to filter out the display based on connection volume. Say if you want to see only higher-volume connections, you need to move the slider to the left.

If you’re interested in digging deeper, I would definitely recommend checking out the Google Analytics Help topics related to Flow Visualization.

Happy analyzing! Also feel free to add your tips on using this feature or ask questions in the comments.

New design themes

Paavel Liik — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We've added a couple of fresh, beautiful options to our selection of Edicy design themes. All Pro users can start using these right away.

First, greetings to all our friends in Belgium! Here's a new design by me dedicated to Brugge (Bruges):

Secondly, a joint effort by me and Tajo, a design celebrating the "city of angels", Bangkok (กรุงเทพมหานคร):

As a third newcomer, let me introduce a truly minimalistic, blog-oriented feat by Tõnu — Tokyo (東京):

Now that's not all actually. As a bonus, I've updated the good old Stockholm theme by Tõnu. Since we launched it a couple of years ago, web technology has evolved a lot. It now gives us more options to let the design shine around the content. Enjoy:

Oh and here's a bonus to the bonus. An alternative version of the renewed Stockholm, the Stockholm North:

More beautiful designs are already in the making. Can't wait to show those too!

Edit websites on iPad

Priit Haamer — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With today's iPad software update (iOS 5) comes great improvement that is mostly left unmentioned — support for inline text editing on the web. So far, Edicy users could not do much with their iPads or iPhones. But the wait is over, we've been testing Edicy on iOS beta for awhile now and it works fine. Just to confirm you, this article was written on one of these.

There are still some limitations, though. The biggest issue is the lack of file upload from web on iOS devices so please make sure you have all the files you need in Edicy before hitting the road.

Edicy Statistics Engine

Tõnu Runnel — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:59:33 +0000

We've just made Edicy a much better marketing tool. Starting today, all paid accounts have a full blown LIVE statistics engine. Yep, real-time analytics. Someone visits your site and it appears as a dot on the map. Like a heartbeat.

It breaks down sources of traffic — direct, search engines, social media, referring links. It shows which content gets how many eyeballs. It knows which search terms brought the visitors, which browsers and platforms they use, what countries they came from. And it allows you to see visits as they happen, live on the map.

In addition to this advanced built-in tool, Edicy supports integration with most common external metrics engines too — Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Compete etc.

Log in and see for yourself.

Edicy featured in Der Spiegel

Tõnu Runnel — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:48:16 +0000

Last night, exceptionally many new users started to sign up to Edicy. A spam attack?

Looking for the source, most of the fresh signups came from all around German speaking Europe. It turns out that Der Spiegel has written a favorable article about Edicy (in German). One of the most read weekly magazines in Europe, it does flatter us a lot. Thank you, Spiegel!

Some important points from the article:

It's the best tool for creating multilingual websites. It makes it "on the database level" meaning, Edicy works well for keeping language structures parallel and doesn't need updating when website design is replaced with a new one.
Websites on Edicy are automatically optimized for mobile devices and enable the integration of Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
It works well for managing SEO.
Its user interface has a very modern touch

Couldn't agree more.

Here are some previous quotes from the world media on Edicy.

Improved web address search, .de and .me now for sale

Priit Haamer — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Just wanted to let you know that we released an overhaul to domain name search. It now finds available addresses faster and gives better overview which of them can be purchased. Of course, you can purchase multiple addresses at once and we give one of them away for free, if you subscribe to Edicy PRO at least for one year.

In addition to "cosmetical upgrade", we also put .de and .me addresses for sale among 18 other we already have. And yes, these also come bundled for free with PRO subscription.

Why hosting a website on your own sucks

Tõnu Runnel — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We are used to web services like Facebook, Gmail and Edicy. Sign up and go. No tech side to worry about. Data is securely online. All upgrades are automatically delivered, all hackers are routinely repelled. A dedicated team is taking care of it silently.

Wait, some of you aren't really there yet. The beautiful, thoughtfully crafted websites made by web agencies are most likely not built on web services. Instead, they are running on custom installed pieces of software called CMSs (content management systems) in the servers of some local hosting company.

It's time for a change. Drop software. Let your agency build your website on Edicy, Squarespace or some other web service.

It sucks to be the owner of such website (unless you're a web developer), because:

Tech becomes your responsibility.
Customization of any engine becomes a future cost.
Any CMS is feature- not user-centric.

Let's look at these reasons in more detail.

Tech becomes your responsibility.

Any custom hosted website needs to be set up in the server first. That's the simple part. Agency takes care of everything — till the end of the web project. After that there's no one left in the room to take care of the website day and night. No one is responsible. No one really cares but you.

Hosting company manages everything "under" the website engine — hardware, underlying software, connection. Web agency can help you with everything above — design, content, marketing.

The people developing the engine should be helping you out with the middle part. But it doesn't work that way. They can't help you to execute. Their updates and bug fixes reach you only if and when you ask web agency to do it manually.

If something happens, the process to get it right is slow and costly. Being responsible for something you have no expertise in isn't worth the risk. You could just switch to a web service instead.

Customization of a web engine becomes a future cost.

Developers love customizing software. Changing a piece of code to make it fit with some random idea you had. Programming. It's like practicing a language you understand. And he gets a reward — you are happy to see your idea implemented along with other changes.

Enter everyday. Two months later you accidentaly hear that the particular version of the open-source CMS set up for you is easily exploitable by hackers. They could just deface your website and replace its front page with some steamy porn.

Turns out that the developer from your web agency is on a long vacation. Some other developer is allocated for you a week later. It takes him 2 days to upgrade the CMS behind your website. It should have taken only 30 minutes. But the piece of code written specifically for you didn't work with the new CMS verion. The other guy wasted time rewriting it.

And then you get the bill. It's generous. You only pay a couple of hundred of Euros. And it even didn't take a whole month to get it done!

It sucks. Instead you could've just used a web service and never have had to bother. There's no waiting, no extra payment, no need to point out the exploits yourself. It wouldn't have been your responsibility.

Any CMS is feature- not user-centric.

One way of creating an application is to build everything around what user wants to acheive. It's an ascetic path. The key is to keep it simple. To drop any excess step, any unnecessary decision point, any long tail tool. It's about predicting the workflow. It's about constant improvement. Edicy is born this way.

Another aproach is how the CMSs are made. It's about building everything around features. And there's any feature or plug in you can imagine. Not to mention the unimaginables. All this fun comes with a payoff. No one curates this load. Your experience is bloated with options, decision points, excess tools.

The drawback is huge. Simple tasks take time and effort because the interface is too crowded. Every new user needs to be trained as the workflow isn't intuitive. Behavior differs per plugin. The only optimized thing is the developer experience.

Combined with everything else that sucks about owning custom hosted websites, you should think twice before investing in them.

Edicy design themes going mobile

Stepan Bolotnikov — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Handheld devices have been all the rage lately, with everyone and their mother already owning a smartphone and/or a tablet computer or two. I myself have only recently gotten hold of an Android phone and I'm really enjoying the possibility to like my sister's new Facebook status while waiting for the bus to come or throw some birds at pigs when there's nothing better to do (I mean, aside from all the productive stuff i do with it!).

Since they automatically resize each web page you visit, browsing the web is really comfortable with these kinds of devices. However you still usually need to pinch your fingers a couple of times before you can actually read any of the text.

To save your visitors the trouble and deliver the information straight to the palm of their hand, we've decided to apply some technical magic and retouch the styles of Edicy design themes to be more suitable for devices with small screen sizes, especially smartphones and tablets.

We're proud to present you the mobile versions of all the Pro designs as well as the free Tallinn and Tallinn North design themes. We'll continue optimizing the whole design library for mobile screens so stay tuned.

Go on, log in and try them out! You can even see the magic in action by just resizing the desktop browser window too. As the window gets smaller the layout will shrink with it until you are left with a minimalistic version of the website. All the unnecessary parts are cut out for visitors on smartphones. Don't forget to leave us some feedback in the comments or Facebook, we'd love to hear your thoughts! :)

Better on-site editing

Tõnu Runnel — Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The key value of Edicy is its rather simple on-site editing interface. We made a couple of additional improvements to take this experience even further.

Many marketing-savvy users have been using hidden pages in the main menu to create landing pages and other campaign materials. The upside is that such pages appear straight behind the domain name in the address bar. The downside is the bloated main menu in editing mode — hidden pages need to be there for navigating on the site. Our new solution is simple — all the hidden pages are grouped under one drop-down button. Marketing fest can begin.

If you have a custom design and don't know much about coding — just let us know. We'll add this feature for you too, for free.

Until lately you still had to use admin section for two standard tasks — creating new blog post and removing spam comments from it. Not anymore. Just go and take a look at your blog listing and comments and you get the idea. This is the first step in phasing out the "Blog" tab in the Edicy menu completely.

In addition there's one beautiful cosmetic change — we revamped the design of the text toolbar. It was the last piece of the old style. Just check out the new text styling menu with actual fonts from your website design. Cool, isn't it?

Free domain names

Tõnu Runnel — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATED. We've opened a new benefit for the Edicy Pro users — free domain names. We are starting off with giving away yourname.com, org, net, eu and info domains. Many local domains (nl, es, in, ...) ~~will follow~~ are available too.

Getting a domain for free for a year is pretty simple — pick a name for it and subscribe to Edicy Pro for a year. Start here:

Domain name hosting is included in Edicy Pro subscription, so it really is all you need to get your website up and running right away.

Pro designs

Tõnu Runnel — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:15:32 +0000

We've added four new designs to our theme library. One that is available to all users (Tallinn North by me) and three for Edicy Pro subscribers only (Copenhagen by my brother Henn :) Östersund by Paavel and Richmond by Tajo).

Names are actually helpful here — the designs with names of Scandinavian cities are modern, minimalistic, advanced. Richmond on the other hand has a conservative look with a slight touch of luxury.

In addition, design tab now sports bigger thumbnails for your viewing pleasure.

Take a look at the beauties below the fold.

Tallinn North by Tõnu Runnel

Copenhagen by Henn Runnel

Östersund by Paavel Liik

Richmond by Tajo Oja

Updated text and image editor

Priit Haamer — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:20:11 +0000

Today we updated core piece of Edicy's functionality - the text editor. It looks very much the same as before but everything has changed under the hood. This release completes the transition that we started by launching the new design last year. We replaced several old technologies with the new ones that in result give site admins faster and more responsive user interface. In fact, we managed to decrease page sizes in admin mode by more than 50%.

But it's not an update, if you cannot see any changes, right? Today we're also introducing our new image editor you can use to modify your photos in-line. By placing the image manipulation toolbar next to photo, it should be more intuitive and easier to use.

If you find any problems with the text editor, please report them at our support forum or by sending us an e-mail to support@edicy.com.

Improved link tool

Priit Haamer — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:25:58 +0000

By looking at how some of our users were having troubles creating hyperlinks correctly, we decided to improve our link tool just a little bit this week. Now it gives you slightly better idea what will happen next when inserting link to your text.

I guess it would not do harm to see once again, how this tool works in our text editor. To create a link, select piece of text and click on "Insert a link" button. If you see only white text field there, you're in the right direction. Start typing into this field and Edicy tries to suggest, where this link should point to. We provide the suggestions from:

All page titles on the site
All files uploaded to the site
If text ends with ".com", ".net" or any other thing that appears to be a internet address we think you may want to create link to another site and suggest that as well
If you enter e-mail address, an link to send message to this address will be created
By typing "skype:" to the beginning of search string, we suggest to create link that opens up skype profile or places a call

And, if you want your link to open in another tab or window, click on the small icon that sits right-hand side of the link suggestion.

To change an existing link, just click on it and click on "Edit" in the small pop-up dialog that just opened.

Designers and developers get better template editor

Priit Haamer — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:34:48 +0000

Among many minor improvements and bugfixes launched this week we also revamped a developer specific part of Edicy — template code editor. It helps our growing partner community to better serve their customers who have sites on Edicy.

The template editor now sports color coding to make code writing a more desktop like experience. Written code is more structured, much easier and quicker to read.

Other notable improvements that made it's way into Edicy this week:

It is now possible to insert pictures into photo gallery at any position
When changing language in login form, username and password will not get lost
Visual improvements of Edicy user interface in Opera web browser
Fixed issues with design editor height calculation
Fix for site switcher in admin views where it was not possible to pick first site in the select menu

Reaching financial freedom

Tõnu Runnel — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Big news, folks — last week Edicy reached financial self-sustainability. We no longer owe money to anyone outside the team and we are expanding our business from the growing cash flow.

Why did we have the loan in the first place

It's a common knowledge that in Europe it's harder to get a reasonable investment for your tech startup than in the US. Especially in the scary-sounding Eastern Europe, where Edicy comes from — Estonia. Unless you are willing to move to US, your options are pretty simple here. Either get a small initial investment, borrow the seed money for 3-5 years or start very small — spend only what you've already earned, bootstrap.

Edicy is a mixture of all three. Founded with tiny $ 25'000 USD seed capital back in 2007 we borrowed an additional $100'000 to get a powerful kick-start. Initially we were certain that we'll live off of it for the first 6-12 months. It makes much more sense to get a "real investment" from one or another venture capital fund when you have a real product with growing user base. And 3rd part was bootstrapping:

How did we get rid of the loan

Just to minimize the financial risks, we started designing and developing custom websites and web apps in early 2008. This kind of consultancy work created significant revenue stream that kept the overall burn rate (negative cash flow) of Edicy relatively low.

But it also blurred our focus. Instead of putting our hearts and souls fully into Edicy, we always divided our time between two different business models.

This "insurance" paid off pretty soon. In September 2008 Lehman Brothers died and the whole VC world went bananas. There was no investment for East-European gangsters like us. So after a few months into the global financial crisis we decided to pivot our whole business. We focused fully to bootstrapping and started to earn back our debts.

In a few months we could already share some of our work time with Edicy again. Still, most of the energy went to client work for the next two years.

Moving forward

We've already started to migrate half of our team of ten people back to marketing and developing Edicy. The other half continues with selected web agency work as we've grown into a well know and respected team in that.

Edicy is increasingly exiting business and product. Our users share the love — growth in the number of active and paid accounts is accelerating and we'll reach the first magical frontier of 1000 payers in the coming months.

We haven't reached the size of our biggest competitors (yet), but we've managed to be like a tiny copy of our much talked about homeland — debt free, quickly evolving and happy.

Better switching between sites

Priit Haamer — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:46:46 +0000

If you manage multiple sites in Edicy, then in order to jump from one site to another, you always had to switch into editing mode where the site switcher is. From now on, site switcher can also be found in full admin-screens. Just click on "My Sites" icon in Settings panel and a list of other sites slide out waiting for you to pick one.

Along with this small release we also improved the invoices screen to give better overview of what you have paid us for. And last but not least, we made admin views slightly lighter to make them more readable.

Exceptional websites on Edicy

Tõnu Runnel — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Edicy is loved by users because of its simplicity. We talk about our simple and lightweight user experience quite a lot ourselves. It fits our image, it is what we want to be.

But thereby the other half of the truth remains unnoticed — in addition to being the simplest tool out there to edit websites, Edicy is a powerful platform. You can build almost any kind of website with any kind of design upon it. It's easy to use, flexible to develop.

Some of the recent exceptional websites running on Edicy

Estonian Shores is a website where Edicy, Google Maps and a small separate application are integrated into a single exciting website. It is not just beautiful and useful, it's as easy for anyone to edit as any standard site on Edicy.

Landing at is a cool analytics application which lives its separate life. But the website promoting it is built entirely on Edicy. Playful, easy to understand and of course, easy to edit.

Varul is a leading law office in the Baltics. It's conservative but modern looking website has among hundreds of static pages also three different databases, interwoven with each other. Oh, and it's all available in 5 different languages sharing the same site structure.

Starman is one of the largest telecom companies in Estonia. They have loads of different systems and tools, some of which are accessible also from the web. For the visitor, a single welcoming and lively front is built upon Edicy.

Did you know that this very same Edicy website is also built on Edicy? Yep — 16 language versions, tens of databases connected to each other, beautiful design. Easy to edit and "awarded" with Google PageRank 7.

Here are more featured sites for your pleasure.

How to reach similar heights?

Most of the websites you see day by day could have been built with Edicy. Many of them already are.

A growing number of designers and developers choose Edicy for building websites for their customers. A website on Edicy can be customized layer by layer, keeping all the difficult parts away from the end user:

Standard design not enough? Any design can be used on any Edicy website.
Static pages not enough? You can build product catalogs and other databases with our catalog tool.
Want to use "widgets"? Need to show content from other systems? Any web service that gives out standardized data can be connected to any Edicy website.

Are you a site owner? Find a suitable agency to help you from our partner list or take contact with us. Are you a developer? Let us teach you more about Edicy.