The news is that we have just rolled out a new version of Synthasite onto our live servers and here are the release notes.
* 17 New Templates, including one with a customizable header
* Image resizing capabilities are now built in
* Editable page headings so that you can change the headings on each page
* Meta data options on each page (Change your titles, etc and improve your SEO)
* Improved page navigation. The site menu will now open the appropriate page when clicking on it in design time.
* Miscellaneous bug fixes and flow improvements (thanks for all the bug logging and suggestions – keep it coming!)
* HTML Widget – which means you can now insert your own HTML.
We’re going to be rolling out the ability to easily add Google AdSense to your website in Q1 of next year (although you can do it right now, using the HTML widget), along with many other requested features, including website stats (and Google Analytics) . By the end of next year, we expect to have hundreds, if not thousands, of templates to choose from with a similar amount of widgets and plugins so that you can really customize your website. We’ll also be introducing a blogging platform next year as well – so stay tuned!
We hope these new features will help improve the usability and address a lot of the feedback that we received. We will have our next release in January – so this is it for the rest of this year!
Thanks again for all your support – and we are looking forward to the year ahead!
Happy Festive Season!!
CEO, SynthaSite
Hello Vinny
First of all, congratulations for getting Columbus on board!
I work at Richemont and know well some of the key people managing this VC. I am not surprised that they decided to back your company. Your target product of a do-it-yourself complete website builder is promising.
I was wondering if you had thought of adapting your solution to also be usable inside the firewall (that is, for an organization to design its internal websites (or “intranets”)?
It is currently relatively expensive to either develop in-house or use the services of a website design company and the result is that a lot of potential “Web 2.0 intranets” are simply not designed for lack of budget.
Regards,
Peter
First I wish you good luck.
I know a thing of two about free site platforms.
Your main competitors are going to be weebly and google page creator. Both are either buggy or slow. You need to concentrate mainly on speed and user experience. Also you need to offer full width templates. Three column elements (you have only two column now).
So far so good, this new version is much better then the one I tried two months ago.
Cheers
I noticed there is no alt tag for images? Can youplease include that.
Hey Vinny.
I just made a page, not shown in the menu, and can’t seem to find the code for linking from the index page. I published the site and all, tried [ite.com/name] but no dice!
Anyhoo love your service, but how can you make it [.com]
and how much. I’d always recommend this service by the way!
Please reply.
-Keith
An interesting service to offer. Do you have the ability to include blogs, podcasts and videos to the site?
I am relatively new to publishing my own content on the web though many doggy years ago I tried UK’s “freeserve.com” for an alumni web site. My question really is the terms and condition do not allow and I quote “Advertise or offer to sell or buy any goods or services for any business purpose, unless such Communication Service specifically allows such messages.” End of quote.
That I understand to mean you’d not appreciate an operating business entity to use your web creation tools to publish itself? Or do you mean a business entity can use your tools but you are not willing to host it? Which is which?
I mean can’t I create a write using your tools but publish it elsewhere for profit? Please clarify.
Thanks to everyone for their comments.
@Netvestor – Thanks, we’re definitely working on everything you pointed out.
@Keith – We’re working on the .com issue – please can you email support@synthasite with your other problem so that we can work on it.
@ John – Blogs is coming – please be patient… you can already add podcasts and videos to the site using HTML/YouTube/etc.
@Bowie – There is a slight misconception. The terms you are referring to, relate to posting communications on 3rd party services that we will be including in SynthaSite. For e.g. if we created a plugin for a 3rd party forum, you would not be allowed to use SynthaSite to publish commercial messages, unless that service allowed it. I see that this can be quite misinterpreted – we’re working on a revision of our T’s & C’s – thanks for pointing this out. SynthaSite is very much geared toward allowing you use it for commercial purposes!
I am enjoying myself setting up several sites that are important to me to get my research on Jamaican history on to the web. So far I am finding ways of expanding the possibilities of Synthasite for my purposes, but I look forward to future developments, some even this month, I believe.
My sites will always be educational and non-profit, so I sincerely hope that you will be able to maintain a free site builder and hosting service.
All good wishes for 2008
Joy L
@ Joy – It’s encouraging to hear that you have found SynthaSite effective for your needs. As you know, this is just the beginning and there are many new features that will be released over the coming months. Our commitment to our users is that we will not charge subscription fees for SynthaSite. In time, we will release certain premium services and products such as domain registrations. The site builder as well as hosting will however always be free.
I’m still looking forward to the next installment of new features!
I just found out, via my enthusiasm for starting new sites, that the cap on published sites is 10; that is a useful bit of information that I had not seen anywhere. Could you also indicate how much space I have left? My sites do not usually use up large amounts of space, but it is helpful to know what amount of space is available.
I’m still enjoying myself using Synthasite, and hope you go from strength to strength in ’08 and beyond.
@ Joy – We currently do not impose a size limit on individual sites, there is however a size limit of 5mb on individual files that you upload to SynthaSite. Our preference would be to remove all restrictions or at least increase the limit. This will hopefully become feasible as we improve our hosting infrastructure.