Our users inspire us to make Weebly better every single day. And when someone inspires us through an exceptionally good cause? Well, we simply can't resist expressing our gratitude in a slightly bigger way. Four days ago our CEO stumbled upon a posting on Reddit outlining the story of Omari, a young man who cares for children at the Faraja Orphanage in Ngong, Kenya. Omari was slashed in the face while he attempted to protect the children and ward off intruders who had broken into the orphanage, earning him a large facial wound and a stint in the hospital. This man is one of those rare real-life heroes. The Longonot Education Initiative was looking to raise $2,000 to help erect a concrete and barbed wire fence to protect Omari and the children. To our surprise, we found that they had built their site using Weebly... and just knew we had to get involved. At that point, the Reddit community had raised $10,000, and Weebly donated another $10,000 to match. Since then, over $80,000 has been raised for the cause! With the surplus funds the LEI plans to continue providing food and supplies for the children and ultimately hopes to purchase the title deed for the land and home. How could anyone resist this crew?We are honored to have people like the folks at Longonot Education Initiative using Weebly to aid others and hope this story inspires you as much as it did us. And to the children sending their thanks in the photo above, we just want to say -- you're so welcome!UPDATE 2/16/12: The wall has been built!
They say that communication is the key to a successful relationship and we know that first hand -- we're constantly listening to your feedback to decide what to work on next. That’s why today we are excited to introduce our newest features: threaded blog comments, moderate by email, and a better look and feel.
Threaded commenting was a big request from our avid bloggers and we're glad it's finally live. Now when you comment on a blog post, you have the ability to directly respond to other comments and have your reply appear in-line below the original comment:
We also snuck in a few other features, just in time for the holidays. You now have the ability to delete or mark comments as spam directly from the comment notification email you receive, saving you time you can now spend drinking more eggnog. And we've improved the design of our blog comments with a fresh new look, adding more style and class to your blog.
2011 was a great year for Weebly, and many of you responded to our many improvements by building some of best websites we've ever seen, and spreading the word to friends and family. We're excited about everything we're working on for 2012, and can't wait to get it in your hands!
 Weebly has made a lot of progress in 2011, but we're not done yet. With so much cool stuff coming up, we're excited to announce a new upgrade: Multiple Columns. You can find this option under the elements tab when you're editing your site, hanging out where the Two-Column element used to be. The highlights of this feature include: - Multiple Columns: you're not just limited to 2 columns anymore; you can now choose between 2-5 columns.
- Flexible Spacing: Choose the amount of spacing between columns: Small? Medium? Large? You got it.
- Improved Preview: We've improved the appearance so your content is displayed exactly how it will look on the published site... what you see is what you get!
- Automatic Upgrade: Your old 2 column elements are automatically upgraded to the new multiple column elements.
- Available in Blog Posts: The new multiple column element can now be used in all of your blog posts!
Want to see exactly what this looks like? We've put together a short video to showcase exactly how this feature can be used on your sites.
We hope you had a great 2011! In the spirit of the holidays, the whole team has been reflecting on how grateful we are for all of our Weebly users and Weebly Pro customers. We have several new improvements we're getting ready to release soon, including our new themes that we've been feverishly working on finishing, so stay tuned!
 Over the past few months we've been working on a new iPhone app, and it's coming along nicely. We've all been using it internally and found it to be indispensable while you're on the go.
As we're getting closer to releasing the app, we wanted to give those interested an early preview in exchange for providing us feedback. While we'd love to give everyone early access, unfortunately Apple only allows us to have 100 testers until we're officially launched in the App Store.
If you'd like to be a Weebly iPhone app beta tester, just fill out the form below and we'll be in touch soon. Due to the limited number of slots available, we'll need to give preference to users with active blogs and websites.
If you're an Android user, don't worry -- we haven't forgotten about you either. Stay tuned!
We're happy to release a couple of our top requested features, and the first of many improvements to come for themes: you can now upload a logo in place of the text-based site title you have now. Once uploaded, the logo can be edited with ImagePerfect to adjust its position, size, rotation, and to apply other effects. Even better, you can use ImagePerfect to add a fancy tagline from our selection of 60+ fonts. To get started, hover your mouse over the site title area and you'll see the button to switch to a logo. Don't have a logo? Our friends at 99designs gave us links to provide $10 off a logo from their store or $20 off a logo contest. Check out a few examples of the new logo feature in action: Another change you'll notice is that your site title or logo links back to the homepage of your website. This was a top feature request and an important usability improvement -- most visitors expect it.
Improvements to photos In addition to the above, we've made two slight tweaks to photos. Now, when you upload a photo, it will automatically size to the full width of the column it's placed in. In most situations, this is the size you want, but you're still free to resize the image however you'd like.
 The second change to photos is with how they are linked to the larger version. You'll now see a "Link to full-sized image" button and, when enabled, the larger image will open in a lightbox when the smaller one is clicked on.
Featured Sites Blog If you haven't yet had the chance, take a peek at our new Featured Sites Blog, which replaces our old Site of the Day. This is our dedicated place to showcase your incredible websites. Our first post showed off a number of stunning photography websites. For the next post, we'll be featuring the sites best taking advantage of our new logo feature. Once you've added a logo to your site, submit it here for a chance to be featured next! What's next? As you know, we're working on a series of improvements to our theming engine to allow multiple page types, flexible footer areas, search, social media buttons, and much more. In today's release, we've added logo support and will continue to release these additional theming improvements as fast as possible. Our San Francisco-based team has been burning the midnight oil, continuing to improve Weebly and make it better for you every day. But long days at work aren't bad -- we're excited and energized by the amazing sites you're building. As always, we deeply appreciate your support and would love to hear your feedback!
While we spend a lot of time focusing on major improvements, we also make sure to keep an eye on the little things you use over and over. We just recently released updates to the Linker that will help you create links faster and easier. We've reduced the number of clicks it takes to add a link, from four to one. You can now instantly start typing a website, and then just hit "enter". That might not sound like much, but when you repeat the process a hundred times, it makes life a whole lot easier.
Even better, you can now search to find Pages or Files you've uploaded. If you're a power user, this is also a huge time saver.
Enjoy these new changes. We're gearing up for a bigger release next week, but wanted to give you something in the meantime while you wait!
A few months ago, we noted that many of the top requested features were related to the design of your sites, and so we spent our summer radically improving the flexibility and possibilities for Weebly themes. We're releasing the culmination of these efforts today: a vastly improved theming engine and a new Designer Platform. Designer Platform  Weebly's new Designer Platform allows designers to create websites for their clients without all the hassle. It's a white-labeled solution that lets the designer add staff to help design sites, and gives clients the ability to edit them. If you're a designer or developer, head over to the Designer Platform home page, or view our blog post announcing the release in more detail.
Improved Theming Engine This release is all about the flexibility of Weebly's theming capabilities, paving the way for more beautiful, more flexible, and more professional websites built with Weebly. The key improvements to the theming engine include support for: - Multiple page types: Instead of every page of your site sharing the same layout, you will now be able to create landing pages, splash pages, pages with or without header images, and more -- the types are configurable by each theme, so each theme can be unique in its own way.
- Logo in the header: You will be able to easily upload a logo to replace your site title.
- Search boxes: Themes will now be able to incorporate a search box, allowing your visitors to search your site to find the content they're looking for.
- Fixed text and image areas: Add your phone number and address at the top and bottom of your site, or have Facebook, Twitter and Google+ share buttons more prominently located.
- Multiple draggable areas: These allow your site to have global sidebars and more flexible footer areas like you see on the Weebly homepage.
To give you a sense for what these improvements look like, we’ve included screenshots below of a few of the themes we’re currently developing and will release in the near future. We’re spending significant time converting all the existing themes on Weebly to support these improvements as well. If you feel comfortable editing the HTML and CSS of your theme yourself, jump right into our new Theme Editor to take advantage of these improvements today! Check out our help documentation to get started. For everyone else, you’ll be seeing a diverse set of new themes and updates to your existing themes being rolled out over the next few weeks and months. Since these are significant changes, we'll be taking some time to make sure your existing sites can migrate over without a hitch -- the last thing we'd want is for your current site to get messed up. We’re extremely excited about these updates and can’t wait to get the improvements into your hands as soon as possible. Our renewed focus on design will help make your site both more powerful and attractive. As always, our team is continuing to work night and day to make Weebly better for you. We appreciate your support and would love to hear your feedback!
One of the hardest parts of building a website is finding good pictures and photos. To help, we recently released the ability to purchase professional, royalty-free photos right from the image selector. When you search for an image, Weebly will now show you results from professional photographers, in addition to free Creative Commons images from Flickr. What's the difference between the two? Professional photos cost $5 each, and you are free to use them throughout your site. Free photos require attribution (that little message placed at the bottom of your site) and are generally lower-quality. Once you find an image you like, you can now also add free and professional images to your Favorites for easy reference. We're constantly at work improving Weebly for you, to keep making it easier to build a great looking, professional website. We have several large updates in the pipeline that we will be releasing soon. In the meantime, we love to hear your feedback -- be sure to vote on what features you'd like us to tackle next!
Our San Francisco-based team is working around the clock to help make Weebly better for you day-in and day-out, and we love to hear your feedback on what we should focus on next. To help us prioritize our list of a million ideas, the newest member of the team, Steve, built us a new feature request board in his first week at Weebly. It not only looks and acts quite a bit nicer than the old one, but it also helps us determine which features are most requested by different types of users -- like Pro users, so that we can send those to the top of the pack. Have a special feature that you'd love to see in Weebly? Go and vote now! We'll be actively working off of that list to decide our roadmap. Thanks again for your support, and keep the feedback coming!
 Good news if you’re looking to learn the ins-and-outs of Weebly — we’re now offering free online live training sessions. Join our Head of Customer Satisfaction, Richard, for one of two sessions that take place every week: Beginner's Guide to Weebly on Tuesdaysor Advanced Website Editing on ThursdaysEach session is an hour long with 50 minutes of presentation time / 10 minutes of Q&A, and is streamed live to your computer. You can listen to the audio via your speakers or a pair of headphones. Learn more about both these presentations on the Live Training page of our help site. The sessions are recorded to ensure that even if you miss out on the live version, you’ll still be able to access all the information provided. Check out the recording of a previous Beginner’s Guide to Weebly presentation.
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