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celebratoryTopic: General Tripod News
Webon has been upgraded!
Major Webon Upgrade
You may notice that the Webon site builder looks a little different now (understatement). After months of work, the latest version has been released. Last fall, we took a long, hard look at how the current version functioned and discussed what we could do to make it better while at the same time giving users features they've been asking for. We studied the interface, looked at our competitors, pored over your survey comments, and dissected the current tools. Afterward we agreed that there were a number of things that we could improve. Our team spent long hours discussing all the details... the editor tools, the user experience, the overall design, technical database issues, and a lot more. Then we set to work on a major overhaul that has been going on behind the scenes for over 7 months. The entire interface has changed. We reorganized the interface to make all the tools work in a logical, unified, and consistent way. All of the functions can now be found in one of the 5 tabs along the top of the editor. The old interface just wasn't going to meet the needs of the features that we are going to add in the future. We were literally running out of screen space. Now everything is cleaner, more dynamic, and more fun to play with!
New Function Tabs
The Text Editing Tab has been completely rewritten from scratch. You can now edit your text and change its font and size more easily. If at any point the text gets out of whack, the new "Clear Text Formatting" button will come to save the day. The new Media Tab will allow you to drag-and-drop your images, video, audio, and documents directly onto the page. The Add-ons Tab will do the same thing. And the Styles and Pages Tabs have also been reorganized from the old pop-up version to be more efficient and more consistent. Can't find what you're looking for? The Tabs now have a search box that will narrow your lists of items and help you find the one you are seeking.
New Webon Help Site
Another important element of this release is our New Help Site... located at http://webonhelp.com. We have included detailed video tutorials on each of the 5 new function Tabs, a tutorial on Publishing your site, and a quick, 2-minute "Getting Started" video. We also moved all of our Knowledgebase items and written tutorials into this site. We will be working hard this summer to continue to improve the new Help Site and we'll be actively seeking your feedback and suggestions about what else to add to it.
The Text Editing Tab has been completely rewritten from scratch. You can now edit your text and change its font and size more easily. If at any point the text gets out of whack, the new "Clear Text Formatting" button will come to save the day. The new Media Tab will allow you to drag-and-drop your images, video, audio, and documents directly onto the page. The Add-ons Tab will do the same thing. And the Styles and Pages Tabs have also been reorganized from the old pop-up version to be more efficient and more consistent. Can't find what you're looking for? The Tabs now have a search box that will narrow your lists of items and help you find the one you are seeking.
New Webon Help Site
Another important element of this release is our New Help Site... located at http://webonhelp.com. We have included detailed video tutorials on each of the 5 new function Tabs, a tutorial on Publishing your site, and a quick, 2-minute "Getting Started" video. We also moved all of our Knowledgebase items and written tutorials into this site. We will be working hard this summer to continue to improve the new Help Site and we'll be actively seeking your feedback and suggestions about what else to add to it.
Some Technical Details
Looking under the hood for the technically inclined, we did a lot of work on the scripting side of the editor. We are now employing an advanced JavaScript library called jQuery, which makes developing sites like this easy and fast. The jQuery library allows us to make Webon speedier while reducing the code size by 66%. It provides nice ways of performing animations, making AJAX calls and has built-in modules for building common UI elements, like tabs and buttons.
Looking under the hood for the technically inclined, we did a lot of work on the scripting side of the editor. We are now employing an advanced JavaScript library called jQuery, which makes developing sites like this easy and fast. The jQuery library allows us to make Webon speedier while reducing the code size by 66%. It provides nice ways of performing animations, making AJAX calls and has built-in modules for building common UI elements, like tabs and buttons.
The Future of Webon
Now that this release is out, we will be hard at work making Webon even better. We will be focusing on fixing bugs and even more speed improvements as well as lots of new features. We want to have a comprehensive library of add-ons available to use, more styles & customization options, ways to interact with friends and other site builders, and much more. And all time we will always be striving to make Webon ever faster, more stable, and more intuitive. We hope you'll join us for the ride.
Now that this release is out, we will be hard at work making Webon even better. We will be focusing on fixing bugs and even more speed improvements as well as lots of new features. We want to have a comprehensive library of add-ons available to use, more styles & customization options, ways to interact with friends and other site builders, and much more. And all time we will always be striving to make Webon ever faster, more stable, and more intuitive. We hope you'll join us for the ride.
In a launch like this we test extensively, and we hope we covered all our bases. We hope that your experience building a website is fantastic. We'd love to hear what you think. If you see any issues or see ways that we can improve our product even more, please let us know! We are absolutely listening.
Thank you,
James Brooks
Senior Product Manager of Web Publishing
Joshua Drumm
Software Engineer of Web Publishing
Posted by team-blog
at 7:17 AM PDT
Updated: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 10:39 AM PDT
