Tripod Control Panel Upgrade
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Foo Fighters
Topic: General Tripod News

Greetings Tripod Users,

Next week we will be releasing an upgrade to the Tripod Control Panel designed to make it easier to use and understand.

Click this to see a screen capture of the updated Control Panel on our developement server where it is undergoing final testing.

IMPORTANT: no functionality has changed! But... there are a few differences in terms of where things are located.

We've removed the "subnavigation" bar because all of those functions are now contained within the Control Panel.

We've also removed the need for the Webon "Site Manager" by adding the 'Delete' and 'Rename' functions right into the main Tripod Control Panel.

Finally, please notice the link to our Webon Features Survey in the upper left corner. You can't miss it... it's the big, blue button. Or you can just click here to take the survey.

If you use Webon please take a few minutes to fill that out. It will help us to decide what to focus on this year. Your feedback and opinions are so very valuable to us and we thank you in advance for your time!

Working With Pages and Navigation in Webon

You can create as many pages for your website you like within the limits of the disk space allocated to your account. Your Tripod Site Builder's Page Manager lets you quickly add, delete and change the order of your pages.

    * Add a Page
    * Delete a Page
    * Jump to a Page
    * Duplicate a Page
    * Reorder Pages

Click Pages on the menu in the site builder editor.

To add a page, click the icon with a plus sign next to Pages on the left. To delete a page, click the icon with the minus sign.To jump to a page, select it and click the icon with the left pointing arrow. To duplicate a page, click the icon with the plus sign and two pages on the right.

Check the box if you want the page to appear in your website’s navigation menu. Leave it unchecked if you want to create a subpage.

To change the page order in your navigation bar, follow these steps:

    * Click Pages on the menu at the top of the screen.
      Select the page you wish to move.
    * Using your mouse, drag the page up or down depending on where you want it to appear in the site navigation.
    * Click the Save button once the pages are in the order in which you want them to appear.
    * Click Publish if you want your changes to be viewable on your public website.

If you would like to use two navigation bars on your webpages (like putting nav bars at the top and bottom of your page) use the Navigation Add-on. If you would like your nav bar to run vertically drop the Navigation Add-on into a sidebar.

For an explanation of how to optimize your pages for search engines, go to Search Engine Optimization (below).

Latest Issue of Handcrafted
Tripod's Handcrafted newsletter just hit the streets. Featured: 8 Ways to Write Effective Link Text. Check your email box.

We've been busy as heck

We've been burning the midnight oil around her in the past month or so.

We've introduced some new Add-ons as we mentioned in our last post and we have a few more that are about to drop.

In the works are Add-ons for Facebook, poll and shopping cart. Those should be out soon.

The library or styles or templates is growing fast. We're up to 150 now and we're shooting for at least 180 in the weeks ahead.

 

Tripod Handcrafted Newsletter is Out
Check your inbox for the just-released Tripod Handcrafted newsletter or read it online at http://handcrafted.tripod.com/.

What's New in Webon
We've just made Webon even more fun and useful with two new widgets:

• Last.fm -- Let your site visitors know what you're listening to on Last.fm.
• Flickr -- Post photos from your Flickr account on your webpages.

Also, we tweaked the Google Map add-on so it works more reliably with Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Remember, all our add-ons are a snap to use. Open a webpage, click the Add-ons menu item, select an add-on and drag and drop it on to your page.

New Styles — We've also added some new style templates this month, bringing the total number of available styles to 119.

New Telephone Support Hours

Tripod has extended its telephone support hours for paid members. The new hours are 10 AM to 10 PM Eastern Standard Time.

Webon Table Tool Gets a Makeover
We’ve just launched a significant update to Webon’s Table tool that makes it easier to use and more reliable. We’ve also streamlined the interface so that using the tool is more intuitive. The updates include the ability to: 

• Click in a cell and start typing
• Resize the table while keeping the rows and columns in proportion
• Insert and remove columns and rows with a right mouse click
• Set the background color of each cell
• Align text to the top, middle or bottom of each cell 
• Select multiple columns and rows and set the background color and text alignment for all of them!
• Drag and drop images, video and other media into cells and rearrange them.

Today we released some significant upgrades to Webon and I am pleased to tell you about them here:

• New Text Formatting Bar
  It takes up less height with all the tools together in one line. This gives you more room to see and work with your site.
  
  
• Text Tools now deal with text pasted from MS Word
  If you paste in text from Word Webon will now ask you if you want to remove the formatting or keep it.
  
  
• "Clear Formatting" Function Improved
  The Clear Formatting Function is now located under the "Style" drop-down and has been improved to handle pre-formatted text.
  
  
• Text Tools stability increased
  Overall we think you'll find your text behaving better and with a greater sense of control and finesse.
  
  
• New HyperLink Managment
  With the new system you create links the same way but if you want to edit or remove them now you just click directly on them in your page and a small dialog box appears with 'edit' and 'remove'  as selectable choices.
  
  
• Improved Saving
  When you click "Save" Webon now saves every bit of your page, not just the stuff it thinks changed... we believe this will solve the problem where some users are seeing changes now save.
  
  
• Pages Tab streamlined
  The Pages Tab has been updated slightly for a cleaner look.
  
  
• New Save/Publish Buttons
  These buttons have been updated to follow a slightly more standard approach that users should find more straightforward

Please let us know how these changes are working out for you. We check in here all the time.

Next up is some upgrades to the Table Tool! Yayyy Table Tool gets love.

Tripod Updates for June 15, 2010
Mood:  happy
Topic: General Tripod News
Today we released four new styles for the Webon Site Builder. "Burst," "Butterfly Sunrise," "Cake Surprise," and "Traversing the Moon" are now available for you to try out and build some excellent websites with them!

A re-release of the style "Americana" was put out a few days ago.  The re-release fixed some reported issues with the top navigation bar.  If you are experiencing any issues with your Webon style, be sure to check and see if a new version of your selected style has been released.  We are currently working on a way to do this automatically for you. However, until that functionality is completed, you can see if you have an up-to-date style by hovering over its thumbnail, in the style tab, and checking out the "date created."  If it's a more recent date than when you originally applied the style, then a new version had been released.  We will also be sure to make announcements whenever we update our styles.

In other Tripod news, we have listened to all of your comments about our recent Control Panel changes, and we taking them into consideration as we continue to update Tripod and make it easier to use.  In our most recent update we have moved your Account Information back to the top of the Control Panel.  You can now view it in it's limited state, or by clicking the "More Account Information" link, you can see more detailed information. (You can also still go to the 'My Account' link and view your information there.)  We plan to expand this section in the future to make it even more useful for you.

Also on the Control Panel, we have made the default view for Domains & E-Mail, hidden.  By just clicking on the "Show Domains & E-Mail" link, that section will expand out to show you all the information that was there previously.  We did this so you only have to view that information if you actually need to manage your domains or e-mail, as opposed to it constantly taking up space and pushing the links to your websites/blogs/photo albums further down the page.

As James mentioned in his previous post, we have a text tool update for Webon that is close to being released, and we're also tightening the screws all around Webon & Tripod in general.  Expect more updates in the coming days/weeks/months.  We're excited about what we're working on, and we hope you are too.

Thanks for using Tripod!

Scott O'Hara
Designer / Front-end Developer of Web Publishing