SynthaSite will be exhibiting at the ISP Conference in Chicago tomorrow through Thursday. Myself & our VP of Marketing, Randy Almond will be manning the booth and we’re looking forward to meeting with any prospective partners that would be interested in working with us! Please feel free to stop by the booth and introduce yourself if you’re one of our existing users, or if you’re interested in working with us! See you at the conference!

Vinny Lingham
CEO, SynthaSite

We’ve just released the latest set of SynthaSite features. The highlight is that the color palette of many of our styles can now be changed. We were really keen to get this feature out as soon as possible so that we could get your feedback so please let us know what you think! In the future we will make it possible for you to set individual properties of the style so that you can customize the look of your site to your hearts content. We’ll be rolling out many more color palettes over the next couple of weeks so please check back soon for updates.

Another highlight is the File Widget which is useful if you want your site visitors to download a file from your website. We’ve also added map markers to the Google Map Widget. We don’t want anyone getting lost now do we!?

For detailed information about the latest changes and bug fixes please refer to our release notes.

The problem that prevented some users from creating sites has been resolved and the service is fully restored.

Our user base has grown substantially over the past few months and we have been working hard to make sure that our infrastructure can accommodate the increased traffic. Last night we unexpectedly reached capacity on one of our servers which is why new users were temporarily unable to create new sites. It is important to note that this issue did not affect existing sites in any way.

Now that we have resolved this limitation we will continue to improve our service with the aim of providing the highest possible uptime and availability. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience.

We are aware of an issue affecting our service that is preventing some of our users from creating new sites.

Our engineers are working hard and fast to resolve this and will keep you updated.

We take the quality of our service very seriously and problems such as this one are just not acceptable - please accept my apologies if you have been affected by this issue. We will keep you up-to-date and learn from our mistakes.

Both the website and Site Builder were updated yesterday.

We always include a number of improvements that are not obvious, but that make the tools and hosting environment better. You can view a list of the tangible updates here. If I were to pick a personal favourite it would be that there are now 24 styles that allow you to change your banner image, something that a lot of you have been asking for.

Other highlights include some excellent tutorials and the ability to invite friends from your existing networks and address books. This means you can help us spread the word about SynthaSite, and in the future you can choose to connect to some of those people (if they agree) from within SynthaSite - doing things like letting them know about website updates and even collaborating on a site together.

We have rolled out new updates to both the Site Builder and our website.

The Site Builder now boasts a bunch of new features which will allow you to add forms, maps, Google AdSense and other widgets and gadgets to your sites. There are new Styles to choose from and it is now easy to manage all types of resources and link to them.

We have also put some effort into making it easier to get going with your first SynthaSite - we have tutorials on how to create, populate and publish your site, as well as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and searchable support. There are some site and profile management features accessible directly from the website once you have logged in.

You can read the release notes for full detail.

Let us know what you think.

We’ve just rolled out some cool new features and have also fixed a few bugs. Firstly, we have integrated picnik.com’s fantastic image editor. Now you can resize, crop, rotate and adjust the colors of your pictures from within SynthaSite!

Another feature is that it is now easy to use your own domain instead of a subdomain of synthasite.com. Look out for this option when you next publish your site.

We’ve also made it easier to save your pages. An “Auto Save” feature will make sure that your latest changes are always saved. You can also create a copy of a page by using the new “Save As” action. You can find this option under the “Site” menu.

Lastly, we’ve added a mini toolbar to our widgets that will make it easier to access various editing functions (see image below). We’ll be adding more actions to the widget toolbar over the next couple of weeks and months.

These are only the headline changes, you can view detailed release notes here.

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!!

Vinny Lingham

CEO, SynthaSite

I’m proud to announce that Synthasite has raised $5m from Swiss based, Columbus Venture Capital. The official press release is located here. This healthy injection of capital will allow us to grow very quickly next year, and release lots of new functionality and features.

We’re also planning to extend the templates and widget libraries considerably - right now, we’re a small team of engineers so it’s difficult to do everything that we have planned, but we’re going to skill up very quickly and the good news is that we’re now looking to setup a Silicon Valley office, and are looking for high class individuals to join us! Check out our Careers page to get an idea of the roles that we currently have available, and we’ll be announcing more roles as soon as we have defined them!

It’s an exciting time for us - thanks to all our users who have provided valuable feedback during the Beta and we look very forward to taking Synthasite to the next level!

Regards

Vinny Lingham
CEO, Synthasite

Synthasite is finally out in the open and has launched into Beta. We hope you are going to love the new features, including the ability to publish your websites. I’ve written about the launch on my personal blog, so instead I’m going to use this opportunity for some brief housekeeping items:

1. Terms and conditions have been updated.
2. For legal reasons, we have been advised to withdraw the 1m shares offer from the public domain, effective immediately. No shares have been issued. We really did try to embrace the spirit of collaboration and making users feel ownership, but unfortunately, regulators don’t see it our way and in the interest of ensuring that our site is accessible to everyone - we have had to make this decision.
3. Your old websites have been removed, as per our notice in the Alpha, however all new websites created will remain on Synthasite through any future versions.
4. Your old logins and passwords will work - if you have forgotten, please use the recovery link on the homepage.
5. Synthasite is free to use, and we are now offering free hosting and free sub-domains. We will never charge for the basic services that Synthasite provides - so don’t worry about the price going up

And please - send us all your feedback and comments to our email, support@synthasite.com!

Many thanks,

Vinny Lingham
Chief Executive Officer,
Synthasite (Pty) Ltd