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

Hi Everyone!

Thanks to everyone for all the testing and feedback! The good news it that we’re finally launching Synthasite into Beta and the confirmed date is 5 November 2007! Yup, it’s Guy Fawkes Day, so we hope that it will be a blast!

What can you expect in the Beta? Most importantly, we’ll have Publishing - so your site can go live after you’ve built it on one of our sub-domain names (xyz.synthasite.com). We’ll also have about a dozen site templates to start with and you’ll also be able to download your site or host it elsewhere (and edit the PHP code, if you want!).

That’s about all I can say right now, but there is a lot more in store - I’m just not making any promises. Our strategy is to release the Beta on 5 November, ensure that it’s stable and then roll out a heck of a lot of features in the weeks that follow.

We’ve really been busy trying to plan our architecture to ensure that we can scale the application to serve thousands of users, and also that we minimize any inconvenience to our Alpha testers as we migrate them the Beta platform.

That’s all from me this week. We’re trying to rotate the blogging between everyone in the team, so expect Peter, Stefan, Brent & David to post here on a weekly basis!

Thanks again for all the support!

Regards

Vinny Lingham
CEO, Synthasite

Thanks for sticking with us, the issue has been resolved. There might still be some problems with pages created during the downtime, please create new pages / projects to see if the problem persists.

Special thanks to everyone who gave us such speedy feedback the issue, we greatly appreciate your support and enthusiasm.

Enjoy the preview!

We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties, the problem manifests itself in that users are unable to create pages. We are currently working on the problem and hope to resolve it within the hour. We will keep you posted.

Due to an unprecedented demand, we have decided to add an additional 500 seats to the tech preview. We received 877 registrations within the first 24 hours and with reviews hitting the web, they are just getting faster. We will keep a close eye on the situation, however the registrations will be limited, 1123 at the time of writing. So get one while stocks last!

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the world of Synthasite. Over the next few weeks and months, we’re going to continue to build upon an exciting base, that we’ve just made public now - as an Alpha Release. Yes, we know it’s not perfect…yet, and we need YOUR help in driving Synthasite to become the de facto standard for Web Publishing. We’re looking forward to building our community of users and developers and your feedback in critical in this.

The Alpha release will give you a taste of what’s to come - and we’re continue to improve things like usability, speed, features & functionality - one step at a time!

I welcome you all to the future of software applications - on the Web!

Vinny Lingham
CEO, Synthasite

Official Press Release Follows:

Synthasite, an AJAX based Web Publishing Platform, emerged today from stealth mode. The 6-person startup based in Cape Town, South Africa was recently spun out from the incuBeta group as a separate stand-alone company that will focus on delivering a world class web based software platform for web publishing, focusing specifically on Widgets and Mashups. Synthasite looks and feels like desktop software, but remains firmly rooted in the browser with no reliance on client side technology.

Synthasite CEO, Vinny Lingham (Founder of a leading Search Engine Marketing company, incuBeta), said the following: “Synthasite’s Alpha [Tech Preview] release today was a milestone in the company’s aim to become the standard for web publishing. We’re releasing it at this early stage in order to allow the community to assist in the direction that we will take Synthasite and we are very excited about the potential for this space, especially with the rapid rise of Mashups and Widgets.”

“Synthasite ushers in a new era for web publishing; where people construct using existing building blocks, rather than build everything from scratch, and publish collaboratively from any machine rather than being stuck on a single PC or OS. We’re very excited about rapidly releasing many of the features on our extensive roadmap. We’re opening the Synthasite framework to the developer community so that they can build their own components and templates, and we will also be enabling source code level editing - although this will only be available in the Beta released, scheduled for Q4.”

Synthasite is also being tested on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which in theory allows it to be infinitely scalable, although accounts will initially be limited.

Synthasite is currently being seed funded by Lingham Capital, incuBeta and Miombo Capital, all South African based investment firms.