We are so sorry to keep you all on the down low for the past few months. First of all on behalf of the entire Neosites crew we wish you all a happy 2012! We hope that your 2012 started full of projects and challenges.

For Neosites, 2011 ended with a lot of new features and improvements. As for 2012, we have a great year ahead of us as we will keep growing and developing new features, in order to provide you with all the tools that will help you obtain a professional site the easiest and simplest way.

Let’s start by giving you the big news! During 2011 we’ve rolled out two big new features that have been a great success amongst our users: slideshow editor on the homepage and a new e-shop.

The slideshow editor is really easy to setup, you just need to upload your list of images, choose a transition effect, save the changes…and that’s it! Your slideshow is ready to be published.

The new E-shop is just as fast and easy to set up as the old one, but we’ve added an impressive amount of features, tools and design improvements.

Let’s check out some of the new features:

-Stock control
-Display of different attributes
-Sale tags
-Variety of currencies
-Personalized URL for each of your products

We hope you enjoy and make the best of this new tool. Remember, in case of doubt, please contact us at support@neosites.com

The improvements this time around point principally at Neosites’s speed and system performance. Lets get to know a little about what they are all about:

-The time it takes for web pages to load has improved substantially.
-Load time for editing websites has improved significantly.
-We have experienced a 50% reduction in queries to the database
-Important improvements have been implemented with the storing of images.

All of these changes will notably improved the creation process, editing and updating your website, plus letting you visitors access your website a whole lot quicker.

We hope that you are as happy as we are with these new changes and have a chance to fully take advantage of them!

On behalf of the entire Neosites crew, we wish you the best end to this holiday season. We hope that 2010 ends on a good note and wish you a fantastic start to 2011, full of interesting projects and challenges.

HAPPY 2011 TO ALL!!

Many of you may remember that a few months back we launched a brand new tool called “Sites by Activity”. This new tool was designed to facilitate, improve and streamline the web creation process. After mulling over and analyzing the options, we have rolled up our sleeves and today are proud to announce the launch of “Sites by Activity” with even more perks than ever before!

Lets check some of them out…

Inside every category you will find details of all the activities we have included as part of our layouts. Professional photographers, hair dressers, musicians, carpenters, lawyers, Djs, athletes… every one has a wide variety of designs totally adapted to an activity amongst many choices!

But that’s not all! As we mentioned before, at Neosites we love giving out gifts, and that is why this new and advanced version of our amazing tool comes with over 350 new variations of design to choose from to create your website.

If you have just started to build your website, or you have already created one and where thinking about changing your design, don’t waste any time and take a look at our new designs and tell us what you think.

Good luck to you all!

We at Neosites want your business to grow, and being that you offer products or services, we want to give out some Holiday cheer in the form of advice so that you are not caught off guard and miss out on this opportunity to maximize your sale potential.

Lets see some suggestions.

-Updating your design. To be on top of things for the Holidays, the first thing you can do is edit your images (this goes for your Homepage as well as your secondary pages) by adding Holiday themed images. Remember that you can always go back and replace everything with what was there before, or add new images altogether. Sending Seasons Greeting to your visitors with a Happy Holidays message is always a good way to go.

-Special Holiday Offers. Be it with friends or family, we are accustomed to celebrating this special time with others. That is why that when to come to buying presents, people tend to look for special Holiday offers in order to take some of the pressure of the old pocket book. With that in mind, and knowing that you offer some kind of goods or services, this is a great time to publish special offers that will help increase your sales. This could take the form of discounts, combos, benefits, gifts or anything else that comes to mind. The important thing is to take advantage of this opportunity and be prepared ahead of time. Don’t forget that it is always a good idea to advertise these offers on the Homepage of your website.

-Promote those special offers. Once you have finished publishing your special offers and Holiday design changes, it’s time to get the word out. Lucky for you, with Neosites you can count on a wide array of marketing and promotional tools that will help you draw more visitors and increase your sales. First of all, make sure you get the word out, via e-mail, to all your contacts and clients by using our promotional tools. The next step is to make an announcement in your website Blog. And last but not least, share all the details in your personal social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin) as well as those of your business and of Neosites (if you don’t have one, there is no better time than the present to sign up).

-Create new adds in Google Adwords. If you already use this system to promote your site, don’t forget to promote your special Holiday offers. Create new adds and get your campaign moving!

-Activate your Shopping cart and incorporate E-commerce. If you make use of all the advice that we have doled out up until now, you will surely be getting more orders and solicitations for your products. Therefore, if you want to be completely ready to handle this surge in orders and capitalize on as many sales a possible, there are two tools that can make thing much easier. We are talking about the Shopping Cart and the system of E-Commerce which you can have of by simply contracting a PREMIUM PRO or GOLD plan. Once you activate the Shopping Cart you can receive orders directly from your website, and by activating the system of E-commerce you can directly receive payments online. With these two tools you will be more than prepared to take on the Holiday Season.

We are confident that by applying this simple advice in an intelligent manner you can gain an incredible advantage over your competitors over the Holidays. We hope you take this advice to heart and we would like to know how things work out for you. If you have any ideas or advice of your own that you would like to pass on to the Neosites community, please publish them. As always, we love to get feedback from our users.

Good luck, Happy Holidays, and get cracking!

Anyone who has already investigated this topic already know how important it is to get links that point toward your site, but why are they so significant?

A good way to look at, is to think of back links as recommendations. We ask a friends opinion when looking for a place to eat, well links work in the same way. A link to your website is like a recommendation, and the more recommendations you have, the better your ranking in Google. Think of it as a vote of confidence for your website’s content. The quality of that recommendation is also important. The more popular and higher ranking the website that has your link, the further the benefit you receive with respect to your ranking. Summing up, the more back links pointing towards your website equals more ways for Google to find you, thereby resulting in a better ranking.

Now that we have got that cleared up, lets take a look at how to get some of those valuable links. Here are some things to take into consideration:

-Keep your Blog up to date with points of interest for visitors. By doing so, visitors will be inclined to reference your site or blog, and thereby be more likely to share it with their contacts. We highly recommended that you include widgets to promote your posts inside social networks and RSS feeds. This is probably the most effective way to get links to your site.

-Participate in the blogs of others. Collaborating and giving opinions is appreciated among Bloggers. By participating in discussions related to your field, it generates interest in your topic.

-Include your Blog in Blog directories.

-Be a part of Social Networks. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are a good place to get to know people and exchange opinions and content with visitors. This is a good way to gain confidence, and furthermore, attract people you would like to meet. For more visibility, promote your Blog in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and include a link to your website.

-Get involved with your users and reciprocate. Answer comments in the most transparent way possible, be it positive or negative. If you get offers to exchange links, or receive a link from a site of interest, you can always respond by adding their link to your site. Reciprocating always looks good.

-And last but not least, we recommend that you get in contact with the entire community of Neosites entrepreneurs. This can be done through Facebook or through our Blog. There are other movers and shakers, such as yourself, interested in your content and are ready to carry out strategic investigations between websites. Remember that with Neosites, you can always take advantage of the Related Links page in order to exchange links in the event that you have received a proposition.

We hope that some of these recommendations can be put into practice and we would like to know how it all works out.

Much success!

Keywords are labels that Google uses to identify the content of your website, it is vital that you select them properly so as to guide traffic to your website. We recommend that you select 5 words separated by comas. That way, for example, if we had to choose keywords for a company that specializes in furniture and interiors design we would use the keywords: interior design, furniture design, furniture, modern furniture and interiors. Lets look at a more specific example:

Why are keywords so important? Well, as we stated earlier, these words will direct traffic to your website, they are the search criteria that visitors use to find your website. When properly chosen, this determines the success of your strategy and the quality of your visits. Returning to the furniture and interior design example, obviously the visits we want are those that require those types of services and not the ones interested in cleaning products. This is what we refer to when we talk about quality visits.

So then, how do I select the appropriate keywords?

First of all, you should have a well defined the goal for your site and know the public that it is directed at. It is very important that if you are going to offer goods and/or services, you should know who those your visitors are and what they want. Second, you need to know the competition. With a simple word search in Google you can get a good idea on how to focus your advertising, the services or products that are (and are not) offered, giving you an opportunity to reinforce your weaknesses and strengthen your virtues. Something many people do not take advantage of are some of the tools that will help you intelligently select your keywords, like Google trends and the keyword tool in Google AdWords. These will optimize your selection of keywords as you will see if the ones you selected work well in searches.

-Google AdWords: although you may not use this type of advertising, AdWords offers an external tool that gives you the ability to come up with ideas for keywords by finding a URL with the same heading to see which keywords and criteria are related. If you are just starting out, it is a good idea to choose words that have little competition (in common).

-Google Trends: allows you to follow up on which searches are most popular in Google and how frequent a particular topic is searched.

The last thing to take into account is how important it is to do follow up of your campaigns and the return they produce. For this you can use our Statistics tool and make your own conclusions depending on the amount of increased traffic on your website or the impact it has on the quantity of visits generated from the new keywords.

We hope that you can take advantage of this advice to improve your ranking in Google. Once again we love to hear your questions and opinions on the subject.

Take care and may you have much success in your endeavors!

If your website is relatively new it is normal that your site does not immediately figure in Google right after publication, this is because it always takes a little bit of time for it to appear. This is why we are going to give you a couple of tips that will not only help include your site in a search, but improve your ranking and get you more traffic. Lets take a look.

Edit your Title, Description and Keywords:

The title is the heading that Google will cast into searches, it should contain no more than 10 words, or around 50-60 characters. The description accompanies the title in the search results and should have somewhere around 40 words at the most. Finally we have the keywords, which are the labels that Google uses to identify content on the web, and those should be no more than 5 words separated by commas. Only the title and description will appear in the search but it is very important to select key words indicating what the search criteria is for your site. It is highly recommended that your key words are also included in your title and description.

Get links to your site:

It is very important that you get your friends websites and social networks to link to your website. Tracing common links is one way Google uses to recognize new sites.

Create relevant content:

It is also important that the texts in your content have relevant information and do not repeat in your other pages. It goes without saying that it helps to have everything well written and spelled correctly as well. Make sure that your keywords are included inside the text of your content, this is something Google pays attention to when indexing your URL.

Include your URL in other search engines:

The first step is to include your URL in Google, but remember that you can also include your sites URL in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo for example.

Lucky for you, Neosites is so complete that it has all of these tools (plus others that we will get to later on) included in our system:

-We offer an easy Google inclusion system that not only permits you to personalize and actualize your title, description and keywords, but also allows you to directly include your URL manually from PROMOTE YOUR SITE!

-Text editors inside your Homepage and secondary pages to make introducing quality content more accessible.

We hope that you can take advantage of this advice to included your site in Google and improve your ranking in search engines. As always, we would love to hear your comments and opinions.

Good luck!

Neosites has 12 different types of modules, or secondary pages, for you to use in your website.

-Contents: use this to your advantage by including corporate text and general information in your site alongside images and video.

-Newsfeeds: you can add texts and images in newsfeed format to keep your page up to date.

-Image gallery: allows you to add images organized into folders with a title and description so you can display photos, designs, etc.

-Product catalog: this is a very useful tool to show products for sale online. You can even activate a shopping cart and an e-commerce system.

-Blog: will allow you make periodical updates on various themes to maintain your website up to date with interesting topics for you and your visitors.

-Videos: watch videos from Youtube right from your website. Organize them into different folders.

-Downloads album: allows you store your files in folders with a description so that visitors to the site can find them for download.

-Forms: this is a very useful tool for getting information about your users, subscriptions to newsletters or courses they may be taking, getting a quote, etc. Your visitors only need to fill out the required fields and send you the completed form.

-Contact: this is a fundamental tool to add to your site being that from here you will be able to receive queries from your visitors. You will be able to include your contact information so that visitors can get in touch with you by filling out a form that even includes a thank you note.

-Forums: is a useful tool for generating discussions and debates over a variety of areas of intrest for you and your visitors.

-FAQs (frequently asked questions): get all the most commonly asked inquiries about your website out of the way and in one place.

-Friends links: with friends links you can add links with images and descriptions to your friends sites thereby swapping advertising and links.

It is important to understand that it is not necessary to include all modules in your site. To know which secondary pages to include, it is key to know where you want your site to point, what you want to achieve and how to convey this to your visitors. That is why we will discus the correct choice of secondary pages and the content that it should display. Lets check this example out:

An interior design company chose a layout that emphasizes image and design over text. They also added the logo of their brand taking into account the colors and theme of the site. When we examine the direction and goal of the site, we understand the ‘why’ behind their choice in secondary pages. As we mentioned earlier, Harbour Design is an firm that specializes in furniture and interior design and they will always push their products in a certain direction because they know that their visitors are interested in decorating their home or office. This is why there are two image galleries (Projects and works), a catalogue of products (Products), two pages for content with information about the company (Business and services), and a contact page (Contacts). Clearly we can see how the goal of the site has determined the choice of secondary pages.

Some useful advice for everyone:

-Understand that it is not necessary to include all the modules into your site and that the same module can be used more than once.

-Organize your secondary pages logically to simplify navigating within your site.

-Don’t make the titles of your secondary pages too long, that way they will fit nicely into the menu.

-If all of your secondary pages do not fit into your site, or if you do not wish some to be accessible, remember that you can leave them as inactive and link them to the images of your homepage, the texts of your homepage or other secondary pages.

-Remember to always use the contact page so that your visitors will be able to contact you.

Don’t waste more time! Put this advise into practice to improve your website. And, as you already know, any questions you can post here or go directly to our Help Center.

Lot’s of luck!

Once you start working with Neosites and choose the layout that you like (and most suits your needs), you will immediately be transported into the world of web design. The first step is to edit your homepage with the goal of making it as esthetically pleasing and eye catching as possible, because after all, this will be the first page people see when they come to visit. But take it easy! If you are a newcomer to this world, no worries. Editing your homepage is as simple as adding and subtracting thanks to our advanced logo, text and image editors. You can have your homepage ready in a question of minutes and by navigating the system you will realizehow easy it is. Either way, we would like to give you some advice to help your homepage be a success!

Step by step, starting with …

Your Logo: personalizing your logo is the first step in giving a personal touch and that hint of distinction you want for your homepage. Keep in mind that visitors will remember the website because of two things: your domain name and your homepage, this is why a well designed logo that respects the theme of the homepage will bring visitors. Remember that you can upload your own logo, but if you do not yet have a logo designed this is not a problem. With our advanced Logo editor you can now create this key professional feature with ease!

Some useful advice:
-We recommend that if you already have a logo, that the file is a .gif or a .png and that it is not pixilated;
- In order for it to be seen completely, make sure that the Logo does not exceed the work space window of the editor;
-Try to respect that the screen colors and to follow the same esthetic direction;
-Don’t clutter up your logo with unnecessary words, this tends to take away emphasis from the icon.

Lets look at this example:

The Images: together with your Logo are the keys to accompany and help define your website. With the help of our Image Editor you will be able to edit the size, properties as well as add effects! This is why it is not only important to have quality images to work with but also because they are so interlinked with what you want to show with your site.

Other useful advise:
-Try to upload high quality images that are not pixilated;
-Respect the colors of your layout and logo, this will make it tidy and keep the hompage theme consistent throughout the site;
-If the image is bigger than the work area, resize it so that the part you wish to show fits nicely into the window;
-If you add effects to the images, make sure they all have the same effect to keep them consistent your homepage.

Check out this example:

The Texts: the design you choose will determine whether your homepage will have text or not. If you do have text, add only the most relevant information to start with. You can introduce more text throughout the site at  the different sections that have been developed specifically for secondary pages.

Some useful advice:
-We recommend editing every box of text;
-Try to not add a long string of text your homepage, if it is all cluttered up with words, it can become bothersome and disorient your visitors;
-If you mention a secondary page in a text, it is a good idea to link it to that text;
-Check your spelling.

Lets get a closer look at the following website:

What are you waiting for? Now is the time to put this advice into practice! Don’t forget that if you have any questions while you are editing your homepage you can contact us on support@neosites.com or go directly to our Help Center.

Good luck with your project!

As we had mentioned in the previous post , this new tool will significantly improve and reduce creation time.

Let’s see how it works:

1)Choose your design according to your Activity…

2)Once your selection is confirmed you will have an example site, with logo, text and images with secondary page suggestions that serves as a model for you to work over. Furthermore, we have implemented a change in our Logo Editor that we are quite proud of: You can nowchoose between creating your own logo as well as using a suggested logo as a model which you can work on top of. This will assure that the esthetic of the site always stays in tact.

3)Once you have fininshed editing your homepage and secondary pages you are ready to publish your site and start promoting it!

We are very pleased with our new launch and hope that everyone will be able to take full advantege of what it has to offer. We would love to hear opinions, suggestions and don’t forget to let us know if a system error occurs (not that we expect any).

Creating a website has never been so easy!