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Friday Roundup: Wisdom from Around the Web

We know your time is precious. So every Friday, we’ll be rounding up a few of the week’s best small business strategy, web marketing, and site tips for you to quickly scan, use, and just plain enjoy. Here goes!

Why & How to Use Mobile Tech
Most U.S. small businesses say they couldn’t run without mobile technologies, according to Jolie O’Dell at Mashable. Check out this fun infographic to see how – and why – you should leverage mobile for your business.

Pitching Your Story to the Media? Warm Up with These Tips
Jon Gelberg over at Small Business Trends tosses around some good hints about getting your story out there.

Measuring Facebook Impact
How do you maximize and measure your Facebook marketing results? Facebook Measurements That Matter offers solid data that’ll help answer the question and let you make the most of Facebook. Check it out over at Vitrue.

Share Photos & Video on Twitter. Finally!
Just in time for your Yola site’s awesome image gallery (the one you’re going to make with the new Picture Gallery widget), Twitter launched its own photo sharing service. The marketing possibilities for your site are exciting, so read all about it right here.

That’s it for this week. We hope this is news you can use.

Like it? Want more? Want something different? Leave a comment right here on the blog to let us know. We’ll get right on it.

Happy Friday!

Labels: News,Small Business | 2 Comments »

Yola’s 4 years old

This month we’re celebrating Yola’s 4th birthday!

In the last four years, 5 million customers worldwide have created their website using Yola. We are thrilled that you chose us over the other site builders and we thank you for your support. We would not be here without you.

As a special thanks for supporting us over the years we are celebrating by giving you a $10 off coupon* to use on your next purchase.

I want to highlight a few key features we are particularly proud of creating, for you:

• Over 100 professional designs for customizing your site, to suit your business or personal needs
• A wide variety of widgets you can easily drag and drop including maps, appointment booking, PayPal and more
• Over 11 Million royalty-free, professionally taken, photos from Fotolia available for your use
• CSS editing to give you maximum flexibility to customize your site
• Ability to build, customize and launch your site in 6 different languages

Our award winning 24/7 customer support team is always ready to answer your questions and we are proud to have a vibrant community of customers who actively engage with us on our blog and Facebook pages. Once again, thank you for being a Yola customer and I am very proud to be part of a team that is working hard to make your online business become more successful!

Warm wishes,

Vinny Lingham

CEO, Yola.com

P.S Don’t forget to use your $10 coupon before March 31st, 2011!

*$10 coupon can be used towards the purchase of Yola Premier, Yola Silver and Yola Bronze. The credit may also be used to renew existing custom domains. This offer does not include Yola Mail or Photo Credits. Discount will automatically be applied at checkout, coupon code is ‘yola4′. Offer ends Thursday 31st March 2011, 11:59pm PST.

Labels: Community,News | No Comments »

Announcement Regarding Custom Domains

After February 15, 2011, we will be changing the price of custom domain registration and renewals to $34.95/year (less than $3/month). This change will only affect the following domains: .com, .net, .us, .ca, .de, .es, .nl, and .eu.

For the last few months, we’ve been upgrading our hosting, security systems and features to protect your website from the threat of hackers and outages so when you renew your domain with us you get a whole lot more:

• Upgraded, state-of-the-art website protection
• Premium quality hosting for round-the-clock care and fewer down times
• Advanced global DNS management to quickly allow you to make domain changes yourself
• Award-winning support team available 24/7
• Instant setup gets your website online in no time

For our Yola customers, we want to give you the opportunity to renew your domain now before the price increase. You can also save an additional 10% if you renew for 2 years or more – only $35.90 for 2 years ($1.50/month)

If you need more information on how to renew your domain you can visit our Community Support forum.

We’re constantly working toward helping your business be more successful and we’re here to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you for being part of the Yola family!

Vinny Lingham
CEO, Yola

Labels: Domains,News,Product,Releases | No Comments »

Yola provides seamless integration of Fotolia images

Yola, Inc. and Fotolia today announced the integration of Fotolia images into the Yola Sitebuilder for use by over 5 million website builders using Yola. The first of its kind for any website creation tool, this new functionality lets Yola customers browse and purchase from millions of inexpensive, royalty-free images without having to leave the Sitebuilder. Instead of a multi-step process, including searching external sites, downloading images to the desktop, and uploading to a website, a Yola customer can now consume images from Fotolia’s vast collection quickly and seamlessly.

“We’re excited about this partnership. We think this integration of Fotolia images into the Yola Sitebuilder will result in better and more professional-looking sites for Yola customers,” said Vinny Lingham, Yola CEO. “We’ve heard our customers say that they either don’t have photos, the ones they have are of poor quality, or they do not own the rights to them. By partnering with Fotolia, we provide access to literally millions of photos that will help make their websites stand out.”

“We believe this integration with Yola is an amazing application of our API which Yola customers are going to love,” said Garth Johnson, EVP Fotolia North America. “It is simple to use, allowing site designers to unleash their creativity, and will add significant value to both our products. We’re thrilled to be working with Yola since this partnership will introduce our contributors’ collections to thousands more customers around the world.”

About Fotolia:
Over 2 million people prefer Fotolia, LLC for affordable, royalty-free images, graphics and HD videos. With the introduction of the Infinite Collection, Fotolia became the first worldwide microstock organization to offer both crowd-sourced and professional images on one site. Founded in New York City in 2004, Fotolia spans the globe with websites in 11 languages and offices in 13 countries. With over 11,000,000 images to choose from, find it on Fotolia. www.fotolia.com

About Yola, Inc.:
Yola is the leading website builder for small businesses, with over 5m users worldwide. Yola’s intuitive drag and drop technology allows anyone to build a professional website, with no coding skills required. Yola is privately held and has raised over $25m in venture capital with offices in San Francisco & Cape Town.

For additional information, please visit www.yola.com.

Labels: News,Partnerships,Product,Releases | 6 Comments »

Planned Downtime for published websites December 11, 2010

We are performing routine maintenance on the servers that host our published websites in order to make them more resistant to failure in the future.  We suspect that you could see periods where your website is unavailable beginning on December 11, 2010 at 1am PST and expect maintenance to last for an hour. We’re sorry that this may involve some slight unavailability of your website, but we’re confident that this work will prove to be invaluable for the stability of your websites in the long run.

We appreciate your patience and support in this matter.

Labels: News | 2 Comments »

Tal.ki community forum widget now added to Yola.com

Great news! Based on your feedback, we’ve partnered with Tal.ki to bring you a new community forum widget we think you’ll love. With Tal.ki, you can embed a community forum into your free website from Yola, so your visitors can have discussions right in your site.

Tal.ki is a free and easy-to-use widget; you’ll have your community forum up and running in just a few clicks. From the Yola website creator, drag and drop the Tal.ki forum widget onto your website and sign in using an existing account, like Yahoo!, Google, or Facebook. Your Tal.ki community widget will automatically match the look and feel of your Yola website.

That’s all it takes to get your community forum up and running with Yola and Tal.ki. If you need any help with Tal.ki or any other widget, our customer support is always ready to help.

Happy talking!

Labels: News,Product,Small Business | 4 Comments »

Yola Silver has landed

It is with excitement that we announce the release of our brand new subscription package, Yola Silver.  In this post I will outline the features included in the package, and then explain how our existing customers can take advantage of special Yola deals to upgrade to Yola Silver.

What’s in Yola Silver?

Yola Silver replaces our existing subscription package, Yola Pro.  It includes all the great features of Yola Pro, plus some great additions, all at the same price of $49.95/year - that works out to about $4.16/month.  Yola Silver includes the following features:

• A credit for a custom domain name so that you can own your own piece of the web (value $19.95 / year)
• Private registration for your custom domain name (optional – value $9.95 / year)
• A credit for a Premium Style to help your website stand out
• Yola Link Removal — the Yola link at the bottom of free styles removed from all your sites
• Create up to 25 sites, get 5 GB of storage per site, and upload files of up to 100MB
• Plus some one-time bonuses:
  • Advertising credits with Yahoo! and Facebook (value $25 each)
  • 10 credits for stock photos at Fotolia (value $10)
  • A credit to make your own logo through HP Logomaker (value $50)

What’s new in Yola Silver?

Let me call out some of the new features we are in including in Yola Silver:

• Credit for a custom domain name + private registration.  You can now get a custom domain name as part of Yola Silver – no need to buy a domain separately any more.  This means that you pay one low yearly price for all these features, without having to renew your domain separately.
  • What if you have an existing domain?  Well, then you can use your Yola Silver domain credit to extend your existing Yola domain for the period you buy Yola Silver for.  We’ll associate your existing Yola domain with your Silver account so that you only have one renewal to remember and pay every year.
• HP Logomaker credit.  Having a logo for your business further helps you to stand out from the crowd.  With this $50 credit and our partnership with HP you’re able to easily create a unique logo for your business.  You can use this on your website, letterheads, business cards… anywhere you need to build up brand recognition!
• Fotolia stock photography credits.  With this release we are also changing our stock photography provider to Fotolia, and we think you’re going to like this change.  We now give you 10 credits, so you can get more images than in the past.  Fotolia credits are also cheaper than our previous provider, so you can get more stock images for fewer credits.

What about existing customers?

For our existing paying customers who wonder how this is going to affect them, don’t fear – you’re in for a treat!

• Existing Yola Pro users.  Existing Yola Pro users will be upgraded to Yola Silver automatically, and at no extra cost.  But that’s not all.  To say thank you for being such loyal customers, we are giving you a 1-year domain credit immediately – again, at no extra cost to you.  You can use this credit to get a custom domain for your site, or to extend your existing Yola domain by 1 year.  (Yes, really – at no extra cost to you!)
• Existing Custom Domain / Premium Style / Yola Link Removal customers.  If you have bought a domain name, a premium style, or link removal from us in the past, congratulations!  You are now a Yola Bronze user!  To thank you for your business, our Yola Bronze customers will be able to upgrade to Yola Silver at a special discount of 30% of the regular price for the first year.  This brings your cost to upgrade to Yola Silver to only $34.95 for the first year!
• Existing Yola Link Removal customers.  As part of the release of Yola Silver, we are no longer going to sell Yola Link Removal as an a-la-carte option.  From now on, if users want to remove the Yola link from their pages, they will have to upgrade to Yola Silver (and get all the great features that come with it!).  But what about those of you who have purchase Yola Link Removal from us before?  Don’t worry – you’re safe.  You will continue to have the link removed from all pages at no extra yearly cost.

And that’s about it from me.  If you have questions or comments about Yola Silver, please let us know below, or head over to our community forum where our wonderful support team will answer your questions in no time.

We hope you enjoy Yola Silver.  Why not check it out now?

Rian van der Merwe
Sr. Product Manager

Labels: News,Product,Releases,Upgrades | 7 Comments »

Announcing the Yola Experts Program

We created the Yola Experts Program to provide resources to web professionals to build their businesses.  With Yola, a web designer can easily build customized sites for clients that are easy to update.

The Yola Experts Program provides:

• Training materials on website building and sales
• Processes to facilitate the creation of quality sites
• An exclusive forum for discussions among web designers
• Marketing collateral to promote the Yola Expert

We are pleased to announce that the Yola Experts Program (YEP) officially moves from pilot phase to public beta today. We have spent the last 3 months with the program in the pilot phase, collecting input from pilot members and their clients. Now that the program is launched in public beta, we are opening it to a wider audience. Please let us know what you think at yep@yola.com.

If you are a web designer, established or recently starting out, we invite you to take a closer look at YEP. Time and time again, the Yola sitebuilder has been referred to by industry experts as an award-winning design tool, which enables quick creation of quality sites.  You’ll find more information on our Join page.

Even with the simplicity and ease-of-use of the Yola sitebuilder, we have found small businesses often do not have the time to create a much needed website. If you are a small business looking for help with a website, or want a redesign of an existing site, please feel free to browse this Directory. There you’ll find the business sites of web designers whose work you can evaluate.  Please remember that these designers are not employees of Yola, and operate completely independently – you will be going directly to them to hire their services.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the pilot phase and for helping us determine the program materials at launch.  We look forward to continuing to expand the program resources and seeing many more high-quality sites designed by Yola Experts.

Labels: News,Small Business | 1 Comment »

Join Yola at SOCAP09!

We’re excited to announce that Yola will be co-sponsoring SOCAP09 this year along with our friends at Kiva.

SOCAP09 is a gathering of the world’s top social innovators held on September 1^st through 3^rd at The Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.  Yola will be exhibiting at the event and we’d love to see as many of our users there as possible. To make that possible, we’re offering a 30% discount for the Yola network using the code “YA30.” Register here to take advantage of this offer special offer.

We hope to see you at SOCAP09!

Labels: Community,News | 2 Comments »