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Start Selling Your Products Online

Whether you are dreaming of starting the next Amazon.com or just looking to sell a few products online, Yola now has the solution for you..

With our newest feature, the Yola Online Store, we’re changing the game for online sellers around the world, by seamlessly integrating an advanced online store with our powerful business website builder all for a remarkably low price of $19.95/month, over one hundred dollars per month less than our leading competitors.

We are thrilled to introduce the Yola Online Store, a package that allows you to create sophisticated online stores from within your Yola website. With this new addition, now you can manage your store, mobile website, email, new customer submission and much more, all from your Yola account.

With advanced features like tax and shipping integration, the acceptance of over 15 payment methods, and the ability for your customers save their profile into your store, Yola Online Store has all the features you need to create and run a professional store. You can sign up and start selling online today.

For users who do not yet have a Yola Bronze or Silver hosting package, Yola Online Store is available for $19.95/mo and it includes all the features of our Yola Silver package in addition to the eCommerce features. If you are already a Yola Bronze or Yola Silver customer, Yola Online Store will be available to you as an upgrade for only $10 more per month.

Yola Online Store features include:

• An integrated shopping cart that can be added to multiple pages or sites, including your Facebook page, allows your products to be seen (and purchased) in more places
• Advanced product set-up, including variable pricing for options like different sizes, colors, models means a complex inventory can be made simple
• Yola Store accepts payments through multiple payment gateways (for example PayPal, Google Checkout, SagePay and more) giving you complete flexibility to choose the right one for you.
• We support dozens of languages for your storefront including English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and many more.  This means your store can be open to more customers worldwide.
• Integrated with local and international shipping providers, including: UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS means your products can be shipped to your customers faster.
• The ability to set up a sales tax for your products based on your location and the location of your customers means you can localize your store to your customers.
• Your users will be able to save their shopping profile, including payment method, billing address, shipping address and previous orders, so they can place repeat orders quicker and easier.
• The management of your inventory, orders, sales and invoices is made easy with our intuitive online dashboard
• Order tracking and automated confirmation and shipping emails keep your customers informed about their purchase.
• Easily upload products in bulk to your store to save time and effort
• Integrated with mobile friendly-site publishing included in Yola Silver

The release of this feature would have not been possible without the help of our partners, the Ecwid team, and the help of our beta users that have been using the store and providing us with invaluable feedback.  Yola sends a big thank you to everyone involved.

We hope you enjoy this new feature, and we look forward to seeing your stores and hearing your success stories,

Please email us with any feedback or product improvements ideas at ecommerce-beta@yola.com, and, as always, don’t hesitate to contact our support team with any questions at support@yola.com.

Labels: Product,Releases | 2 Comments »

Take Your Site Mobile

We are exited to announce our newest feature: mobile publishing!

Mobile publishing lets you take your existing website and instantly create a version optimized for viewing on an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry device.  The mobile version contains all of your website’s pages and information in a size that fits perfectly on a smaller screen.  If you have a business number or address, it will automatically add a “Call” and “Map” button to the top of your mobile site.

Internet usage on smart phones will soon exceed that on regular computers, making mobile sites a necessity for being well-positioned online.  With a mobile site, your customers can now connect with your business anytime, anywhere.

The feature is still in early beta testing, so please excuse us while we iron out the kinks.  But check it out and let us know what you think.  It is free to everyone with the Yola Silver hosting package.

Labels: Product,Releases | 5 Comments »

Exciting new package changes!

Great news!  We listened to your feedback, and we have made some significant changes to our domains and packages.  We are introducing lower priced domains, a new Bronze package, and the ability to pay for hosting monthly instead of the whole year up-front. 

Lower Priced Domains
Over the last year, we have introduced more than a dozen new custom domain types such as .us and .co.  We have always included the price of hosting in our domain prices.  This unfortunately meant that someone who purchased a second domain from us, in essence, paid for hosting twice and this model led to some confusion.  So we decided to split our hosting costs from our domains.

This means when you purchase your first domain, you will need a hosting package to go with it.  Then once you have a hosting package, you can purchase additional domains without paying for hosting twice.  For our existing domain and Silver customers, we have already migrated you to a domain and hosting package.  This means you will be able to start taking advantage of our lower priced domains immediately.  We now offer .com domains at $11.95/year and have reduced the price of all our other domains as well.  It is now more affordable to protect your business’s brand identity by securing additional domains like .net, .biz, or .co.

Yola Bronze has arrived
We are also introducing a new starter hosting package called Yola Bronze.  In addition to the easy-to-use, powerful site building tools all our users get, Yola Bronze includes the following key features:

• Premium quality domain hosting
• External domain pointing to your Yola site
• Twice as much storage (2GB per site)
• Ability to create up to 5 unique sites
• $50 Google AdWords credit
• Premium Phone and Email Support for 30 days

We also modified our free offering for new users to align it with the new Yola Silver and Yola Bronze changes.

Pay Monthly
In order to provide you with even more flexibility, we are introducing monthly billing for new subscribers.  This means that when you chose one of our hosting packages, you will now have the option of being billed monthly or annually.  We will also still continue to offer our “2 months free” annual package for purchase at a discount.

For more information regarding our changes, please check out our Frequently Asked Questions.

Labels: Domains,Product,Releases | No Comments »

Widget Wednesday: Flash SWF

We now have a simple way to upload flash files to your website, our Flash SWF widget! You can find the widget in the Multimedia section in Sitebuilder.

Simply drag-and-drop the widget to where you would like your flash file on your website.  You will then be given the option of uploading a new SWF file or browsing already uploaded files.

If you are uploading a new SWF file, choose the location on your computer and upload it.  You will then be given a dialog box with various editing options.

You can select the height and width of the file, the margin around it and how you would like to align it.  By selecting ‘Save’ your flash file will display on your Yola website.

Please note: In order to see flash, you will need the Adobe Flash plugin.  Flash will not work on mobile phones or iPads.

Labels: Releases,Widget Wednesday | No Comments »

Widget Wednesday: Custom Panel

You can now organize your content better with our Custom Panel widget.  The widget works in a similar way to the Column Divider widget, you can use it to create a container on your page and then place other widgets inside it.  You can find the Custom Panel widget in the Basic widget category.

Drag the widget to where you would like your panel; it will then open up a dialog where you can customize your panel.  On the first tab you can choose one of the preset colors, you can see what your panel will look like in the preview section.

If you would like to customize your panel more, click on the tabs to change various aspects of the panel.  You can change:

• The background and gradient color* – Choose a color from the color chart or type in the hex color if you know what it is.  You can even upload your own background image and choose the direction of the gradient!
• Border – Choose the color of your border, the style (dotted or straight line) and even the thickness.
• Corners* – You can add round corners to your panel and choose how rounded they – you can even make one corner more rounded than another.
• Shadow* – Use the sliders to add shadows to your panels.  You can add them to the inside or outside of the panel and select the color of the shadow, the opacity and the width of it.
• Spacing – You can edit the space inside your panel i.e. create space around text within the panel or you can edit the space outside your panel by creating a margin around it.
• Fonts – Here you can change the type of font in your panel, the size and different colors for the heading, font, link or link hover text.   When you add the Text widget into your panel, these font selections will automatically apply.

*Please note, these features are not supported by Internet Explorer.  We suggest that you upgrade to Google Chrome or Firefox in order to make use of these.

Just like your house, containers on your website can help keep things neat.  Use Custom Panel widget to present your content and to call attention to information on your site that you think your visitors will find helpful.  Here’s a great example of the Custom Panel widget is being used effectively.

Labels: Releases,Widget Wednesday | No Comments »

Customize your page heading

You asked for it, and now we deliver!  Our developers have been working hard to bring you even more customization options for your page header.

On Monday we released our new Edit Heading tool.  Now you can customize your page heading in new and exciting ways.  Experiment with adding bold, italic, or underlines.  Change the font size, the text alignment, or even accessorize your header text with colors.

For our advanced users out there, we have even added a way you can upload your own font.  Clicking on the upload button next to the font selector lets you upload your own True Type Font (.ttf) files.

Explore and find out what works best for your style and company’s image.

Just move your mouse over your page heading and click on the “Edit Heading” link.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Internet Explorer does not currently support uploaded fonts.  For the optimal experience, we recommend upgrading to Firefox or Chrome.

Labels: Product,Releases | 3 Comments »

Yola Roadmap

We often get asked, “what is Yola working on?” The answer is: tons!

We have a very exciting couple of quarters ahead of us and we wanted to share a piece of that excitement with you. Here is a sneak peek into what you can look forward to seeing:

Soon

• New container widget for adding borders, boxes and containers to your site. You can use the custom container widget to help spice up your layout and gain greater control over the presentation of things on the page. You will be able to easily customize the border, background, and drop-shadow of the container. Once you have styled it, you can easily drop other widgets inside!
• New Flash widget for displaying Flash files on your site.
• Better header editing! We will be giving you greater control over the way the header text displays. Soon you will be able to change the color, size and font of your page heading.
• Form widget improvement: adding a CAPTCHA field. Finally relief from spammers submitting bogus entries in your contact form. The CAPTCHA “human test” will help prevent robots from submitting things to your contact us form. If you like robots, you can always turn this off.

Next Several Months

• My Store & eCommerce! A new eCommerce package is coming. Included will be all the tools people need to create and manage an online store. You will get a full suite of tools including inventory management and a brand new online store widget. Selling things online will be as simple as 1-2-3.
• Better banner editing! We will be updating the banner editor to make it easier to crop and edit your banners images. This will include adding Picnik image editing, as well as new defaults and Fotolia integration.
• New styles!
• And what better way to show off these new styles, but with a quicker, sleeker style selection tool. Goodbye small preview window, hello instant, full-screen page preview!

Longer-term

• More form widget improvements including a new survey template and the ability to create mandatory fields.
• Google Docs integration! Soon adding Google Doc into your pages will be as easy as dragging a widget onto your page. It will let you embed text, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars and drawings!
• Mobile sites! Using optimized styles for smart phones and mobile devices, you will be able to publish mobile versions of your site. With no additional work, you can be sure your site looks as good on a smart phone as it does on your desktop.

And this is just a taste; there is so much more! Things are changing all the time and but these are just some of the great features we are excited to be able to bring to you. We will keep you posted!

Thanks everyone!

Labels: Product,Releases,Upgrades | 3 Comments »

Faster set up—more polished websites

As small business owners, we know there is never enough time in the day. Keeping that knowledge at the forefront of our thinking helped to inspire our new site set up. In just a couple simple steps you can create a more polished looking website than ever before.

Based on the “website category” you select, we generate pictures and content designed to align with your business needs. This means that even if you don’t have time to customize your website right away, there’s no need to delay in getting your business online. Simply add your company name and address—we’ll take care of the rest! Changing the pictures and text we have provided is quick and easy, so you can customize it a little or a lot.

Aside from improved content that better suits your business we have also introduced an updated default style and modernized the layout of the homepage. Instead of generating 4 or 5 pages based on your business needs, we have given you an attractive layout that allows you to put the most important aspects of your business on the homepage—front and center, where it belongs! Of course we still encourage you to add new pages and expand on your content as your visitors will surely want to learn more about all you have to offer.

Adding our social media widgets to every page we populate for your website enables your visitors to tell all their friends and colleagues about your website which in turn will drive more traffic to your business. Even if you don’t maintain a social media presence for your business, your site visitors can still spread the word on your behalf—who doesn’t love free marketing?

Finally we’ve added “instant help” to your Sitebuilder. This tool can answer nearly any question you may have while customizing your website without having to break your workflow. Head to “Help” in the upper right hand corner of your Sitebuilder and select “Instant Help” and remember, we’re here to help your business be a success!

Labels: Releases | No Comments »

3 new widgets make going social a cinch

We’ve added a new category of Social Media widgets to the Sitebuilder. You can now add buttons to “Tweet this,” “Like” that and “Google +1″, all with the ease of the simple drag and drop you love about the Sitebuilder.

The Google +1 button lets people who love your content recommend it on Google search, and helps people discover relevant content—such as your website—from the people they already know and trust.

Content recommended by friends and family is generally more relevant than content from strangers. For example, your friends may have the same taste in music as you do, have their finger on the social pulse, or know where the best shopping bargains are to be had—and so you’ll visit websites that they +1. For more information about +1, and how it can improve your SEO, check out Google’s FAQ’s for the +1 button.

Here’s how to add the Google +1 button to your Yola site:

1. The Google +1 Widget is located in the “Social” folder in the Sidebar. Drag and drop it onto your page.
2. Click “Edit” on the top-left corner of the widget to edit the layout, margin, alignment and language of the button. You can also choose whether to display the number of people who have clicked the button, as well as the URL of the +1.
3. When you are finished, click “Save”.
4. Save your site, and then click on the green “Publish to the web” button to make your changes live.

The Twitter and Facebook widgets also allow you to choose from a few different button styles so you can select the one best suited to the design of your website. You can also edit other details to complete the customization.

To customize the Tweet This button click “Edit” on the top-left corner of the widget after you’ve added it to your website. You will see the following editing options:

• Button: In this menu, you can edit the layout, change the margin and change the alignment of the widget.
• Tweet Text: This is the text that will be included in your visitor’s tweet when they share content from your website.
• URL: This is the URL of the page you’d like to share. You can type in the URL of your site, or you can type in the URL of a specific page. Alternatively, you can set it to “Automatic”, and the widget will use the URL for the page it’s on.
• Language: You can choose the language that you’d like the Tweet This icon to display in on your site.

If you want to share your favorite Twitter accounts with your visitors, you can recommend up to two. These will display after users have shared content from your site. When you’re finished setting up your button, click “Save”.

To customize the Facebook “Like” button click “Edit” on the top-left corner of the widget after you’ve added it to your website. You will see the following editing options:

• Margin: This is the spacing around the widget.
• Alignment: You can align the widget to the left, to the center, or to the right.
• URL to Like: This defaults to the page you add the widget to, and you can change this URL to another page of your site.
• Layout style: You can choose how the number of likes your page has had is displayed.
• Width: The width of the widget, in pixels.
• Show faces: You can select whether to show the profile picture of the visitors who have liked your page.
• Font: You can choose the font of your “Like” button – there are six options to choose from.
• Color Scheme: Choose the color of the like count and button.

We hope you’ll enjoy the benefits of going social combined with the ease of the Sitebuilder. Now there’s no reason not to spread the word about your business or organization across all the major social networks!

Labels: Releases,Widget Wednesday | 11 Comments »