Featured Website: Anri Olivier
We’ve had the pleasure of working with site owner Anri Olivier for the past three summers in our San Francisco office. Last year her focus was on mentoring style designers and helping to prep a new batch of Yola Styles for the Sitebuilder. If you’re a Yola Silver subscriber using a Premium Style, chances are you have Anri to thank for it!
As a graphic designer she has a leg up on creating a stunning looking website filled with visual impact. Visual pop aside, Anri also implemented a clean dual navigation making it easy for site visitors to learn more about her and her projects both past and present. It’s exciting to see her design process unfold in the creation of a new logo in her current project.
“I have gotten positive feedback, which has allowed me to grow more as a designer. It has attracted a wider range of new clients, thus promoting my services and my business. Making a clean, professional website is so easy with Yola. A couple of simple steps, and you are there!”—Anri Olivier
Want to see your site featured here? Take a few minutes to tell us what you think makes your site stand out and submit it through our Support Form.
Labels: Featured Websites | No Comments »
Featured Website: Yola
Normally we don’t like to toot our own horn, but hey, we’re pretty proud of this. Today’s featured website is: Yola.
We’re excited to unveil our new website, designed to make it easier for you to discover all the great features Yola offers to help grow your business online.
Here’s a quick tour:
Homepage: A snapshot of the important things to know before getting started. Look through sites created by our users, watch a demo video, and learn about the key features of Yola. You can log in or sign up in the top right corner.
Features: Did you know that with Yola, you can publish to mobile phones, Facebook (coming soon), and the web? Or that we have business and marketing tools to help your business grow? Learn more about our product suite in this section of our site.
Pricing: Want to sell your products online? Need a custom domain name? Or want someone to build your site for you? Yola has the package you need – find it here.
Site Gallery: Looking for some inspiration? Browse through a collection of sites made by Yola users like you. With websites organized by category, you’ll be sure to find an idea that works for you.
About Us: Did you know that we were founded in Cape Town, South Africa five years ago? Get a behind-the-scenes look at Yola and who we are in the “About Us” section.
Help: What’s a widget? How can I get found on Google? For answers to these questions and much more, visit our Help section. Here you can browse our tutorials, ask our automated help tool, or drop us an email for more personalized help.
Underneath this new website is the same set of features you’ve come to know and love. We’re quite fond of our new look, and know you’ll like it too. Give it a whirl at www.yola.com, and contact us if you have any questions or comments.
Labels: Featured Websites,International Websites,News,Product,Releases | 1 Comment »
Yola’s 5 years old
This month we’re celebrating Yola’s 5th birthday!
I am often asked, what is it that Yola does? I like to think that we are changing the way small and medium sized businesses launch and grow their business online by providing them with an all-in-one solution to create and manage their online presence.
When we started 5 years ago, we helped our users get an online presence using our Sitebuilder. Over the years we have developed to provide all the necessary premium building blocks to grow your online presence by offering products and services such as a custom domain name, email address, a mobile friendly site, website analytics, a robust online eCommerce store, the ability to link your site to your social networks and much more. We also work as a small business hub to recommend other trusted 3rd party business solutions that can help you, tools such as appointment scheduling and email marketing.
In 2012 we will continue to work on bolstering our product to give you even more tools and help you to become even more successful. It has been a fantastic 5 years and we could not have done it without you, thank you!
Over the next few months we will be starting a series of blog posts written by Yola employees that are aimed at helping you with various aspects of your website design and promotion. We will also be giving you an insight into our product road-map and give you a taster of what new features you can expect in 2012.
We’re sure that the next year is going to be even more exciting than the last. Thank you again for being a Yola user and for all of your support.
Warm wishes,
Trevor Harries-Jones
CEO
Yola
Labels: News,Small Business | 2 Comments »
Featured Website: PunyPixel
PunyPixel may be designed with the smaller set in mind but don’t call them tiny. This website has a big personality!
Site owner Jo Tiongson-Perez selected our Vibrant Canvas style to showcase her puny pals. We love her use of color both in her designs and her website. It is young and hip while remaining refined and sophisticated. She made use of the CSS editor to customize her style which suits her designs perfectly.
“As a mompreneur, I have less and less of two things: time and budget. Enter Yola, my super sidekick for building a tasteful website with e-commerce and social media marketing widgets. All on my own and all within budget—which means more time devoted to being an awesome mom.”—Jo Tiongson-Perez
Success stories like Jo’s are why we get out of bed every morning—to help small business owners spend more time running their businesses and living their lives than creating and maintaining their websites.
Labels: Featured Websites | 6 Comments »
Yola Announces Trevor Harries-Jones as CEO
We are pleased to announce that Trevor Harries-Jones is being promoted from President & COO to CEO of Yola.
Over the past year, Trevor has handled his increased responsibility exceptionally well, thus the Board has decided to officially transition him to CEO, effective immediately. We are very excited about the growth prospects of Yola and feel confident we will achieve our goals with Trevor at the helm. Please join me in congratulating him in his new role.
As most of you may know, Vinny is stepping down from Yola to launch his latest venture (www.gyft.com), which we are very excited about for him. We are very appreciative of Vinny’s efforts in founding and building Yola and we wish him great success in his new venture. Vinny is however retaining his role as a Board member of Yola and will continue to provide his vision and leadership at the Board level.
We see enormous growth opportunities ahead and welcome this next chapter for Yola in partnership with you, our community.
Jason Young
Chairman of the Yola Board
Labels: Media Coverage,News | No Comments »
A sneak peek of Yola’s new look
Over the past few months, we’ve been developing a suite of new features and wanted a new way to showcase them. Soon, when you visit www.yola.com, you’ll see the fruit of our efforts. Here’s a sneak peek of our new homepage:
At Yola, we’re committed to helping you launch and grow your business online, and our new website makes it easier for you to discover all the great features you can use to build your online presence.
Come see us soon at www.yola.com, and let us take your business online.
Labels: News,Releases,Small Business | No Comments »
Featured Website: Never Have Dry Skin
Beauty and skincare websites need to look, well, beautiful. This site does a great job of using engaging
images to sell products and takes it a step further with an online store that’s easy to use.
“It was very simple to put together and most important the store merged with my site and didn’t operated
only as a pop-up – something I have tried in the past and had very poor sales results with. It makes
on-line shopping very simple and inviting besides professional looking. Setting up the store was very
simple. Practically all I needed to do was to drag the on-line store widget in to a new page and start
loading my products. I have found that using this store customer’s purchase a variety of products than
only one. This store is easy to browse through and customers can easily find more products they need
and want. I have built several on-line stores and this one was the simplest to put together and the result
stands out as a professional job.”
Interested in adding online shopping to your website? It’s easier than ever with new Yola Online Store.
Learn more about all the advanced features it includes!
Would you like to see your site featured on our blog? Just take a few minutes to tell us what you think makes your site stand out and send it to support@yola.com.
Labels: Featured Websites | 1 Comment »
A few words about ScaleConf
Early this year, two of Yola’s operations engineers in Cape Town, Duncan and Jonathan, organized ScaleConf, a tech conference dealing with scalability issues and the problems faced by those building and running services on the internet today. They felt that more exposure on these issues was needed, and that the tech community in Cape Town would greatly benefit from such an event.
ScaleConf took place on the 26th and 27th of January, in the beautiful Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. The conference was a huge success with nearly 300 people attending including a number of international speakers. As an organizer of the conference, Jonathan (who is Operations Team Leader at Yola) gave the introductory talk, an overview of the types of issues that the conference would be covering. You can check out the slides for his speech on SlideShare: Jonathan Hitchcock – “Clearly, I Have Made Some Bad Decisions”.
Jonathan began by talking about how some people think they don’t have the sort of scaling problems that were going to be discussed. Perhaps because they don’t have millions of users, they think they don’t need to be worried about “scaling”. However, it is important to note that “scaling” is not about how many users you have, but about whether you can handle a rapid increase in traffic, or any other sort of change in the way things run normally. And the fact of the matter is, change always happens, and that is not something you can do anything about. In addition, people make mistakes, and you don’t always know that you have made a mistake until much later. Problems are going to occur, and you need to be ready for them when they do, so that they don’t have a catastrophic effect.
Jonathan then walked through some of the things you can do to prepare yourself for the problems:
- Use monitoring systems to watch how your systems behave, all the time. This is important because you need to know whether their current state is normal or not – otherwise you might think something is a problem when it is not, and waste time trying to “fix” a situation, when the real issue lies elsewhere.
- Store your infrastructure as code. Instead of manually setting up your systems, you need to write code to set them up automatically. This way, you can use all the clever tools you use to manage your source code to manage your systems as well. When you need a new system, you just run the code, and you instantly have a new one!
- Pay attention to how your code runs, as well as just what it does. You need to think about how to get your code onto your servers in a way that you can do again and again, very easily, so that updating your systems is trivial and you always know exactly what is deployed where. Too often, people just copy their code onto a server manually and think that this is sufficient.
- Make lots of little changes instead of one huge change. If you continuously push out new changes, you can see what effect they have immediately, and if they aren’t desirable, you just undo them. This way, you get constant, instant feedback, and know exactly what the consequences of your actions are as you are performing them. This means you become comfortable with making little mistakes and can fix them straight away, and aren’t scared to innovate or try things.
- Test how your systems behave when things go wrong. Things are going to go wrong, one day, and it is much better to be in control when it happens, so you can see how your failsafes behave, and make them better. Then, when things go wrong and you’re not in control, it won’t matter, because you have already tested the situation and know that you are fine.
Jonathan wrapped up by saying that if you have these good practices in place, and are ready for it, it won’t matter when things inevitably go wrong, because you have prepared yourself and your systems for these eventualities.
We hope you found this insight into the things our engineers need to do interesting!
Labels: News,Operations | No Comments »
Widget Wednesday: Facebook Comments
We’ve added another valuable social media widget to help you connect your website to previously untapped visitors. We all know how powerful word of mouth advertising can be, and nothing helps to spread the word like Facebook. By adding Facebook comments to your Yola site, visitors can easily leave comments that show up on your website as well as on their Facebook profiles. That means all of their connections will see it too!
In your Sitebuilder, select the Social category, locate the Facebook Comments widget and drag it onto your webpage.
Once you’ve added Facebook Comments in the Sitebuilder you’ll see the dialogue box shown above. Copy and paste the URL to the webpage you want the comments added to. You’ll then be able to customize the look of the widget. You can adjust the margins, alignment, number of posts displayed, width and the background color (theme) to insure it blends in with the design of your website.
That’s it! You’re all set up and can watch your comments spread and your customers grow.
Labels: Widget Wednesday | 1 Comment »
Introducing free stock images with Yola Silver
We are exited to announce a new addition to our Yola Silver hosting package. Starting today, your Silver package includes access to over 3,000 quality stock images. Stock images are a quick and easy ways to add professional looking photos to your business website.
Yola and Fotolia handpicked these images specifically for small businesses; we hope they will inspire you to create beautiful sites.
To t
ry this feature out, open your site in our Sitebuilder and add the Picture widget to your page. Click on the “Find Stock Images” button. The image selector has three sections. The first lets you browse your already uploaded files, the second contains Fotolia images available for purchase, and the third is a tab of free “Yola Images”. Check out this new complimentary gallery and let us know what you think. And if you have not tried our Yola Silver hosting package, this is one more reason to try it!
Labels: Product,Releases | 2 Comments »