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Five new features added to the Yola Sitebuilder and Online Store

Over the past month, you may have noticed that we added in a few new features to the Yola Sitebuilder and Online Store that can help you further customize your website.

Custom Panel Widget
Our custom panel widget is one of our more flexible tools, allowing you to create sections of your site and add in text and images within these sections. Now, when you upload an image to set as the background of your custom panel, you can choose to have the image size set to auto, cover or contain. This means that the size of your custom panel will display your image exactly how you want.

New Map Styles
We’ve updated our Google Maps widget to include ten different styles from gray to green to bubbly and clean cut. You can easily change the look and feel of your map to match your website branding. Simply go to the settings after you’ve dropped the map widget on to your page and choose a style to your liking. Take a look at our demo site Haystack to see one of the map styles at work.

Add a Styled Map to your Yola Website
Displaying Banners
On the Skyline Style you can choose to display banners on a per page basis. This means that you can add a banner to your homepage but have it removed for your contact page. Similarly you can also upload different images for banners on each page of your site.

Padding for Column Dividers
Our column divider widget just got a little easier. Add padding to each side of the column to control the space around the elements inside. For example, on your contact page, you can add space around a text widget moving it to be halfway down the length of your Google Maps widget but within the same column. It can also be used to add space between two Text widgets to prevent words running together. You can see an example of this on Growersfield Farm below.

Add Padding to your Column Diviger Widgets on Yola
Online Store SEO Improvements
When you add products to your Yola Online Store, each product page will be submitted with your sitemap to Google so that the keywords, titles and descriptions will be crawled. To see your sitemap, republish your website and go to http://MyWebsite.com/sitemap.xml and replace “My Website” with your website name.

To speed up the process, you can submit your sitemap to Google following the steps in this tutorial.

We hope these updates have been helpful. Please let us know in the comments below what you think about our new features.

14 thoughts on “Five new features added to the Yola Sitebuilder and Online Store”

      1. Hi Niki,
        We agree that would be a wonderful addition, and will pass it along to our design team for consideration. Please see the steps shared above (on B’s comment) to achieve an animated banner image on your website. If you have any questions, please let us know. We’re here to help!

      1. Hi B,

        Great suggestion, thank you! We do not offer a photo slider in the Sitebuilder right now, but rest assured you can still add this to your website, even in the banner area! Please visit to create your animated banner image. After you have customized everything to your liking, you can press “submit” and save the file to your computer. At that stage, it is time to upload it to your Yola website! We have a tutorial walking you through the steps here:

      1. Hi Ralph,

        You can definitely add a Flash banner to your site, but not in the banner position of a style that has a changeable banner. This is because the banner area does not support .swf files.

        You can, however, choose a style that does not have a banner image area and use a SWF Flash Widget at the top of the page for your flash file. Here are some style possibilities that you can use if you would like to try this:

        * Squeaky Clean
        * Darkened
        * Midnightalley

        You may also find another style that works better for you; the above are just a few styles without a banner image that also do not have a large amount of space between the top of the page and where you can begin to place widgets. We have an excellent Style Guide which will help you choose the best style to fit your needs, here is a link: [Yola Style Guide](http://www.yola.com/yola-style-guide).

        Alternatively, you can use a style called “Skyline” which includes the option to remove your banner area. Here’s the steps for this:

        1. In your Sitebuilder, go to Style > Styles > Free **OR** Page > Page Properties > Background
        2. Select Skyline.
        3. Then, go to Style > Style Settings > Style Designer.
        4. Scroll down to the bottom and uncheck “Display Banner”.

        Once you’ve selected your style, here’s how to add a Flash file to your page:

        1. Go to Widgets > Media.
        2. Drag and drop the Flash SWF Widget onto your page.
        3. You can either upload a new Flash file, or browse for existing files.
        4. Once you have selected your file, it will display in the editing dialog box.
        5. If necessary, edit the width, height, alignment and margin of the file.
        6. Click “Save”.

        Hope this helps!

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