Welcome to December everyone! We’ve got two announcements today combined into one.
1) Silver Bells Special
Upgrade to a year of the Silver Hosting Package and Ad-Free Option for only $218. That’s an $80 savings from the regular price. Special ends December 31. You can upgrade an existing Free, Starter, or Bronze site, or build a new site.
2) Chime in on NE1
==> A simpler, more beautiful, remarkable NE1 Web Builder. <==
That’s our goal for 2011.
We believe NE1 is already one of the better and easier to use web builders online, but we’re not content with that. We’ve got plans to improve it, and we’d like your input to help shape those plans.
Simple – We are busier than ever and don’t have time to figure out complicated systems. The simpler we can make NE1 the better. That means making NE1 more intuitive to use. Giving features & menu items better names. Making instructions clearer. It may also mean removing options that are confusing and rarely used. What about NE1 do you find complicated or confusing? What can we do to make NE1 simpler?
Beautiful – We are becoming less of a text-based culture and more of a visual, image-oriented culture. How your site looks matters a great deal to your visitors. It’s the first impression people get of your organization. What can we do to make NE1 more beautiful?
Remarkable – We want NE1 to blow you away with what it can do for you. What would could we add to NE1 or change about NE1 that would be a game-changer for you?
Here are some of the things we have in mind:
1) Eliminate background music. While a lot of website owners love background music, the vast majority of website visitors hate it.
2) Eliminate unattractive templates. We used to think the more templates the better, but in reality a large, bloated gallery of templates makes it harder to find the template(s) you want to use. You don’t need 300 mediocre templates you’ll never use. We think a smaller number of beautiful templates will serve you better (By the way, eliminating templates will remove them from our gallery to download, but will not remove them from any sites already using them.)
3) New template gallery. We want to make it easier to find the best template for your NE1 site with a new template gallery that enables you to find templates by theme, color, layout, or features.
4) Make templates unbreakable. We see a lot of NE1 sites where the administrator has inserted a logo that’s too big for the header area or added too many menu items and as a result “broken” the template. We plan to introduce safeguards that prevent that from happening.
5) Affordable template customization services. No matter how beautiful the NE1 templates we provide are, you simply won’t have a truly unique, remarkable website without customizing the template to include your logo & colors that compliment it. We already offer template customization services, but many NE1 users are not aware of that. We aim to change that in 2011.
6) Better ad positioning. I really don’t believe you can create a truly beautiful website with NE1 without the ad-free option. But we want to make free sites more attractive by improving the layout of the ads on those sites.
7) Redesigned admin. We think the NE1 admin looks cluttered. We’re planning to completely redesign it to make it simpler, more intuitive, and more beautiful.
8 ) Drag-and-drop menu admin. What if you could change where one of your pages appears in your navigation menu by simply clicking on it and dragging it to where you want it?
9) Drag-and-drop graphics. What if you could add an image to a web page by simply dragging it from the folder on your computer into the NE1 web page editor?
What do you think of the proposed improvements listed above? What other improvements could we make that would lead to a simple, beautiful, remarkable NE1 web builder?
38 Comments
I really like the ideas for the new improvements.
I personally believe there is a place for background music and still want that option.
I also think that the Picture Gallery needs some work. The photo's just do not look good in that presentation. I use another source to upload my pictures and use their gallery. I just post the HTML code on my site. They are also far quicker to upload to the outside source.
I would like to see Many more Christian based templates and also several more selections for holiday templates or special occasions.. A truly unique website requires lots of template selections. If we have fewer selections we will have lots of websites that look the same.
Continued…
I would like to be able to upload video quickly and easily. I have attempted this several times and failed. I know its probably me but this is something that I have failed miserably in doing. If I remember correctly, Beacon had a way of moving and uploading large files. Maybe this is an area you can advise me in.
Your ideas are great and I would like to say thanks for all the help your support team has provided to me over the last few years. I was not happy about the move to NE1 and have just recently started to familiarize myself with it. Your support team really is fantastic!
Thanks Billy. We'll take your feedback and suggestions into consideration.
You can use FTP to upload large files:
https://www.ourchurch.com/help/frame.php?/help/hel…
If you need any help with that let our support staff know, and they'd be happy help.
I love the new ideas, especially the drag and drop features. I echo some other comments about the need to upgrade the picture gallery. It would be nice to allow visitors to post comments for individual pictures. It would also be nice to be able to sort pictures once uploaded (when uploading more than 5 it ends up being confusing as to which picture to upload first and last so that they show up in the right sequence in the gallery – which doesn't matter for some collection, but it does for others where there is a certain progression from the first to the last picture).
Keep up the great work!
Thanks Brian! We appreciate the feedback.
* Good ideas – except that if you remove templates, that means they can't be reloaded. But, when you now add an extra template, e.g. for Christmas, that seems to remove the existing template as default, which then needs to be reloaded. Not too combersome, but if the original template was removed from the album…
* Just to remind you of an older request: making he translation module also available from Dutch.
* Finally, a more recent concern: RSS is not available anymore for the News pages, as it now points to a mid October version including already deleted items and not showing recent items.
Hi Luk, thanks for the feedback…
– When you import a new template, that new template does become the default, but you don't have to reload any previous templates. They're still stored in your account. You can switch to any previously imported template by clicking the "config" tab and changing the default template in the config form.
– Dutch is one of the languages in the translator module.
– Thanks for the note about the news module. We'll look into that right away.
Hello Paul,
Thank you for your reply.
But, as far as the translation menu goes, the drop down menu of "What language is your site written in?" doen *not* list Dutch as one of the options, the available choices being only English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish…
I would like to add my support to the posts already made suggesting improvements for the Photo Gallery. I have had problems uploading pictures in the past and could only load 2 or 3 at a time instead of the 5 maximum that I was supposed to be able to upload. It takes a long time to upload when you have a lot of pictures but can only do a few at a time. Facebook and MySpace will let you upload a large folder of pictures at once, so we know it can be done. Also, it would be nice to be able to change the order of the pictures once they are uploaded. As someone said earlier, when only doing 5 (or fewer) at a time, they do not stay in the correct order unless we can remember to start at the end and work backwards when uploading. Then, if we miss a picture and have to upload it later, or if we have more pictures to add later, those always go to the beginning (or end, I can't remember which); we can't move them around and put them where we want them.
Thank you.
Paul, never mind about what I was saying about different settings for different submenus. It's been a long time since I've tried to change something on these and I don't quite remember what I was wanting to do. I found a work-around for my site, so I'm good right now.
I did just send an email to your help support; I'm now having problems with "Paste HTML Code" and can't get it to save new pieces of code. I hope you are not removing that function; it is must better than using "Edit HTML Source" if we only need a small piece of code.
Thank you.
Jean, don't worry, we won't remove the "Paste HTML Code" option. I think that's a very important function.
I find the format used by tripod lycos often quicker and easier to use so often times i will build my projects away and then paste them into ourchurch. To be able to separate each little insert into separate textual edit areas would help greatly those of us who frequently aleer portions of our page content without changing the whole page. Thanks for all you do.
I like the new ideas. I’m not a big “computer guy” and I was very pleased already at how simple it was to create my current site. Thanks and Merry Christmas to all.
Ditto all the comments about a better photo gallery. I too have had to resort to uploading pictures 1 or 2 at a time instead of the 5 allowable. It's also frustrating to have no ability to change the order. I also get frustrated with the text boxes not being a uniform size on the website after you enter your text. And every time I enter quotation marks or a hyphen in a text box in the gallery pages it shows up as several characters of jibberish when published on the website.
Anytime the drag and drop option is available I'm happy. I have noticed at times when I make changes that shouldn't affect the navigation menu it's order gets altered at random. That has become a headache keeping photo galleries and song clips in the order I want them to appear (ususally most recent to oldest). Comments will continue on the next post!
I am all for less templates and more Christian themed and far less generic. Also a more efficient way of sorting through templates quickly.
Thanks for all you do and for constantly striving to make things better. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Ambassadors of Grace southern gospel duet
Because of Christ and His wonderful work,
Dennis and Cheryl Perkins/Ambassadors of Grace