Custom Fonts now available in the Sitebuilder

The Sitebuilder now offers a selection of custom preset font settings. This allows you to change the font of your entire website in a single click. Our design team worked hard to create font duos that work well together eliminating the guesswork in selecting header and body fonts.

The fonts provided are Google web fonts which means they’re open source and supported in all modern browsers. If your site visitor is not running a current browser version, the font will degrade gracefully and not cause display issues with your website. This is a great way to revamp the overall look of your website in one easy click.

All styles start off with the “Default” option selected. Selecting a new font family will apply those changes to your site—but don’t worry, your widget fonts and any custom HTML you may have added will not be affected. When you change styles, the font will automatically be set to the default style of the new style. Should you return to a previous style in which you customized the fonts, that customization will be reapplied.

Steps to customize your website font:

• In the Sitebuilder click on Styles > Customize Fonts.
• You will see larger text and smaller text. The larger text is how your headings will look, the smaller text is body text.
• Select the font you’d like to use.
• The changes will be visible immediately.

To revert to the default font, simply click Styles > Customize Fonts and select “Default for style”.

Choosing the right image for your website

Selecting an image from a collection of millions is like being a kid in the biggest candy store you’ve ever seen; you have no idea where to start! 

There are many factors to consider when selecting the best image for your creative needs. You want your image to be conveyed in the exact way you intended it to be. Here are seven key areas to keep in mind to ensure you get the perfect image every time!

1. Purpose: What’s the image for? At the heart of every image is the message it conveys to the viewer. Make sure that your image supports your written content and achieves the purpose you are using it for. They say a picture speaks a thousand words, therefore telling a story is the exact purpose you should be aiming for.

 

2. Tone: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.  When providing information to people, it’s not just the content that matters, but also the tone in which the content comes across. Choose a humorous image to support a website that is supposed to convey a humorous tone, or a professional image for a business website. Using an image that compliments the tone of your message will be more powerful.

 

3. Audience Relevance: Does your audience relate to the image? Any person visiting a website or reading a publication wants to see the immediate relevance to their own lives, and one of the first places your website visitors attention will go to is the images on your website.  People like to identify.  Connect your audience to your subject by using a photo that relates to the subject matter appropriately.

4. Timeliness: How new is new? Up on the latest news? A trend setter perhaps? Reinforce your credibility with an image that screams, “I keep up with the Jones’!” Stay current with your topic, and reinforce it with an image that depicts the right moment, era or time.

5. Uniqueness: Is your image one of a kind? Show people that the content you provide is meaningful and unique. As tempting as it may be, steer clear of highly accessible freebie sites. What’s free and easy for you is also free and easy for everyone else. By picking a unique image from a micro-stock site, you show your followers that you’re taking the time to get great images. You can take it one step further by customizing it with Photoshop or other design tools to make it truly unique.

6. Image Rights: Is it legal? Another benefit of buying from a micro-stock company is that you will have the legal rights to use the photo as you please. Downloading an image illegally can sometimes involve serious repercussions. Take the safe road by purchasing royalty-free images and save yourself the headache.

7. Aesthetic Appeal: Lookin’ good, kid! Last but certainly not least, your image should have visual appeal. This is probably the most important feature to take into consideration. Draw your audience in by attracting them with stunning visuals. A beautifully placed image can make all the difference in making your material vivid and engaging. 


There’s a world of stock images out there—have fun exploring the thousands of images available to you and don’t over think it. Keep these handy tips in mind and you’re already well on your way to dazzling your audience.

– Matt Dujay, Fotolia

 

Featured Website: Panacea Records

Panacea Records is a Young Enterprise company, which has produced a compilation album of local artists. With both time and money in short supply, they needed an affordable way to set up a great looking website quickly without any technical knowledge. They found Yola to be simple to use enabling them to exceed their business goals with ease.

“The main thing I enjoyed about Yola is the way in which the template system allows you to make a great looking and unique website in a small amount of time. People who comment on the site say it is very professional and are surprised at its quality as we have no professional web developers in our team. This impression of quality has resulted in far more sales and online interest in our business than we had expected, thanks to Yola.”—Seyon Sivarajah, Director of IT, Panacea Records

They found the Form widget to be quick and easy to set up while providing a professional looking way for customers and website visitors to reach them. They also utilized the Share Me widget to add social features to every page of their site with just a few clicks. Thanks to that widget they received over 80 tweets about their venture!

“The really fantastic thing about Yola is that you can keep your website updated and fresh without any hassle. We are always thinking of ways to make the site better and the Yola editor with its instant publishing system lets us change and improve very quickly. A good example of this is the forthcoming addition of a Tumblr blog to the site which will let us put a lot more content and news on the site, at a rapid rate.“—Seyon Sivarajah

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.

Featured Website: FL.ROC

FL.ROC needed a website that would get their site visitors excited about getting dirty! FL.ROC Race Director Dan Matuszczak did his research and knew he needed a fun and professional website that inspired a sense of adventure so he took advantage of our Yola Premier package and worked with a professional website designer who helped him achieve the look and feel he was after. Dan felt that having a design in mind from the beginning “was very important because it gives the designer a great starting point to stay on track with instead of possibly creating something that they find pleasing but is different from what the client wants. The final design was awesome and totally captured the feel we were looking for.”

“We started the process by filling out a questionnaire that was very complete on expressing what the client is looking for and what was to be added to the page.  We included all logos and pictures and color schemes that we were interested in. The new design captures our company image so much better than my original site that I created by myself. The new site has a professional look that gives us the detail and design that matches our MUD RUN Adventure Run feel.  We have gotten rave reviews on the site and the new look from all our racers, friends and family.  Being that our website is our first impression and storefront to get people interested we knew it was a no-brainer that we needed to have professional help to get the look we desired.  And the price is so affordable we knew it would be worth the chance and we are super happy with the results.” —Dan Matuszczak

Dan was also pleased that his designer took the time to teach him some of the techniques used in order to make maintaining his site in the future more seamless. They detailed how to use the different font types such as “paragraph” and “headings” including the specialty fonts that his designer added to his Sitebuilder giving his website a truly custom look. Run on FL.ROC!

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 using our Support Form.

Announcing Aviary, our new photo editing partner

Yola is excited to announce a partnership with Aviary to bring you a new way to edit your photos. Picnik, our previous photo editing tool, is no longer available as they were purchased by Google, but we worked hard to find a great replacement so your photo editing needs can still be addressed in the Sitebuilder.

Aviary is powerful and easy to use. With it you’ll find all the features you love, in a slick, new interface. Add text, crop, rotate and adjust your photos, all within the Sitebuilder. This makes the editing process simple and easy!

Check out our tutorial for detailed steps on editing with Aviary via the Picture Widget or the Text Widget.

The Future of the Sitebuilder

At Yola, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our site building tools.  We know that building and editing your website can be a daunting part of getting your business online, and we strive to make our Sitebuilder as intuitive and easy as possible.

As great as we think our Sitebuilder already is, we know we can continue to make it even better.  This year we are focusing on three main areas of improvement.  First, we want to give you more control over your workspace.  When our customers are editing their site, we know the most important thing is the page they’re editing at that moment.  We want to help the page stand out and reduce the clutter of controls you don’t currently need.  We will be adding a control bar to the bottom of the tool that will let you show and hide the widget sidebar.  We will also add in a new style selector that will let you quickly preview your site in a new style without needing to open and close new dialog boxes.  Style changes will happen seamlessly from within your page. You will be able to hide tools you don’t need and free up more of the workspace to devote to the most important thing: your site.

 

The second area we are focusing on will be adding richer web tools into the Sitebuilder. We make it easy to add photos and text to your page, but now we want to provide more tools to support you after you have published your site. This year we added mobile optimized sites and Facebook publishing into the flow.  The next step will be to add even more tools that will help your site get found on Google and boost your page ranking.  The built-in tools will live within the bottom bar and will provide you real-time feedback about your website.  The goal is to make the site building tool a resource for the entire lifetime of your website.

 

The third user interface area we wish to address is online help. We currently offer email, forum, social, and phone support as well as our help bubbles and guided tour, but we think we can take the concept even further.   We are considering adding an easily accessible toggle that will trigger a context sensitive help layer.  Click on the layer, and the Sitebuilder will use arrows and text to explain everything on the screen. The idea would be to provide you an easy place to go whenever you have questions about the Sitebuilder.  The system would know what you were currently looking at and provide you the help most relevant to the moment.

 

And this is just the beginning.  We have a ton of other features in the works, including styles, widgets and new font choices.  It is going to be an exciting year.

 

– John-Mark, Director of UI & Design, Yola

 

 

Featured Website: Ten Point

If you want to sell people on your ability to help them rise to the top to get their dream job, your website needs to set the tone and prove that you can stand apart as well. Ten Point is a resume creation and design website which does just that. In today’s economy everyone is looking to differentiate themselves from the crowd in order to be successful.

Site owner Julie wanted to convey a fun and relaxed approach to the often daunting task of resume creation. Her goldfish graphic effectively conveys her understanding of clients need to stand apart in a fun way while her stylish banner and clean background keep the overall look of her website professional.

Using a Yola Style, I was easily able to customize it in order to display a light-hearted feel, while remaining fresh and professional. It is a good example of how to simply make changes to a Yola template, and create a unique site. The entire process was surprisingly easy and I would highly recommend Yola to others.—Julie

 

 

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.

Create a professional Facebook Page with Yola!

We are excited to announce another new addition to our Yola Silver hosting package. Starting today, your Silver package includes access Facebook publishing, allowing you to publish your website as a new professional tab on your Facebook business page.

To enable this feature, can click on the Facebook publishing button in the Site Settings panel or in the site preview window. Please note, you will need to publish your site at least once to use this feature. Check out our quick video tutorial below to get you started.

With this new feature, you can create a professional look and get your Facebook fans to engage with your business directly from your business’s Facebook page. Your fans can learn more about your business, make appointments, shop from your store, or leave comments on your pages, all without leaving Facebook.

And better yet, every time you make a change or update your website, your changes will automatically be propagated to your Facebook page.

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

 

 

 

 

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Yola now with more Ds

It has already been a great year for Yola, we’ve launched loads of new and exciting features.  But we are never ones to rest on our laurels and we’re always looking for new ways to make your websites even better.

We realized to fit any more awesomeness into your pages, we were going to need another dimension. We thought, hey, it worked for movies, it worked for TV, why not take it to the web? So, Yola is proud to introduce: Yola 3D.

Whether you sell Avatar memorabilia, or hologram stickers, imagine how much better your inventory looks in glorious 3D.

 

Our engineers have been hard at work developing this groundbreaking technology, programing in one, two and sometimes all three dimensions at once.

 

 

 

And turning it on is easy, simply visit the Site Settings panel under the Site menu in the Sitebuilder tool.  Click on Yola 3D, and stand back.

 

Visitors to your site can download special 3D glasses, cut them out and place them on their head.  They will be amazed at what they see.

We look forward to keeping you and your websites cutting edge.  Even as we prepare to release this breakthrough, we are already thinking about how we can open up a 4th or even 5th dimension.

Happy April, everyone!

 

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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.