New Toolbar for everyone from Feb 2010

Following the successful roll out of the New Toolbar for all new customers late in October, and the positive feedback from customers using it, we are now planning to phase out the old 'basic' and 'advanced' Toolbars from 1st Feb 2010.

We wanted to give you long enough to play with the New Toolbar (if you haven't already) as well as provide further feedback to us about what could make it better for you before this switch-over date. We have already received valuable feedback during the beta phase from you that helped us shape changes for the current release. We want to make sure we give further opportunity before the final version becomes the only version.

Why we're doing it

The major drive for developing the New Toolbar was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. SiteMaker has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this was an opportunity to re-present them for how they are, or can be, used today.

The New Toolbar will see the introduction of new blogging tools and the long awaited e-commerce upgrade, both of which we are aiming to deliver in the first half of next year.

The Old Toolbars (both basic and advanced versions) do not have the space or capabilities for us to integrate these new features as they are based on older version of Flash. To support both versions (Old and New) also creates overheads in the code that makes it difficult to add new features without breaking the old, and require editors to download parts of the old infrastructure that they will not use.

So for these reasons we have decided to phase out the Old Toolbars and create a single expandable New Toolbar that can cope with new additions for years to come. This has not been an easy decision, and we hope you understand that this creates a better platform for delivering new features in the future.

If you have comments or feedback on the New Toolbar, please let us know on this blog or via a support ticket.

New Toolbar highlights

You can get to the new Toolbar in the same way, e.g. 'View' --> 'New Toolbar', or if you're already using it you'll get the updates automatically.

The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help you 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down

Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects while in Edit mode (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)

Quick pages menu - includes quicker ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)

Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)

Copy site/transfer site feature - allows you to create copies of your site as the basis for a new site (not for backup)

HTML widget - add any HTML snippet to your site using our HTML widget snippet (e.g. Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more).

Let us know if you have any thoughts or comments. We're still making some improvements to the New Toolbar before 1st Feb 2010, so let us know if there's something that really doesn't work for you.