Happy 2009!  We just released an update to Webon, the first of many we expect to do this year.  This update includes a bunch of small improvements across the service, but we also made two bigger ones.

First, you can now register additional domains beyond the one you get when you upgrade to a Personal Account.   We heard from some of you that you'd like to use a different domain for each of your sites, and this lets you do that without upgrading an account for each one.

Second, we tracked down an issue in IE 6 that was causing Webon's page editor to occasionally stall for a few seconds at a time.  If you're an IE 6 user, we think you'll notice the difference.  (We still encourage you to upgrade to IE 7 or switch to Firefox, though; those browsers perform better with nearly all web applications, not just Webon.)

We have more improvements on the way.  In the meantime, what would you like to see us add to Webon in the first part of 2009?  Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

As promised, we have more features to tell you about today.  If you're a Twitter user, now you can display your Twitter feed on your Webon site, giving you a home base for your twittering.  You can also use the feed to spread the word when you add new photos, blog entries, or video.  To add the Twitter Feed add-on, just drag it onto a page in the editor, enter your Twitter details, and publish.  Your site's visitors will see all your tweets right on your site, and the feed will be updated automatically whenever you add more. More information available here.

And by popular request, we've also added another new add-on we call Share This Site.  This add-on makes it easier for your visitors to share your website with popular social networking and bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and more.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

One of our goals with Webon is to make it incredibly easy to create media-rich websites, and we just unveiled a major update to the Media Manager to help you do that.

First, you can now organize your images into albums and your videos into playlists right in the Media Manager itself.  Albums you create there will be available for selection when you drag a Photo Album add-on onto a page in the editor.  When you've got a lot of images to upload and albums to create, this can be faster than creating each album within the editor.

Second, the Media Manager should now behave more like moving files around your desktop.  You can drag your media into albums or playists to organize it, or into the Trash to get rid of it.  To edit the name of an item, you only need to click it.  We've streamlined the uploading process, too: all you need to do is click the Upload button to browse and select your media files, and you can work on other tasks in the Media Manager while they upload.

We've got some other improvements planned for the near future, but we wanted to get this update out so that you could take advantage of it.  This is actually one of two updates we're making today; we'll post about the second shortly.

We've released five new styles this week. Coincidentally, they all happen to have the flavor of "sky" in some way or another.

• Skyline has the urban look of a big city at night.

• Autumn Sunrise utilizes the bright, warm colors of fall foliage.

• Sky Blue Sky is a classic blue-sky look.

• Rockin Purple has a funky, metropolitan flavor.

• Reach for the Sky is a blue-sky look with a modern feel.

In addition to the new styles we've also released a very useful new feature called "Share this" that lets readers of your site share your blog posts easily with popular sites such as del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, and more. This can really help your blogs attract a larger audience.

If you're a fan of video, we recently made some changes that should make it even easier to use in your site.

First off, we now support the WMV format.  For various technical reasons, this took quite a bit of work, but since it's a popular format we wanted to support it.  In the process, we switched to a different encoding process that does a better job with our existing video formats, too.  If you weren't totally happy with how your video played before, try re-uploading it; we think this should take care of the (rare) glitches that we've heard about.

As always, leave us a comment or put in a help request if you run into any problems.

We just released two new features: an image crop & zoom tool, and an add-on that will make it easier for visitors to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed.

The crop & zoom feature lets you adjust your images on the fly within the editor.  For example, you can turn a rectangular full-length photo into a square head shot.  Here's how:

• To crop, mouse over an image and drag one of the lighter-colored squares on the side of its frame.  (You can still resize the image using the darker-colored squares on the corners of the frame.)
• To zoom, use the slider that appears when you mouse over an image.  If the image is small, you may only see two buttons for "zoom in" and "zoom out", and you can click those instead of the slider.  What's more, you can also reposition an image once you've zoomed in on it by dragging it within the frame.

Cropping and zooming usually requires special desktop software, but it's now standard for Webon images.

For bloggers, we've also added the Blog Subscribe add-on, which makes it easier for visitors to subscribe to your blog using their favorite RSS readers.  If they're signed in to one of the popular readers like Google or Technorati, subscribing only takes a couple of clicks.  Otherwise, they can copy and paste the feed URL.

If you run into problems with any of these features, please let us know using our help system.  Enjoy! 

We're pleased to announce that you can now add video to your Webon sites without the need for a third-party service.  If you have a home movie, screen capture, or other video file you'd like to add, just drag the Video icon from the editing toolbar onto your page.  You'll be prompted to select the video file you want to upload, and then a placeholder will keep you posted on the progress of the upload and encoding of the video.  Once encoding is complete, the video will appear automatically just where you placed it, with standard player controls (play, pause, volume, and so on).

Unlike many sites, we don't put any ads or Webon logos over your videos; they look just the way you want them to.  You can also resize the dimensions of the video player to fit your site better.

Free accounts can upload a few short videos.  If you want to host more, however, you'll need to upgrade to a Personal Account, which now includes 100 videos of up to 10 minutes in length.  (We do have to pay the bills somehow, after all.)

A lot of work went into this, and we hope you'll enjoy it! 

In addition to our recent feature update, we have three more styles to share with you, straight from our talented designers:

• Break is an edgier, expressionistic style with a dark background and pink accents.
• Bouquet is an elegant style with a floral motif, suitable for weddings and invitations.
• Tranquility combines natural images--birds taking flight from a tree, blades of grass--with an out-of-the-ordinary color scheme and layout.

Check them out, and let us know in the comments if you're looking for a particular kind of style that we don't offer yet.

We recently released an update to Webon that included two new features:

• Now, when you upgrade your account and get a domain, you can use the Domain Manager to create web addresses for multiple sites using that domain.  For example, say you have a site for your business and one for your upcoming wedding: you can use something like store.mydomain.com for the first and wedding.mydomain.com for the second.  (These are referred to as subdomains of mydomain.com.)
• On your profile, you can now organize your connections into groups to make them easier to keep track of.

We're hard at work on a bevy of other features, too.  You should hear more about those in a few weeks.

This week's update includes three new styles:

• Back to Basics is a clean, general-purpose style with a modern touch.
• Business Casual is what it sounds like: a business-ready style that's not overly formal.
• Candy Striper is a more playful style to balance the other two.  Its name is a pun on its cotton candy-like colors and the stripe motif in its header.

Enjoy!