Hey everyone. Got some cool new features and some important information for you.

RE-CAPTCHA
We are so pleased to inform you that we have switched from our in-house Captcha to the more common, industry-standard "Re-Captcha" technology used by many popular Internet sites. Instead of a jumbled collection of letters and numbers that users are as likely to get wrong as to get right we now have a display of two words that are easier to read and get correct. It will still serve to filter out a majority of Spam posts and will make it a lot easier for you and your users to leave comments on Guestbooks, bodys, and Photo Albums.

WEBON DATABASE SERVER UPGRADE
This morning we moved the Webon database to it's own, dedicated server machine. This is something that has no visible effect but will serve to help the Webon Editor move a bit more quickly as it switches between pages. It's part of a broad series of changes we are making to speed up the Editor. We are also about to release a change to the way Webon auto-saves pages that will further increase the speed of the Editor. We will do a body post all about it next week when the code change goes out.

NEW STYLES
We released 5 new styles yesterday. And there will be many more in the coming months. We brought in a dedicated employee for styles this summer and he is really getting the hang of things and beginning to turn them out faster and faster.

• Coffee Smoked: a cool, loungy style with smoke-curl accents
• Floral Clover: featuring an attractive illustration with dusty green tones
• Scratched: grungy and urban with a heathy dose of attitude
• Skooled: will appeal to site owners with a focus on education
• Woofers: a bright, happy style built for dog lovers

MIGRATION APPROACHING 100%
You may have seen, heard, read about the Migration that has been occuring on Tripod.com where users of Trellix can move their sites onto Webon. After various fit and starts we've finally reached almost 100% availability of the process to Tripod users of Trellix. Working on this occupied almost all of our development resources this past summer and really affected the pace at which we have been able to do bug fixing and roll out new features for Webon. We are SO pleased to be almost done with this because we want to do some serious upgrades and enhancements to Webon this fall and winter and we're just about at the point where we can.

We are aware of some of the bugginess around Fonts, Photo Albums, and other parts of the Webon Editor that have crept in in the last months and we want to assure you that we will be fixing them and bringing Webon back up to the standard that you should expect.

More information coming soon about some of the upcoming projects.

Thank you so much for using Webon!

We are pleased to announce the release of our new Table Tool. With this tool you will be able to easily create and format tables on your sites.  You will notice that the Table Tool has its own text formatting and file insertion controls. With these controls you can insert images and videos directly into your tables. If you click the "Settings Cog" at the top right of the table you will see additional controls for adding and deleting rows and columns, and for changing other style options such as background colors and borders. Feel free to try it out and leave a comment here to let us know what you think about it.

You can also follow us on Twitter at @webon_team and Direct Message us there if you'd like. We do check it often.

Another exciting new feature is the updated Page Manager tool. This update makes it easier to manage your pages and allows you to control the Title, Keywords, and Description meta tags on a per page basis. By using these tags on your sites, you can increase your page rankings in search engines.  Take advantage of it and be found more easily.

We've also released a cool new style called Circuit Board with a very high-tech feel.

As usual we are always happy to hear your feedback.

There are also many other exciting new features in the works, including: audio uploads and player, file uploads, and a shopping cart. Coming soon to a browser near you.

Stay Tuned

We are happy to announce the release of some new styles and features to Webon close on the heels of the move over to Angelfire. We're still working busily to improve Webon for you even as we integrate it with the new platform.

Today's release contains two new Styles: 

GreyBiz is a clean, simple style designed for businesses or anyone who wants a professional look.

Blue Lounge is a modern style with the flavor of a cool, smoky Jazz club.

There are also some new features that were requested by multiple users and which we hope will please everyone.

1. Password protection for sites. In your Site Manager area you'll now find a new option in your "Actions" drop-down menu labeled "Security" where a username and password can be assigned to a particular site. Only someone with the username and password you assign will be able to access your site. Good for wedding sites, baby pictures, or any type of personal info that you might prefer to keep private.

2. Open in New Window can be found in the menu where you make text into a link. You'll notice that there is a checkbox at the bottom of that box that allows you to specify that a link should open in a new window when it is clicked.

And finally, there were a number of under-the-hood bug fixes to increase stability and in particular to prevent Videos from hanging or becoming corrupted.

First, thanks to everyone who left a comment on our last post.  We're starting to work on the features you suggested along with some others that we think you'll find helpful in building your sites.

Before we could get started on those, however, we wanted to finish some improvements to Webon's built-in photo albums, which we just released.  As you might have noticed, their background and accent colors now match the ones used for the rest of your site, creating a frame that lets your photos stand out.  To make it easier to work with your photos, we've also added a "zoom bar" to the Media Manager; this lets you zoom in to see larger thumbnails of your media, or zoom out to manipulate lots of them at once.  And as always, we made some adjustments and fixes to other parts of the service while we were at it.

In addition to the features and fixes, we created a new gift-themed style called Gift-Wrapped, just in time for Valentine's Day.  If you'd like a creative, personal, and inexpensive way to show your love, why not take your photos and compose a few words on a website dedicated to your significant other?

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.

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.

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!

As some of you have already noticed, we've rolled out some new styles over the past week:

• Black Lace has a dark background with gold highlights and a very classy feel to the typography.
• Charcoal is a clean style with a black background and gray and red accent colors.
• Vino is saturated with purple.  If you like deep, vivid colors, this is the style for you.

We've also seen some good user-submitted styles such as Rojo recently.  Check them out!

At the end of last week, we released a major update to the Style Editor.  It's intended for builders who want to edit the CSS for their sites, but in the future we'll roll out another update that will let you change the basic elements of a style, such as color and background, without knowing any CSS.

The new Style Editor now includes:

• code highlighting for the Source View
• a revamped Properties View (formerly Visual View) that makes it easy to jump between selectors and upload images
• a significant performance boost over the old editor

We hope you like the changes.  If you've never worked with the Style Editor before, you can find it by opening the Styles window and clicking the Customize link for your site's style.

Let us know what you think, and remember to hit the Share button for any styles you create that you think other builders might appreciate. 

Earlier this week, we released two new styles, Americana and Taped Down, which you can find by clicking on Styles in the site editor.  (Taped Down can be found under the "user-submitted" category, but strummer6048 designed it on our behalf.)

We plan to roll out new styles pretty regularly for the foreseeable future.  Enjoy!