Today we released FolioEdit version 2.102, which includes some feature updates and various bug fixes. The update will install automatically on login.
Feature updates
Improved menu saving
We have rewritten the code for saving the main menu. This will be most obvious to users with very large menus, as they should see a dramatic reduction in time it takes to save the menu. This re-write has also fixed some bugs listed below.
New Colour Picker
The old colour picker had an annoying bug whereby you couldn’t drag some of the sliders until you had clicked on the colour pane. We have replaced this feature with a completely new ColourPicker, that has a more visual colour spectrum that you can click directly to pick a colour. In addition there are some default colour swatches to choose from, that should speed up things like chossing black or white.
Option to choose html-based site
We have added a feature in the Theme Editor which allows you to select “html-based website”, so that your visitors will see the html version whether they have Flash installed or not. We have done a lot of work on the html-based versions of the FolioStop sites, and they are very nearly up to the same quality as their Flash counterparts. Lots of users have asked for this, and they now have the opportunity to beta test their sites using the html version as the default. Please report any issues to support@foliostop.com, and if there are any major problems, you can switch back to a Flash-based site using FolioEdit. It is our intention to phase out the Flash-based sites over the coming months, once all bugs are ironed out.
Please note, “html-based” does not necessarily mean the sites will have no Flash in them at all, rather that the structure of the site as a whole uses html, css and javascript. Video will still display in Flash for the time being, and Flash animations will continue to work as usual. Lastly, some of the features of background layers that use Flash-based rendering will continue to use Flash player to display.
We will post more information on the html-based versions in a forthcoming article.
Migration to AIR 2.0
This might not mean anything to most users, but a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes migrating FolioEdit to use the AIR 2.0 runtime. This move will make it possible to create a host of new features in the coming months. The immediate effect should be a small increase in performance.
Bug Fixes
Menu saving bugs
- Fixed a bug where dragging pages from one folder to another resulted in the page disappearing. Users can now move their pages around with confidence.
- Fixed a bug where changing the name of a page in the menu overwrote the choice of gallery navigation
- Fixed a bug where changing the name of a page in the menu overwrote the SEO settings
Multimedia Page Editor bugs
- Fixed a bug where adding an image gallery as the first item on a new page would result in the gallery failing to save.
We invite all users to share their thoughts and experiences of this update with us.
I have been a hobby photographer for many years. A little over a year ago I finally made the decision to get myself a website that represents my photography.
As I didn’t want to spend much money on my first website, I went on the lookout for companies that offer attractive templates and finally stumbled upon FolioStop. Out of all the companies I liked they were the only ones that offered a two week free trial period. As I assumed that web design and building your own website is difficult, I figured this way I could check out if I was at all capable of creating a website by myself or whether I needed to bribe a web designer friend into helping me.
Very soon after I started I had an almost finished website and I did it all by myself! This seemed a miracle to me who has as much knowledge of web design as my grandmother has of iTunes.
The secret is: FolioStop make their software dead easy to use. I will tell you the steps I took to build my website www.bettybhandari.com.
Once you have created your own account and have installed FolioEdit you can get started. FolioEdit is a simple bit of software which offers six basic elements from which to build your website: a text page, a multi-media page, an image gallery, a video gallery, an audio gallery and a folder.
The first step is simple: think about how you want to structure your website menu. The easier to navigate a website, the more successful it is. I wanted to have a ‘home’ page for general introduction, a page for each of the areas of my photography, a page for information such as services & costs and a section that tells the visitor a little more about me.
I started by dragging and dropping the above mentioned web elements into my menu area on the main FolioEdit window. I dragged an image gallery into this area and I double clicked its default name of ‘Untitled Image Gallery’ and renamed it to ‘Wedding Photography’ and hit save. I opened the gallery by double clicking the icon next to the name and dragged all my wedding images into it. If you want to show more than one wedding you simply use a folder instead of an image gallery, call this ‘Weddings’ and then add several image galleries into this folder, one for each wedding.
My Weddings Gallery
Next I dragged a multimedia page in to my menu, named it ‘About Me’ and wrote all relevant text in there. I also wanted a picture of me on the page so I simply clicked ‘Add image’ at the bottom of the multimedia page window and dragged the image in. I found that a landscape image looked better than a portrait image as it was the full width of the text.
My ‘About Me’ Page
Last but not least I created an image gallery as my ‘home’ page, loaded a single image into it and added all my contact details to this image. All of the image galleries offer you the option to add titles and text info to accompany the individual images.
My Home Page
Then I went into ‘Site Design’ and played around with the different layouts FolioEdit offers. Next I adjusted text styles, background and text colour by clicking my way through the software’s options in Site Design. The most difficult part was to create my hand written logo, but when ready I was able to load it into the software very easily.
When it came to fine tuning I contacted the boys at Foliostop’s customer service who were not only pretty helpful, but actually very proactive with additional suggestions such as “Why not add an ALL RIGHTS RESERVED note to your website. This is how you do it…..”. This is where the ‘Graphics’ tab comes in. You can upload images to the foreground, content area or background of your website. I made the text ALL RIGHTS RESERVED as an image using photoshop and then uploaded it as a foreground layer so that it appears on every page. I may also add a graphic for my facebook page which you will be able to click.
I have not only been very pleased with how easy and fast it is to get a good looking website, but the monthly maintenance of adding new photos, text, info and testimonials is dead easy. I always wanted a website that I can be in control off at any time of the day or night, without having to rely on someone else to update it for me. The FolioStop software and boys behind the system has helped me achieve this and I’m looking forward to discussing new features for the software with them in future.
Betty Bhandari
FolioStop – now optimised for iPhone
FolioStop sites have a special iPhone layout
FolioStop websites are now optimised for iPhones and other touchscreen smartphones. For more about why this is important read on.
We have just released new scripts that deliver your FolioStop website to iPhones and other smartphones in a special template that is specifically tailored to touch screen mobile phones. This happens automatically and requires no action on your part.
Navigating website layouts that look good in the browser can be a real pain on a small screen, with lots of zooming in and out required. This can be enough to put many people off trying to view a site on their phone. However, with the right layout, navigating a website on a phone can be really usable.
The layout we have developed uses a single scrollable column that you can drag your finger to move up and down. The menu is part of this column and opens and closes as an accordian to reveal or hide page content.
Image galleries work really well too, with the images automatically showing up the exact width of the screen, and arrows to flick forward and back through the gallery. In fact, it is so easy for visitors to view your site on a phone they may not even need to look it up in a browser!
If a potential client is checking out a few competitors on their phone to get some background information, you can be confident that your FolioStop site will present you or your business in a very positive light.
New html versions coming soon
FolioStop was initially created to deliver great-looking Flash-based websites, but Flash alone can cause serious problems with Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines are designed to read the text in the html on web pages and can’t read the contents of Flash websites, so FolioStop has for some time provided accompanying html versions of all customer sites, which allows search engines to fully index the sites in their results.
At present (25 May 2010) there is one standard html version for all FolioStop sites regardless of which layout you have chosen for your Flash site. This works very well in terms of SEO but we recognise that some customers would like their html version to look representative of their Flash site.
Consequently we are currently developing html layouts that look and functional in a very similar manner to their Flash counterparts. Of course as they are non-flash versions they won’t support Flash animation and cannot load Flash widgets, but in most other ways they will be very similar.
If a visitor without Flash goes to a FolioStop site they will automatically see the html version so there will be no inconvenient interruptions telling the visitor they need to download Flash before they can see anything.
In addition these html versions can be viewed on all mobile phones. However, we also have in our development schedule plans to release a mobile-optimised html version that makes best use of mobile screen gestures and automatically displays text at a suitable size for reading without having to zoom in, with images automatically displayed at full-screen for easy viewing.
It might also be worth mentioning here that with Flash 10.1 coming to many new smart-phones (including Blackberry and Palm, and devices running Android) in the second half of 2010, we’ll be able to deliver Flash versions of FolioStop sites that work directly on these phones and integrate neatly with the phone gestures. Watch this space.
As always these new developments will be automatically rolled out to all FolioStop customers as soon as they are released.
Currently in development is a new feature that lots of customers have been requesting – the ability to add PDFs and other documents to your FolioStop website.
We have created a new tab in FolioEdit where you can upload a range of different file types, including .pdf .doc .xls and a bunch of other common file types that you may want your visitors to be able to download from your site.
We are developing this to be as easy to use as possible, so that whenever you create a link in your text, one of the options is to link to a file in your repository. If you select this option you get to choose from a list of your repository files and it is as simple as that, the link is created for you automatically.
You will also be able to create these type of file links from your foreground graphics, so if you create a graphic button to download your CV (for example), when your visitor clicks on this graphic it will automatically open the PDF in a new browser tab.
Watch this space for updates on when this new feature is released.
Update 31/6/2010: this feature is now live, easily add documents, pdf, spreadsheets to your site using FolioEdit and then link to those documents from any text page or graphical link.
This post is about how to take the first steps towards optimising a FolioStop site for search engines, and winds up with a look at a real customer site that has done this to good effect.
FolioEdit makes it very simple to add meta tags to every page, which is the starting point for search engine optimisation.
Firstly, you can set global tags for the whole site. To do this select the SEO tab in the main window, as shown in the screenshot below:
Screenshot showing the FolioEdit global SEO settings tab
You can also add page specific tags to each and every page, whether it is a text page, gallery, or other media page. If you set specific tags for a page these over-ride your global tags, but only for that page.
Most important is the page Title, as this tells the search engine what the page is about. The Keywords tag plays less of a role than it used to (and in fact Google now ignores it completely) but it is good practice to list keywords that are relevant to the content of that page. The Description tag has no affect on SEO itself, but the text entered for the description tag is what will show in Google search listings, so choose something that will help a prospective visitor decide if your page is relevant to their search when they are browsing their search results.
Setting these tags is a good start, but there is plenty more to be addressed.
The next thing to consider is the text itself on your site. If you don’t have much text, then you are not giving the search engine much to work with. Put simply, if you consider your target audience, then try to imagine what search phrases they might enter into Google when searching for sites like yours. These words need to feature prominently in the text on your website. At the page level, also make sure that your most important keywords are in the page Title.
Note: You need to be careful not to over-do the repetition of keywords in your text as you will end up filling your pages with junk text. This is called keyword stuffing and will most likely put off prospective visitors, and could also lead to your site getting blacklisted in the search engines. As a rule of thumb, if it reads well then it is probably OK.
There is a great deal more to SEO than this post touches on, but hopefully this should provide a good starting point.
To finish off this post I want to take a look at a FolioStop customer who has managed to gain a good search engine position for her B&B in the Loire Valley in France. La Bellevue offers Loire Wine Tours as a side business to their B&B set-up. Sarah Jane has written her site page titles and text effectively enough for Google to grant her site position 8 for the search “Loire Wine Tours”. Here is a screen-shot of a section of the Google page 1 results for that search as of 20th May 2010 (3rd row from bottom – www.domainedelabellevue.com):
One last thing to point out, SEO is something that needs to be maintained. This position in the results can change any time due to other websites publishing more relevant content, so you have to keep working at improving your site text.
FolioEdit V2 Released
We are very pleased to announce the release of FolioEdit V2, in conjunction with some significant upgrades to the whole FolioStop system.
New Features at a Glance
- Add Animations to your site (see example)
- Multiple background images (see example1, see example2)
- Create graphical buttons / links
New FolioEdit functionality
We have re-designed the layout and functionality of FolioEdit to make it more manageable and easier to use, and to incorporate the new features highlighted above. Major changes include:-
- Centralised edit window – now there are less windows so your screen can stay clearer
- Preview your site layout and colour scheme directly in FolioEdit
- Save multiple colour themes so you can test out new ideas without losing your old settings
- Save text styles and give them titles for use through the site
- Much more advanced colour palette selector – unlimited colours
- Save your own colour ‘swatches’ for quick access
- Add images to your website layers and preview how they will look on different screen sizes
- Add animations to your website
Welcome to the FolioStop blog
Welcome to the FolioStop blog. Here you can find information about FolioStop development, case-studies, and other musings.
