Silver Bells Special and Chime in on NE1 Changes

Welcome to December everyone!  We’ve got two announcements today combined into one.

1) Silver Bells Special

Upgrade to a year of the Silver Hosting Package and Ad-Free Option for only $218.  That’s an $80 savings from the regular price.  Special ends December 31.  You can upgrade an existing Free, Starter, or Bronze site, or build a new site.

2) Chime in on NE1

==> A simpler, more beautiful, remarkable NE1 Web Builder. <==

That’s our goal for 2011.

We believe NE1 is already one of the better and easier to use web builders online, but we’re not content with that. We’ve got plans to improve it, and we’d like your input to help shape those plans.

Simple – We are busier than ever and don’t have time to figure out complicated systems. The simpler we can make NE1 the better. That means making NE1 more intuitive to use. Giving features & menu items better names. Making instructions clearer. It may also mean removing options that are confusing and rarely used. What about NE1 do you find complicated or confusing? What can we do to make NE1 simpler?

Beautiful – We are becoming less of a text-based culture and more of a visual, image-oriented culture. How your site looks matters a great deal to your visitors. It’s the first impression people get of your organization. What can we do to make NE1 more beautiful?

Remarkable – We want NE1 to blow you away with what it can do for you. What would could we add to NE1 or change about NE1 that would be a game-changer for you?

Here are some of the things we have in mind:

1) Eliminate background music. While a lot of website owners love background music, the vast majority of website visitors hate it.

2) Eliminate unattractive templates. We used to think the more templates the better, but in reality a large, bloated gallery of templates makes it harder to find the template(s) you want to use. You don’t need 300 mediocre templates you’ll never use. We think a smaller number of beautiful templates will serve you better (By the way, eliminating templates will remove them from our gallery to download, but will not remove them from any sites already using them.)

3) New template gallery. We want to make it easier to find the best template for your NE1 site with a new template gallery that enables you to find templates by theme, color, layout, or features.

4) Make templates unbreakable. We see a lot of NE1 sites where the administrator has inserted a logo that’s too big for the header area or added too many menu items and as a result “broken” the template. We plan to introduce safeguards that prevent that from happening.

5) Affordable template customization services. No matter how beautiful the NE1 templates we provide are, you simply won’t have a truly unique, remarkable website without customizing the template to include your logo & colors that compliment it.  We already offer template customization services, but many NE1 users are not aware of that.  We aim to change that in 2011.

6) Better ad positioning. I really don’t believe you can create a truly beautiful website with NE1 without the ad-free option. But we want to make free sites more attractive by improving the layout of the ads on those sites.

7) Redesigned admin. We think the NE1 admin looks cluttered. We’re planning to completely redesign it to make it simpler, more intuitive, and more beautiful.

8 ) Drag-and-drop menu admin. What if you could change where one of your pages appears in your navigation menu by simply clicking on it and dragging it to where you want it?

9) Drag-and-drop graphics. What if you could add an image to a web page by simply dragging it from the folder on your computer into the NE1 web page editor?

What do you think of the proposed improvements listed above? What other improvements could we make that would lead to a simple, beautiful, remarkable NE1 web builder?