Fresh from Wix.com, you’ll find simple beautiful apps waiting for you on the Wix editor. Find out more below, and don’t forget to check out your special offer!

For a live demo of our news apps and to take advantages of your special offer hit:
http://www.wix.com/upgrade/LatestApps

Latest Apps:

2 Types of Page Flip Books:

Now you can effortlessly create books with that cool page flip effect in minutes. To make a book with purely pictures, hit the Wix editor under Widgets > Photo Albums. To fill your book with text, vids, pics and more, go to Widgets > Mini Page and select a book from the Mini Page gallery.

Google Maps:

Make it easy for your users to find you. Easily add maps, driving directions and more to your sites with Google Maps for Wix. You’ll find this feature in the Widgets section of the Wix Editor.

Your Special Upgrade Offer:

We’ve launched Wix Premium Upgrades and there’s a special offer waiting just for you.

But be sure to Upgrade your Wix site before November 15th so you don’t miss out.

P.S.

Our new features and offers are driven by your feedback!

So don’t be shy, let us know what you think: feedback@wix.com.

We’re exited at Wix today. After a lot of hard work Wix.com has a new design all designed in Wix of course!

New thing

Old thing

The new design is more than a cosmetic one:
You’ll still find all the sections that were there before, though they may be easier to find with our new navigation structure.
And in the coming weeks you’ll also find some extra surprises and offerings, too!

Stay tuned and looking forward to your feedback

Amit

No doubt you’re part of many different communities in your life at home, at work and all the places in between…and these days, perhaps without even realising it, you’re a member of many online ones, too.
As I’ve been working with Wix on the community aspects I wanted to share some of stuff we’ve been doing and what I’ve learned with you.

We designed Wix so that we could help you build your own web-life and landscapes, no matter where you are based, what language you speak or which web-demographic you belong to…

The coolest thing about being able to launch in Beta, and then Open Beta, is that we’re still small enough to listen and be in dialog directly with you. At first, we met you only through your emails, and your awesome creations.

As you’ve grown, we’ve integrated more communications structures piece by piece: pages on MySpace, Facebook and twitter, a forum from vbulletin, blogs via wordpress, and soon, a wikimedia support wiki that will include content supplied by you – videos, articles and more! And as we’ve done this, you’ve increased your communication with us, giving us feedback and more along the way. And even cooler, you’ve started sharing what you’re learning with the rest of the community, just last week a few of you put more tutorials on YouTube :)
And all this dialog means we are able to shift to your needs, and create better products for you. For instance, the latest version release of Wix included features driven by your suggestions, and countless bug fixes you picked up!
This is all part of what I’ve learned about community building on the web:

• Simplicity grows with, and in response to, the community. In Wix’s case for example, we add features based on your needs.
• Consistency: you should always know where you are and what your next step is
• Decentralized community: members of online communities are often scattered around the globe. So it’s important that to talk to users in their own place, in their own language…
• Closing loops – it’s important to close communication between users and communities, and between the site and the service.
• Respect: on Wix for instance, we do this by crediting users for their contributions, sharing, promoting and giving and receiving feedback. Respect can also relate to features like: favorites, rating, explore, most viewed & popular
• Attitude and transparency – always answer, share plans with the community, ask for their opinion and respond to the outcomes from this dialog

These aspects in turn influence the business model because the business is driven by, and built with, you, the community.

Amit Knaani

Wix is now offering support in French. We’ve asked Se’bastien, an avid user of Wix, to lead this effort and below is his introduction to our French speaking users: (to get support in French, please contact frsupport@wix.com) to learn more, go to Wix.com homepage..

Bonjour à tous !

Je suis Sébastien, votre assistant technique Français.

Wix travaillant actuellement sur la traduction de son site en plusieurs langues, je serai votre interlocuteur en cas de besoin (seb@wix.com)

N’hésitez pas à vous inscrire sur le forum je répondrai très rapidement à toutes vos questions et suggestions.

Avoir choisi Wix est pour moi une question de passion, y travailler est un honneur car je suis sûr d’une chose : Grâce à Wix, le web va connaitre un nouveau jour.

Voici un exemple de très beau site réalisé avec Wix par Karl Souprayen, See site here

(cliquez sur la croix clignotante pour entrer)

Apprenez tout de Wix dans le dernier numéro (541) de Micro Hebdo

Merci d’avoir choisi Wix !

Sébastien

We didn’t quite break the 200 meters sprint world record, but it’s been a big week at Wix. We just uploaded a new version of the Wix editor and over the next week you’ll find a stack of cool new features!

Finally, *cue drum roll* Wix offers you… UNDO (& redo)

What’s more, our latest version means Wix is now twice as fast! Check out your Wix creations online to see the difference

Of course, we’re still in Open Beta so there may be some hiccups over the weekend. If you discover a bug, please let us know: support@wix.com we’ll be working around the clock to solve it.

New Features Already Online:

• Make your own background from your pics, set any media item as Background
• Rulers & Transform you can easily design with precision
• Update your Account settings: change your password and user name
• Import Contact Lists from gmail, yahoo, hotmail & AOL
• Now you can apply effects and behaviors to groups
• Embed Videos from Metacafe & 5min as well as YouTube

Thanks for being part of the Wix evolution, and stayed tuned for more new features in the coming weeks!

Happy Creating,

Wix Team

We are adding a bit different post today, as we see the need to understand more about Wix and it suitableness to search engines, so here: our first didactic post including tips from our SEO resident expert, Ilan Shriki.

Anyone who tries to promote their website quickly learns that two types of visitors read our websites – humans and search engine robots. No doubt you’ve worked hard on mastering the language of your customer. Today I’d like to focus your efforts towards speaking to a particular breed of machine commonly know as the search engine robot. (Search engine robots are what search engines like google & yahoo send out to ‘crawl the web’ and gather data for their indexing and ranking systems).

SEO: Optimize your Website for Search Engines

Stick ‘SEO’ into google and you’ll get millions of links (206 million last time I checked). But often very little one knows what to actually do to optimize your website for search engines. Whether using a wix.com platform or not, here are some steps/tips we recommend:

• Choose your platform with Care
• Write clean relevant text
• Submit your Website
• Relevant inbound links

1. Choose Your Platform With Care

Before you even write a word, it’s important to ensure your Website is designed in Format that Robots can read.

For most html-based sites this is a given. It is also a given with Wix.

Traditionally, this is not a given with Flash. So if you are thinking of using flash - dynamic visuals being great for humans - Wix may be the solution for you. (Wix creates an html mirror of all your web content that can be read by search engine robots but is invisible to your website visitors).

2. Write Clean Relevant Text

You’ve probably heard that on the web, “content is king”.

This is because although all search engines robots behave differently, the 3 largest engines (google, yahoo & msn) prefer pages with clean and relevant text.

But robots don’t only read the text you write throughout your website. They also read the “page title”, “description”, and “keywords” you select for your website.

Page Title is the most important element for search engines to correctly categorize your website. “Page title” is the title that appears at the top of the browser when visitors view your website.

Description This is what people will read when they find your website on search engines. As search engines typically publish only 20-30words it helps to keep your description short and sweet.

Keywords: keyword selection is also critical. You may know what category/s your website occupies…but we recommend you use look up keywords being used by your market in keyword directories, and include them in your web content.

Here are two great free tools for selecting keywords:

• http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Of course you should also make sure to write for your current & potential customers…

3. Submit Your Website

When you have finished your website, it can also help to let search engines know you exist.

If you are publishing your website on your own domain, you can submit your website to the 3 major search engines by using the links below:

• http://www.google.com/addurl/
• http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

(If you are publishing your website with Wix hosting service, this will happen automatically.)

4. Relevant Inbound Links

“Content is king” is not the only SEO mantra. “Relevant links” is also key.

From an SEO perspective, the more relevant inbound links your site has, the higher the ranking your website will receive on Search Engines.

Here are a few simple ways to increase your inbound links (and help your site get promoted):

• Add your site to Open source Web Directory Dmoz: (Note: it can take a long time for your request to be processed)
• Create links from web directories that are relevant for your website subject area.
• Ask friends and clients with relevant websites to link from their website to yours.

These are just some tips for optimizing your website for search engine robots – without compromising on the language of your customer. We hope you’ve found them helpful! If you do end up using wix feel free to ask our help for any follow on questions.

Wix.com graphic design user, Michelle, shares her experiences using Wix.com with the Canadian TV show “HomePage”

And more:

In TWS2008 we presented Wix.com. To watch our presentation and see some of the team, click here and select “Wix” - you can also see all the convention via this link if you really want :-) )

Wix.com in tradevibes.com

Have you met Planet Wix? It’s always fun to see interesting sites made by users…

Globes closing the list for today, here

Click on the Pic to see the full Wix!

Check Simple plan on Ning

Of course I love all of you out there using Wix…but I wanted to take the time to plug some of my favourite Wix! It isn’t not just that I like them (ok I love them). It’s because they do more than just give us a great visual experience… they are here to promote something of value. Here are just some of the Wix being created for not-for-profits or for making this world better :

The A.N.A open source project,

You can find all about the A.N.A here (A Wix site, of course)

Bullying UK

One of the leading anti-bullying charity, Bullying UK, has created a junior Bullying UK site for young people under 10 using Wix. We are proud to be a part of it!

Frames of reality
The Peres Center for Peace, in partnership with Local Testimony, has launched “Frames of Reality” with a Wix site - a unique endeavor for Palestinian and Israeli photographers.

Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh http://www.wix.com/toonseum/ToonSeum

404festival http://www.404festival.com/

E learning: Purdue University http://www.wix.com/entr200/teams

Quiggly’s Clayhouse - is a fun and safe art studio for children and adults. Members can paint pottery, make mosaics, sculpt clay, fuse glass and learn to use the pottery wheel http://www.wix.com/youngblood9292/Quigglys%20Clayhouse%20Redo

Rocs: A day of

I hope they’ll give you the inspiration to create a free Wix for your own non-profit organization, or perhaps offer your services to create one for your favorite charity. (And do let me know if you do - I’ll always be happy to support projects like this and share them with the Wix community)