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.

We just wanted to let everyone know that we have experienced some problems with our e-mail provider yesterday, due to that, if you happened to try and contact us through one of our mail boxes - feedback@wix.com, support@wix.com, help@wix.com, info@wix.com, bizdev@wix.com or press@wix.com - you probably had your e-mail bounce back. We are happy to announce that the issue has been resolved and you are more than welcome to contact us with anything that comes into your mind.

Yours,

The Wix Team

We’re thrilled to announce that as of yesterday, Wix is live and kicking in open beta. That means everyone can now be a part of this fun creative force known as Wix.

Excitement is in the air. Check out what the guys over at TechCrunch and KillerStartups had to say about us.

The open beta launch is a big step forward in our journey to change the way web content is created. We’re constantly exploring new directions for developing and improving Wix. Together with the Wix community (in the forum, email, our social network profiles and more), we can make a happier, prettier and friendlier internet.

We want to give a large round of applause to all the users who helped us through the private beta. Your feedback and experience with Wix had a tremendous role in our decision making process. Thank you for your much appreciated support, we couldn’t do it without you (and we don’t want to!).

Yours Forever,

Team Wix

So, as I promise, this is the Wix Evolution.

(And the truth is that we are still at the beginning of our way..)

(this is the actual version)

Now we are trying to get into a new rhythm of writing in this blog, things are moving so fast, and we are chasing them as fast as we can… this blog is a good tool to catch them and lock them here forever :)

Today on the schedule: Invite friends and the new Wix forum

We allow ourselves to think that from time to time you got this crazy idea and you want to show or introduce Wix to your friends, well, from now on - you don’t need to write to us and ask an invitation for your friends!

Look for the modest “Invite Friends” button we added to your “My Account” (5 for now - you can e-mail us if you need more) use it! it’s almost fun :-P

Another new thing that we really like - is our new forum (designed and customized by Yonatan, respect! :) ) In this place you’ll be able to tell us what you think, to ask for new features and complain about all our sins, for now we’ve got 2 forums, the main is for support, we’ll try to update it every time issues will come up and we cant wait until you’ll fill it with bugs and problems.

The other forum is for you to talk about - well, everything, the general chat.

In the past few days I was busy with trying to build all kinds of widgets for bloggers using Wix, and I thought it would be great to share them with you (our users). Got ideas for new widgets? comment about them here, lets try to do them as well…

1. The “where i am” widget (see here, my personal one ) As you can see, I just took all kinds of icons (we will supply Wix icons to known Social networks and services very soon) and linked them to the right place. The fun thing is that you can:

• Customize the way your widget looks like (colors, effects, sounds)
• Fit the size of the widget to your blog/profile/whatever…
• Add more icons to your widget the moment you join a new service (and you will!) and the Wix will be updated wherever you embedded it.

2. Sport widget: your favorite players, your favorite groups, you can embed it into your profile and change it following the changes in real life… (see example here )

3. Countdown widget: you’ve got a big campaign coming up? are you starting a new project that you want people to notice? are you planing to launch a new album? new song? new something? why not let Wix promote it?Or simply put: comment to your friends with Wix-countdown widgets, and it will update everyday or every time you want it to (use it as banner, newsletter…) you can see how the Anarchist Music Project A.N.A use it in MySpace press here.

Written by Amit knaani, Amit@wix.com

Yup: Big news – our new version is up and running…(you can read a review about us at Techcrunch).It’s our belief that community is out there in the wider world, not centered here at Wix headquarters. As we see it, Web communities grow and change organically, with content generated by users from all over the world. That puts you, the user, at the center–you own the content, you decide when and where to publish it, you embed it anywhere–and, of course, we’re happy with any creative way you choose to do it!

Did you see our new cool features? (I guess some of you already use it, and as we can see, use it well!)
Now, you can:
• Add mini-pages that allow you to make small changes rather than major overhauls to your designs.(We also added a ton of new content)
• Animate your content, simply by using the “animation” feature; you can now decide when and where your content will appear and how it will look (how about fading in smoothly?)
• Draw from your own collection of visual content and present it in a photo album, carousel, or other creative layout.
• Control the editor and HTML background of your published Wix. When you publish or edit your Wix, you can change the background color from the default blue to any color you’d like. Just click the multi-colored square that you can find in “settings” (in the “info” section inside it) and both your editor background and your published Wix background will be changed.

In the meantime, you can see some of our favorite designs created by Wix users in the ‘Explore’ section of the site (if you’d like your work featured on Wix, email me at Amit@wix.com)On the same note, as you can see from our Artists’ Blog, we warmly welcome (and are seeking!) any content you’d like to contribute to Wix. If you’re an artist, musician, or graphic designer, we’d be more than happy to add your content to the system, allowing other users to see, use and enjoy it (you’ll retain credit for your work). Content submissions should come to me: Amit@wix.com As always, you can find us at our twitter: http://twitter.com/Wix (check it out, we’re friendly to strangers…), or be our friend on MySpace (www.myspace.com/wixmypage) (or, if you are an Artist: http://www.myspace.com/wixart ) or Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=528459119).

2 comments

All of us here at Wix would like to wish our awesome Beta Testers a happy and loving Valentine’s Day!

And to try and get you in the Wix spirit we’ve created these Valentine’s Comments.
Spread the love by personalizing them and sharing them with your friends and special loved ones :-)

So far we’ve given access to a small group of people who are helping us shake-out the kinks.

Wix is an ambitious Web product and the entire team is working hard at getting everything ready for the official Beta launch, which isn’t far away.

We are gradually giving access to more people while increasing server capacity.

So what’s the best way to make sure you know what’s going on with Wix?

Two ways:

1. Sign-up for an early access invite on Wix.com.
2. Subscribe to our RSS.

Thanks to everyone who’s helping us with testing, feedback and in donating stock graphics!

If you want to lend a hand with any of the issues above, write to us at: feedback@wix.com