Doodlekit | Website Builder | Website Maker | Website Creator - Latest Blog Entries

Doodlekit's new Partnership with Orange Soda

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:31:00 -0500

We are very excited to announce our new partnership with Orange Soda, the local internet marketing provider. Among other things, Orange Soda provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to small businesses at prices our customers are used to.

After creating a website, our customers first question is usually, "Why am I not showing up on Google?". Unfortunately the answer to this is not an easy formula we can apply to everyone. Orange Soda does the dirty work by putting their expertise to work on your website.

Orange Soda will among other things...

Submit you to search engines
Submit you to business directories
Perform keyword optimization

This is a perfect match for our existing SEO tools.

In addition, very soon we will be releasing extended SEO tools for more finely grained control of keywords and other information. This will allow you to add keywords, descriptions and titles to individual pages.

And this is just the beginning folks, stay tuned for more exciting developments.

Doodlekit takes on Business 2.0

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:39:00 -0500

Two years ago Doodlekit Online Free Website Builder was nothing more than a vague idea in the back of our minds. Ben and I had just started our own web development company (Doodlebit Web Solutions) a few months earlier, and we were selling small custom websites on the side when we had the time.

As more and more of our clients started requesting the same tools, we started to develop a custom, reusable framework. We immediately saw an opportunity – why not just sell this framework to the masses? The currently accepted philosophy at the time (a.k.a. Business 2.0) stated that in order to be a successful internet startup you had to have several millions of dollars in venture capitalist funds, resources, and business connections. The assumption back then was that software and web companies should break even after $20 million in investment. Not to mention you would need to move out to Silicon Valley (*see How To Build A Bulletproof Startup).

Then one day we came across a blog post from a small internet startup company called 37Signals that changed everything. The blog post, How To Shoot A Bullet Through Your Startup, railed against Business 2.0. It defied Corporate America’s view on how to run a web company. It denounced the waste, bureaucracy, and mindset of these entities that limited others from pursuing their dreams.

We loved it.

37Signals explained that you could start your own Web 2.0 company with hardly anything down and just one or two people. They had done all this themselves and had great success. Ben and I raced out to their website and purchased their online book, Getting Real, that explained in more detail how to achieve this type of success. We sat down and read the whole thing in one night.

Heath: "It's gonna take a few years to get Doodlekit up and running. We got 2 clients, $600, a refurbished PC, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."
Ben: "Hit it."

The next day we started Doodlekit. We scrounged up $300 each, grabbed an old refurbished PC from Ben’s basement, slapped in some extra memory from my old computer, and we were off ‘getting real’!

A year and a half later (just 4 months ago) we had our first major release of Doodlekit. Since that time our membership base has increased to over 15,000 and our revenues have gone up 10 fold. We have zero debt.

Most of our competitors are multi-million dollar startups from the Business 2.0 way of doing things. Many of them still have yet to break even. We compete head-to-head with these companies and hold our own. How? Because Doodlekit is a much better product than what they offer. I find it rather humorous that a small company of two employees can successfully compete against so many multi-million dollar startups. If you put what we offer next to what they offer and let a consumer pick which one they want, they will pick Doodlekit. The only thing Doodlekit lacks right now is the budget that these larger corporations have for marketing. That’s all going to be changing very soon.

We aren’t out to be the next MySpace or YouTube. We aren’t measuring our success based on millions of dollars. We just want to make a decent living doing what we love doing – building websites! Doodlekit and 37Signals has given us both this opportunity, and for that, we are very grateful.

If your interested in helping us get the word out, please feel free to promote Doodlekit via a banner on your website. Ben and I would really appreciate it!

On a side note, I just wanted to let everyone know that 37Signals will soon be coming out with Getting Real (Second Edition). Ben and I will be the first in line to buy a copy!

Doodlekit Layout Forums Re-Design?

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:44:00 -0500

I have had several request to make the forums that come with Doodlekit look more like regular forums – basically make them a little more ‘compact’ and easier to read. I am looking into redoing the forums for ALL the layouts – so this will affect all our users that use our forums.

I would like to simplify them even more and make them easier to follow. Any suggestions from the community are appreciated and will be considered.

Doodlekit now supports external domain hosting

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:04:00 -0500

For those of you who already have registered your domain name, setting that up with Doodlekit just got a whole lot easier. All you have to do now is setup your Nameservers to point to our new DNS servers, and you're done. This will automatically setup your website and email DNS.

I recommend that anyone who has already setup your existing domain name using a CNAME take the time to change to this new method.

The detailed instructions are in the forums.

Network Upgrade Complete

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:48:00 -0500

Our network provider has just completed their network upgrade. This upgrade will mean better performance and uptime for all Doodlekit Websites.

Thank you for your patience.

Doodlekit Gets A New Layout!

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:42:00 -0500

Ok – I finally got a new layout out! We have had lots of requests for more layouts, so that’s been my focus for the last few days. The new layout currently only has 5 color themes, but I will be adding more throughout the following week.

I will also be adding more layouts here shortly. These will be more ‘generic’ and ‘simple’ for those that want less complex looking sites. They will also make good starting layouts for those that know CSS and want to customize their own look and feel.

As far as color themes go, if you have any suggestions I would love to here them! Post a link to a website that has color themes you like and I will see If I can incorporate a few requests into the color theme selection.

Doodlekit's Website Builder Gets Funky Fonts!

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:17:00 -0600

Now available with all Doodlekit layouts, you get the option to change your Header, Page, and Sidebar title fonts – and these aren’t the boring ‘web safe’ fonts either! Using a new version of sIFR technology, we were able to incorporate fonts outside the normal limits of use for web development. Most browsers support this technology - for the few that don’t, it gracefully degrades down to a web safe font.

Here is a sample of what your font selection looks like from the website builder admin tool:

Here is what a Doodlekit website looks like with the default font:

Here is the same website with a new ‘Funky Font’ selected for the title:

Check out our demo website to see a live example.

Try out all our fonts! Find the one that right for you. More fonts coming your way soon!

Doodlekit Website Builder Goes International

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:09:00 -0600

Today we pushed out internationalization options for our Doodlekit Website Builder! You now have the ability to:

Change front-end labels to different languages
Pick a preferred date format
Pick your time zone for timestamps
Pick a currency for use with the Shopping Cart.

Right now you can only switch to one of the selectable languages provided. However, we will soon be releasing a properties file that you can customize to any language you want.

More cool stuff coming soon!

We’re still here!

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:39:00 -0600

We have been super busy since our new release of Doodlekit a few months ago. We have been spending most of our time optimizing and bug fixing Doodlekit to make it more reliable, faster, and better. These thing, while not noticeable to our users, have kept us pretty busy.

Well – we are close to wrapping that all up! We should start releasing some new cool tools and extras by next week! Multi-language labeling is on the way, as well as more layouts! We are also working with http://grassroots.org to set up a system for them to use Doodlekit for non-profit websites! Also in the works: Doodlekit reseller and affiliate programs! We will post these updates as they happen on our blog, as well as through a monthly email. We have lots coming your way… so stay tuned!

Server Outage - 1/9/08

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 09:19:00 -0600

Today our hosting provider had some issues with their provider which caused our servers to go down for a couple of hours. Everything is back to normal now.

We of course realize that this can be very frustrating, and are researching different hosting options to keep problems like this from happening again.

I apologize for this inconvenience. Please contact us if you have any further concerns.

*Update - We got this email from our provider:

Earlier this morning one of our data centers suffered a major power
outage. I have not received an explanation of the nature of the outage
and why the UPS backup and generators did not fail over properly. I
assure you I will investigate this thoroughly and understand what is
being done to prevent it in the future.

Unfortunately, this caused a large number of our virtual machine host
servers to reboot bringing down about 500 virtual servers and
additional causing network issues on half of the inbound routes. As
some noticed, this affected our internal sites as well.

Over the past few hours, we have been working diligently to verify and
check everyone's server.

I apologize for this major inconvenience and appreciate your
understanding and patience as we restore service to everyone as fast
as we can.

Multi-Language Labeling For Doodlekit

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:15:00 -0600

Doodlekit is currently working on a multi-language labeling system for the front end of all Doodlekit websites. We have had a lot of request for this, so we have decided to move forward with a solution. This will mean that you will be able to change your website's 'labels' to whatever text you want, in whatever language you type in. Static website text like 'subscribe', 'more', 'search', etc are examples of the labels you will be able to reword.

We will also be including time zone support options so that your timestamps will match up with your selected location. You will also have the option to select a desired timestamp format.

Ben and I take all suggestions on how to improve Doodlekit seriously, and we hope this demonstrates our flexibility in accommodating requested features by our valued members.

Doodlekit Makes PCWorld!

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 08:17:00 -0600

Doodlekit was reviewed by PCWorld this morning, but with one caveat - it's the Danish PCWorld! Hey... we are not complaining! The very first few sentences (translated) read:

"The time's most beautiful, quickest and mostly advanced web page gets one with Doodlekit . Next month a new web service has maybe taken over the leading position, but just now Doodlekit is the enough strongest online web page programme."

Read the translated article yourself (scroll down a bit).

Doodlekit In The News

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:23:00 -0600

The past few days since Doodlekit got TechCrunched has been crazy. The number of free Doodlekit websites people have been creating each day has jumped from around 40+ a day to 400+ a day. We have had over 1,700 total new websites created in the last few days, and over 12,000 unique visitors to our website.

Of course this is just the beginning. Now that the word is out, more and more people are coming to check us out, and more and more people are blogging and writing articles about us. All of them have been pretty good reviews so far. To give you an idea, here are a few articles, reviews, and blog posts that have popped up in just the past few days:

There are lots more I didn't post here, and I am sure there will be even more posted over the next few days.

We were looking to launch a huge marketing campaign to give us a big push out into the web, but not anymore. The TechCrunch review pretty much has done that for us. Ben and I are very grateful to TechCrunch for helping us get the word out, and we are both pretty humbled by the response of the world wide web to our product.

Ads are back on free websites

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 10:24:00 -0600

Today we pushed out our new Yahoo advertisement system to help us support all the free websites we provide. We have incorporated matching colors for each theme as well as placed them discreetly to the side and in the footer. These will help us keep the free websites available for everyone to enjoy and use. Thank your for your support.

Doodlekit Featured on TechCrunch

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:39:00 -0600

Yesterday the popular tech blog TechCrunch posted an article featuring Doodlekit.

The article focused on how our advanced features set us apart from our competitors. It's nice to see our hard work recognized by one of the most popular tech blogs on the net.

Since the October release our signups have dramatically increased, and we're getting a really good buzz going. The influx of traffic from the article pushed this even further.

On a related note, our Questionnaire has been a big hit, and we're getting some great feedback. For the most part people have been acknowledging Doodlekit's ease of use, but they've also been asking for more layouts. We're already on it.

Thanks to the guys at TechCrunch, and to all of our customers for helping us get here.

Doodlekit Survey

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:41:00 -0600

In order to provide better service, better products, and to improve your user experience, we would like to get some feedback from you about Doodlekit. Please check out the online survey. It is 9 simple questions – easy to fill out and very helpful to us. Every day we work on improvoments and enchancements to Doodlekit. This will help us prioritize our list. Thanks in advance!

Doodlekit Survey

Advertisements are Disabled, Temporarily

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:39:00 -0500

Due to some issues we're having with Google, the Advertisements placed on free accounts have been disabled for now. They will resume on all free accounts once everything is worked out. Customers using their own Adsense accounts should be unaffected.

New Features

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:17:00 -0500

Heath and I are very excited to officially announce the biggest Doodlekit release to date. We've packed it full of new goodies and gave it the expected DK polish.

What does this mean?

Even if you have little or no web-building experience, or simply don't want to spend any time writing code, you can have a personal or commercial, fully-functional web site at your fingertips in no time.

Open an online business
Blog to your heart's desire
Sell products
Create a narrated photo album to share with friends or family

Here's what's new:

Advanced Content Editor

Upload just about any image or file
W3C compliant HTML so your site loads faster than ever
Style formating so you have an instant professional look and feel

Shopping Cart

Use your own Paypal account
Simple to create
Start selling immediately

Google Adsense Integration

Just enter you Google ID and start making money
Ads match your color theme

New Layout & Themes

More colors
More backgrounds
Change your entire look and feel with a click

Stock Photos and Image

A huge new library of photos and images

Plan Changes

The basic web site is FREE! Just give us a try
Personal site with all the bells and whistles
Commercial site with a fully functional, easy to use shopping cart

Check it out for Free. We know you'll have fun using it.

-Ben

New Doodlekit Release was a Success!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:38:00 -0500

The new Doodlekit has arrived! Starting today, Doodlekit has many new enhancements and features that help make managing your website even easier. Don’t miss out! Check out the new and improved Doodlekit today!

Doodlekit Update Rescheduled - Saturday, Oct 13th

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:27:00 -0500

To allow for even more upgrades and improvements to be included in the next Doodlekit release, the release date has been changed to Saturday, October 13th. After we unleash the new release, be sure to explore the new and improved Doodlekit Online Website Builder.

We'll send you another email as soon as we're done. If you have any questions about this release just reply to this email.

More information about this release