We were getting some feedback that the method to add a page, and then assign its page template wasn't quite as intuitive as we'd first thought. So, we decided we'd overhaul the adding a page mechanism and we hope you'll like the results. Now, when you add a page a dialog pops up that gives you all the page types that your theme has, along with a graphical representation and short description.

So, now you don't need to worry about the concept of page templates at all, just select the kind of page you want and you are done - simple as that!

This screen shot shows the new dialog for the 'Thebe' theme.

You may notice a small change to your admin page today, we made a small change to how Page and Post titles are managed. The URL for a page or post is directly related to its title, we automatically create an SEO friendly URL based on this title and once a Page or Post has been flipped from Draft to Published its a good idea to lock this page URL down for SEO purposes. That is, once the page is live then search engines will start to remember this page, and if its popular enough then this URL, title and description (remember to set a page description on the settings panel!) will be listed in search result pages. If you then change the page URL then this link will be broken, and the new one will start appearing too. Whats worse is that search engines such as Google will think that there are now 2 pages, when there really is only the 1 - this is called SEO Bleed.



This image shows what the new feature looks like, to change the title on a Published Post or Page, simply hit the 'Edit Title' button and you'll be presented with this warning:



This shows the warning, and explains the consequences of changing the title.

We hope this new system makes sense, we tested a couple of different ideas on some of our Beta customers to get a feel for what would work - and we really wanted to keep this as simple and user friendly as possible. Other systems, like Wordpress, use a much more complicated method for doing this, but we just felt this is way more simple! We hope you enjoy, and as always we appreciate any feedback you have!

Today we launched the Stats page. This page allows you to view the page views for your entire site, or break it down by page or blog post. You can select various date ranges, from the last month (page views for the last trailing 30 days, not just for the current calendar month) to the last year of your stats!

Your pages and posts are listed to the left, they are displayed in order of popularity with the most popular, the page with the highest number of page views, at the top.

We've been fine tuning our stat tracking over the last 6 months, we are gathering a ton of data so we can add more features in the future. As you can imagine, we get a lot of traffic to our site, a lot of it is unfortunately from spammers but also from legitimate search engine 'robots'. We've been filtering and updating our tracking to take all this into account, as we don't want to count these guys towards your page views, only real human beings. We're also prying out referral sources and search terms from this wealth of data, once we're pretty confident we're getting that right you can expect new features to be rolled out on this page that will give you this data.

We keep all of your data private, and we avoid storing any personally identifiable information about visitors to your site (except in cases where those visitors voluntarily provide it, such as in contact forms). We never share this information with anyone. For more information, check out our privacy page here.

Welcome to the new design for ApolloSites! We're one step closer to launching, we have a few more features to roll-out before we launch, but that won't be the end - just the beginning! Over the next few weeks you can expect the following features to be rolled out;

Some style fixes - we know that for people with a lot of images, folders or pages the page starts to look funky. We'll be fixing that soon.

Account tab - this will allow you to view your account status, update your address and change your password.

We'll add the ability to manually modify a post's creation date.

Stats tab - this will allow you to see a breakdown of your stats per page. More features will be added to this page in the future!

Image Tagging - this is a biggie, but we found that people with a lot of images need a way to organize them that goes beyond basic folders, so we're introducting the ability to add image tags, that will allow you to more rapidly organize your images