A Summer Focused on Design

A few months ago, we noted that many of the top requested features were related to the design of your sites, and so we spent our summer radically improving the flexibility and possibilities for Weebly themes.

We're releasing the culmination of these efforts today: a vastly improved theming engine and a new Designer Platform.

Designer Platform

Weebly's new Designer Platform allows designers to create websites for their clients without all the hassle. It's a white-labeled solution that lets the designer add staff to help design sites, and gives clients the ability to edit them.

If you're a designer or developer, head over to the Designer Platform home page, or view our blog post announcing the release in more detail.

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Improved Theming Engine

This release is all about the flexibility of Weebly's theming capabilities, paving the way for more beautiful, more flexible, and more professional websites built with Weebly.

The key improvements to the theming engine include support for:

• Multiple page types: Instead of every page of your site sharing the same layout, you will now be able to create landing pages, splash pages, pages with or without header images, and more -- the types are configurable by each theme, so each theme can be unique in its own way.
• Logo in the header: You will be able to easily upload a logo to replace your site title.
• Search boxes: Themes will now be able to incorporate a search box, allowing your visitors to search your site to find the content they're looking for.
• Fixed text and image areas: Add your phone number and address at the top and bottom of your site, or have Facebook, Twitter and Google+ share buttons more prominently located. 
• Multiple draggable areas: These allow your site to have global sidebars and more flexible footer areas like you see on the Weebly homepage.

To give you a sense for what these improvements look like, we’ve included screenshots below of a few of the themes we’re currently developing and will release in the near future. We’re spending significant time converting all the existing themes on Weebly to support these improvements as well.

If you feel comfortable editing the HTML and CSS of your theme yourself, jump right into our new Theme Editor to take advantage of these improvements today! Check out our help documentation to get started.

For everyone else, you’ll be seeing a diverse set of new themes and updates to your existing themes being rolled out over the next few weeks and months. Since these are significant changes, we'll be taking some time to make sure your existing sites can migrate over without a hitch -- the last thing we'd want is for your current site to get messed up. 

We’re extremely excited about these updates and can’t wait to get the improvements into your hands as soon as possible. Our renewed focus on design will help make your site both more powerful and attractive.

As always, our team is continuing to work night and day to make Weebly better for you. We appreciate your support and would love to hear your feedback!