Virb Blog

In case you missed the banner sitting atop our website for the past couple weeks, Virb will be a red carpet sponsor for the 18th Annual Critics’ Choice Awards that takes place this coming Thursday, January 10th. With lots of help from our new family at Media Temple, Virb will be in Los Angeles this week helping introduce a whole new industry to the easiest way to build a beautiful website (while staring open-mouthed at stars like Robert de Niro and Anne Hathaway, naturally). The Critics’ Choice Movie Awards is a prestigious ceremony that’s been taking place since 1995 to honor the year’s best films and actors, and we’re really excited to be a part of it.

If you live near Los Angeles, Virb & Media Temple are giving you a chance to join us at the official Critics’ Choice Awards pre-party. If the free drinks aren’t enough to convince you, how about the chance to get an early preview of Santa Monica’s brand new club, 41 Ocean, and the possibility of mingling with your favorite stars? Read more and enter to win on Media Temple’s blog.

Also, don’t forget to visit our Critics’ Choice page to vote for your favorite film franchise (c’mon, we can’t let Twilight win) by Wednesday at 11:59PM PST. Then watch the show on January 10th on The CW to see if your favorite series won.

Virb and Media Temple will be live-blogging during the red carpet pre-show as well as during the show itself to give you an inside look. You can keep up with us on our Twitter, our new Instagram, or by visiting the official liveblog that launches on Thursday morning.

Wait. Not into the whole movie/celebrity thing? That’s okay. We’ll be introducing even more of you into our new Platform this week so you can celebrate that win instead (no fancy gown required).

2012 was an awesome year for Virb: We doubled in size, released tons of new features that we’ve been dreaming about since day one, and joined forces with a truly awesome company (Media Temple, of course). Now it’s time to look ahead and start planning for all the great things that 2013 holds.

The first item on the list: our brand new Platform. We’ve been releasing access incrementally to many of our customers over the past month and, come early January, it will be in the hands of everyone and will be the default Platform for our new customers. We’re also still working hard to overhaul every single one of our existing Themes for use on the new Platform so you can expect to see all of those rolling out over the next couple months.

Next up, we have quite a few helpful features we’ve been dying to add (and that you’ve been asking for) that we plan to focus on early in the year. You can watch our Roadmap to get a live peek into our progress there. We have really big plans to add new built-in Page types that will make Virb both easier and more useful for a variety of different needs.

We also have some exciting events coming up early in the year that we’re sponsoring and attending: the Critics’ Choice Awards in January, the Texas Photo Roundup in February, and SXSW Interactive in March.

As for the rest, we’ll all just have to wait and see. We have many dreams and big ideas that we’re excited to explore in the new year so we’re keeping our noses hard to the grindstone. Thank you so much to all of our customers for continuing to make such great and inspiring things with Virb and for always helping spread the word to your friends. We’re so proud of how far we’ve come this past year and can’t wait to journey into 2013 with you. Happy New Year!

In case you missed it, we recently overhauled the Virb color picker. This understated tool can make a big difference for your website so we wanted to make sure the process was as simple as possible.

Our color picker now offers “favorites.” Now, when you toggle through different color options, you can add up to six colors to your favorites bar by clicking the plus sign. That way, if you want to coordinate your site’s navigation color with your other text links, for example, you don’t have to copy a hex code or try to do any matching.

Created something disastrous? No worries. Now, you can also easily reset a color back to its default Theme setting by clicking the new “reset” button.

These handy features will become even more convenient with our expanded color choice options that will be available in our new Themes v2 Platform, which is coming very soon. This is just one small feature we’re checking off our “things we’d love to make for Virb” list, and we hope you’ll find it helpful and fun to use.

We love learning about our customers’ stories. People create websites for a countless number of reasons, but each one of them is personal and, very often, inspiring. We wanted to show off some of our wonderful customers’ sites in a new way: by telling you the amazing stories behind them. Our brand new Showcase features illustrator Kate Bingaman-Burt, the two young owners of the accessories shop EAYRSLEE, and photographer Clarke Tolton—with many more to come.

Take a peek at these interviews to learn a bit about how their websites came to be and how they got where they are. And, as always, we’re still displaying great work by many more of you in our broader showcase section. (And hey, can you guys slow it down a bit? We can’t keep up with all your awesome creations.) We hope you enjoy this new feature on the website and that it inspires your next big idea!

Those of you who have been with Virb for awhile know that our Roadmap has been steadily progressing, promising Themes that work beautifully on any screen size. We’re hearing a lot of questions lately, wondering where the new responsive Themes are, and the only answer we’re really able to give back, at this point, is “soon.” 

So why the long wait? Well, we didn’t just stick in a few mobile styles to our existing code—we’ve completely overhauled our platform to bring you a lot of the things we’ve both been dreaming about for a long time.

We hate to keep you in suspense, but we know that making these substantial upgrades now will help make the product better for everyone and improve the future of Virb. We want to craft the best product possible, and that means we can’t take easy shortcuts. We’re so excited to show you what we’ve been working on for the past few months, and we’ll have some sneak previews coming out within the next couple of weeks.

Apply to be a Beta Tester

Right now, you can apply to be a beta tester. As a beta tester, you’ll get a sneak preview of everything new, and you’ll get a chance to help us out in a big, big way. And, just for signing up, you’re entered to win a sweet Virb swag pack. We’re looking for truly dedicated customers who want to devote at least an hour of their time to helping us find bugs and improve the new workflow. Got what it takes? Sign up to be a beta tester now!

It’s you, our dear customers, who help us shape the future of this product we believe in so much. We appreciate your patience as we work to finalize our new platform. It’s going to be great.

Virb has just introduced a new way to stay up to date with our latest announcements, new features, scheduled maintenance, and anything else that you might need to stay in the loop. Now, when you log in, no matter how long you’ve been away, you’ll get a rundown of anything you may have missed so you can ensure you’re getting the most out of Virb. Plus, we created a handy News page where you can view our latest notifications anytime.

You’ll also notice a shiny new header when you log in, which makes it easier to access items like your Account info and other useful links (like our recently added Site Status page).

Log in now to see what’s new, and keep checking back for some exciting notifications in the coming months!

We’ve recently put together a new video to answer the big question, “What is Virb?” We’re really proud of the result and excited to share it. A big thanks goes out to Brian Ward, Charles McDonald, and Neighbors for helping our team make it happen. Check it out:

We recently added an even easier way to connect your site with Google Apps or Google Webmaster Tools. When you connect to these services, you’re required to verify that you’re the owner of the site. We love the free tools that Google offers to enhance sites so we’ve added a handy field to your Settings tab titled “Google Apps.”

You can grab the ID code from the HTML tag that Google gives you as a verification option (don’t worry, we have super detailed instructions for you).

Why Verify?

Verifying your site is necessary if you want to use Google Apps, which lets you set up Google services for your team or business like shared docs and calendars as well as having a fancy email address that matches your domain (you@yourdomain.com).

You can also verify your site to use Webmaster Tools. Enabling these tools can help give you a bit more power over your site in Google and boost your SEO. You can see what search terms are being used to find your site, monitor how often Google crawls your pages, set a geographic region for your site, and more. Webmaster Tools enhances your Google Analytics information too, if you monitor those stats closely.

Verifying won’t help your page rank, but it can provide you with some helpful info to get there. You can check out our SEO guide to see a few tips to optimize your site through Virb like using descriptive titles and adding meta information.

For our customers who want to keep close tabs on their site and their visitors, we’re glad to offer a simpler way to connect with Google’s powerful tools.

Over the last few weeks, we had a small contest to give away our highly-coveted official Virb tees, which are not only beautiful but also printed on super soft American Apparel tri-blend cotton. Our team pretty much lives in them (don’t worry—we wash them occasionally). To enter, we asked you to fill out a short survey so we could check in with everyone and hear what you like and don’t like about Virb (yes, the survey is closed now, but we’re always here to listen).

We got some helpful feedback, great suggestions, and heartwarming praise. Thanks so much to all of you who took the time to share your thoughts. Here are the winners who will be getting a visit from the t-shirt fairy, listed—of course—by their beautiful Virb sites:

Little Minnow Designs
Capybara
Caroline Eddleman
Pedro Infantas Dot Com
Joel Kotlowitz
BENJOOS.ME
James Boyce Percussion
White Moustache Urban Adventure Co.
Jacob Webb
ASAP Blinds

Congrats to these proud new Virb tee owners, who will surely be the envy of all their friends. We also wanted to share some of the great comments you left. It helps to remind us of why the long hours are SO worth it:

“Updating my site is actually something I do for FUN now instead of something that used to make me want to cry.”

“I like the smallness of the company and the fast and friendly replies. I feel like I’m part of something special and unique…”

“I love how absolutely easy it is to customize my site. My last website I coded myself, and anytime I wanted to change something, it was just such a hassle. The ease with which I can move things around with Virb has made my life, and my site, infinitely better.”

“I’m a web novice and Virb make me feel and look like a pro.”

Aw shucks, you guys. Thanks again, everyone!

We’re so excited to welcome Andy Rossi to our growing Virb team, bringing our crew to a solid 12. Andy will be lending us his front-end development skills, which means even more cool features—faster. He lives in Dayton, Ohio, and can often be found having picturesque barbecues with our other Dayton Virbians Ryan Clark and Ryan Buttrey.

Andy is also a skilled designer and has written for the popular design blog Method & Craft. When not developing or designing, Andy can be caught trying to break the land speed record with his car, making pasta sauce, or attempting to create the perfect mix tape.

Andy told us, “I’m happy to be a part of this awesome group and look forward to what we come up with.” Us too! Welcome aboard!

After much brainstorming, testing, and revising, we’ve completely overhauled our site customization feature. It’s now even easier to use—and it looks pretty slick, if we do say so ourselves.

The biggest improvement is that you can now use a live preview when customizing your site. That means you can add all the crazy color or font combinations you can think of without worrying about your live site changing. Once you get things how you want them, you’ll just click Save to update your site or Close to discard everything.

We also improved the way you view and change Themes. There’s no more Themes tab, but you won’t miss it. To choose your Theme now, you’ll click the Customize Your Design button in the Admin and then just hit Change Theme. You can even preview your site with all the Themes (which will really come in handy later this fall when we release our new ones).

Everything else is essentially the same—but better. You’ll find all the customization options you already use within the Design tab, and our geekier users can access their full site HTML through the Code tab (psst: check out our new code formatting).

To make sure the transition is as easy as possible for our existing customers, we’ve made a helpful tutorial that outlines all the big changes. There’s even a video if you don’t feel like reading.

If you’re already a Virb customer, just log in to check it out. This is a huge step forward, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Can you believe that Virb is already two? As we enter our third year, we want to thank everyone who has supported Virb (shout out to the old social network members!) and helped us get to this point. We’re growing and moving—crazy fast—but it was a really exciting year so we want to make sure we take a moment to celebrate.

Let’s recap! This past year brought some seriously exciting things our way. We kicked off the year with a full site redesign, which made it easier for all sad, website-less people to become happy Virb site owners. Then there was the new admin launch this past March, which changed the way Virb customers create sites, boasting new features and a smarter interface. As if that wasn’t enough, just a few weeks ago, we announced our super exciting partnership with hosting giant (mt) Media Temple. We also doubled the size of our team, bringing our Virb family to 12. But all of that was just a warm-up for year three.

This coming year, with (mt) Media Temple by our side, we’ll be expanding features, upgrading operations, and getting you the things you’ve been begging for. We’ve been working to reengineer our Themes inside and out to make them work across all devices. Plus, we’re adding entirely new Themes to our line-up that we’re sure you’ll love. Those will be hitting a Virb near you in the next couple months. And one more thing: later this year, we’ll be ditching our WYSIWYG content editor and replacing it with a system that’s more intuitive and reliable. That’s just the beginning. So bust out the balloons and cakes to celebrate two awesome years with us (thanks, Google Hangout)!

We wouldn’t be where we are without our awesome customers so we just want to say, again, thank you! Bring on year three!

We’re thrilled to announce that Jonathan Boyett has just joined our growing team at Virb. He’s coming over from the (mt) Media Temple office so the paperwork was really easy (we joined forces, in case you missed it). Jonathan was the Senior Systems Engineer at (mt) Media Temple and will be our Infrastructure Engineer here at Virb, whipping our servers into shape and optimizing our back-end systems.

Jonathan spends half his time in LA and the other half up in the East Village (and, presumably, far too many hours in airports). He likes to read both McSweeney’s and various PhD theses in his spare time. Also, he’s a bit internet-famous for the crazy stop-motion video he created last year.

We’re so happy to have Jonathan join us! And we’re really glad that he (and Brad) are already sporting the official Virb uniform: