Latest News

With always more websites hosted with UGAL, it was time to revisit the network architecture that was in use since UGAL launched. We are happy to report that the project is now completed, and that you should experience a pretty dramatic increase in the speed at which web pages are delivered from our servers to your web browser.

While we were at it we worked at improving the time it takes to generate the pages of your website. Queries to our databases are now (much) faster and more data is cached in memory for faster rendering. Our goal is to never spend more than 200ms (milliseconds) to generate any page of your website. We are well below the mark for most of the pages we serve, and are still tweaking the few remaining "slower" pages.

Contact us at support@ugal.com if you think of an area where UGAL could do better. A few milliseconds shaved here and there add up to improvements that us, the humans, can feel.

Enjoy faster websites!

You can now login to your website from your own domain name, not only from its ugal.com address. Simply go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/login and enter your email and password. Or click the "login" link at the bottom of every page of your website.

Our CSS Design Kit has been updated and version 2.2 is now available for download. The update reflects the changes made to UGAL over the last few months.

UGAL's CSS Design Kit is a reference for web designers who design their client's websites on top of UGAL. It details the HTML markup generated by our Content Management System and gives them instructions on how to decorate it using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

If there is a designer you'd like to work with for your website, send him/her to http://www.ugal.com/designers. Your website will look exactly as you specify while you still benefit from the Content Management capabilities of UGAL.

Email designers@ugal.com for any questions about designing websites powered by UGAL.

Product Catalogs and Portfolios are among the first pages to benefit from the new interface, with new and improved photo management features:

• Uploading photos is now much easier.
• Photos can be re-ordered by single drag and drop.
• Legends can be attached to photos.
• Photos can be displayed in a slideshow.

When editing a product or a project, there is now a "Photos" tab dedicated to the management of the associated photos:

A Favicon (favorite icon) is the small icon associated with a website that is displayed by most web browsers in the address bar and next to a website bookmark. The favicon adds to your website overall feel and helps your visitors identify your website among other bookmarks and open tabs:

A small addition to the product catalogs just made it to your website: you can now choose to randomly display the featured products on your home page.

With the option activated, the featured products are rotated on your home page every time it is loaded.

The technology behind the news categories (see 'Create a Blog') is now available for the Product Catalogs and the FAQs pages. Both types of pages had categories in the past, they had however shortcomings that are now addressed:

• Friendly URLs. Category URLs now look like http://www.mywebsite.com/products/category/bikes/. Much better than the cryptic http://www.mywebsite.com/products/c,3167/. Friendly URLs are easier to read and communicate and are better understood by search engines.
• Easier management. The content management pages (where you update your products and FAQs) have been redesigned to include the same category management tools as the news / blog pages. We use a technology called AJAX that allows to manipulate parts of the content of the current page without having to refresh the entire page.

UGAL was recently updated with a new option called "Quick Info". It is a small text box that you can place anywhere on your home page, and is useful for short messages that you want to highlight on your home page.

UGAL's Content Management System allows to display dynamic information from various pages of your website on your home page (e.g. the 10 latest news). Up until now the interface to update where this information is displayed was not the friendliest. Enters the Page Layout functionality.

It could not be easier to use: simply drag and drop the pieces of dynamic content around your home page, click "Save Changes" et Voilà, the layout of your home page is updated.

If you are a web designer looking for an easy to implement Content Management Solution, have a look at our designer section, grab our CSS Design Kit and create UGAL websites with the look that your customers want.

The CSS Design Kit is now version 2.1 and implements the entire feature set of the UGAL platform, including e-commerce.

For more info, contact us at designers@ugal.com