Virb Blog

Customer support is a four-letter word. Customer support means sitting on hold for 30 minutes only to be hung up on. It means filling out a contact form only to receive an error and have your entire message deleted. It means getting useless responses from robots that don’t come close to addressing your problem. We know; we’ve been there too.

At Virb, we want our customer support to feel like our product: friendly, simple, and fast. We’re only a team of eight right now, and each one of us handles support. That means that the people answering your questions are the same people who work with the product day in and day out. So, yes, sometimes your question will be answered straight from the hands of our CEO—when he has a meeting-free minute. We’re all on the front lines.

Just this past Spring, we overhauled our entire support system. We moved over to Desk.com, which involved, oh, just the simple task of redoing and rethinking everything we were doing for customer support. We changed a lot, and the results are already speaking for themselves.

We created an ever-growing set of tutorials and documents to help customers find answers to common questions without having to wade through pages of irrelevant information. If Google is any proof, we know that people love searching to find their own answers (and cat videos). We hope that our customers will be able to find everything they need from our support documents, but if not, we’ve also improved our support ticket system.

Desk gave us a new interface for fielding customer questions that helps us stay organized, which means faster response times, less misunderstandings, and a lot less headache for us. Every question you send, whether it’s through our Help page, our Twitter account, or even Facebook, shows up in our list. We take turns tackling questions according to our specialties and often brainstorm solutions together.

When we’re in the office, we try to answer questions within a matter of hours, but more complex questions might require some research. On weekends and non-operating hours, we always have someone keeping an eye on things, and you’ll often find a team member responding (we just can’t stay away).

This is only the beginning. Within our Help area, we’re planning to add more Theme-specific docs, video tutorials, and an improved “getting started” section. And, the biggest news of all, is that we’re hiring official customer support folks: real people whose sole concern is your online welfare. We’re going to keep our support team very closely involved with our product so you’ll continue to get real answers from people who understand your needs.

In the meantime, keep the questions coming! Your questions help us discover our weak spots so we can make things better for everyone. Of course, we’d prefer to have our experience be so seamless that we wouldn’t even need to offer personal support—but we guarantee that we always will.

We promised you new Widgets, and we’re happy to announce that they’re here! In this round of new features, you’ll find Widgets for social icons, a Facebook Like Box, and RSS feeds. Here’s a bit more info:

Social Icons

Whether you’re a small business or just a student, it’s great to let your visitors connect to your accounts elsewhere in the internet. We’ve added a simple and beautiful way for you to add links to your social sharing accounts. Once you’ve created a new widget, just choose the services you want to share and add the full URL for your account. Hello, internet fame.

We’ve created eight varieties of icon styles for you to choose from as well as the option to display them large or small. With these beautiful icons, you really can’t go wrong. Think we’ve missed a social service? Just drop us a line through Help.

Facebook Like Box

We like you. Now your visitors can like you too. We’ve added simple integration for the illustrious Facebook Like Box. Your site visitors can “like” your Facebook Page and share it with friends on their feed. You can choose to show your Page’s activity stream and the faces of other users who have liked you. Choose what works for you, and share away.

RSS Feeds

Have a personal or favorite RSS feed? Now you can share any feed in your widget area—and, of course, it’s quick and easy to do. Just add the full URL of your feed and choose how many entries to display. That’s it!

We know you’ll enjoy adding these new widgets on your site, and we can’t wait to see them popping up on your pages.

With our recent Admin overhaul, we upgraded our blogging platform to give you more control, while still keeping things sweet and simple. One of the most useful details we added was the ability to add categories and tags to your posts.

Categories

Categories help you keep your blog grouped and organized, and they help users find the content they want. Your readers can now filter your blog by category to get just the posts that interest them. Your category drop-down is automatically added to your blog page as soon as you define them. You can think of categories as your blog’s navigation.

Tags

In case categories weren’t enough, we’ve also added tagging ability. Tags let you append keywords to your posts that readers can use to filter your content. Tags can be used for further breaking down your categories and adding significant details that might interest your readers.

There is, understandably, a lot of confusion between categories and tags. Categories should be very broad, but tags can complement them and add more information. For example, in a recent post I wrote about Downton Abbey, I put it in the category “Television” and added tags for “fashion,” “british,” and “drama.”

Comments

We’ve also added Comments, a much-requested feature. You can now let your avid readers leave their loving commentary on your posts through Facebook or DISQUS. When your readers connect with Facebook, they can opt to post their comment to their public feed, giving your site increased visibility.

If you have a DISQUS account, you can connect it with one step to give your blog all the features you already love.

We have also made it easier to connect your existing blog to Virb with simple imports for Wordpress and Blogger. We’re so excited to be able to bring our users these great new features. Enjoy!

Virb has recently teamed up with Big Cartel to bring online shopping straight to your site with simple, one-step integration. We love Big Cartel for their simplicity, customizability, and support for the little guys. And did we mention they have a plan that’s completely free?

Don’t have a Big Cartel store? Sign up for one here. Once you have your shop set up, just create a new Virb Store page, enter your Big Cartel info, and voila! Your store integrates seamlessly with your existing Virb site.

Check out how simple it is to get a store up and running: watch our quick demo.

We’re so excited to offer this simple solution for Virb customers. Now you can sell just about anything—from t-shirts to jewelry to digital audio files—straight from your Virb page using your existing theme and customizations. Big Cartel handles your payments seamlessly through PayPal so all you have to worry about is how to fill all those orders.

Check out some of these great examples our users have already implemented:

When we rolled out the Virb Admin updates two weeks ago, there were a few surprises that didn’t make it into the final release. Today, we’re excited to unveil one of those little treats.

Phoneography lovers rejoice, for Instagram galleries have come to Virb.

[golf clap]

With only a few clicks you’ll have a gallery which will import (and auto-update) directly from your Instagram stream. Simply create a new Gallery page, connect your Instagram account, name the page, save it and smile. Virb will now continually display your 50 most recent IG photos in whatever gallery layout your heart desires. No black magic required.

Be sure to reblog this post with a link to your new Virb + Instagram galleries. We’d love to see what wonderful things you can do with that futuristic phone+camera contraption.

Happy Friday. Enjoy!

P.S. If you have 30 seconds to spare, *watch* just how easy it truly is.

Howdy, Virbland.

The time is finally upon us. Next Wednesday, March 28th, we’ll be releasing the largest group of new features since Virb first launched 18 months ago. However, to ensure these upgrades go as smooth as possible, we must take all Virb sites offline for a very short period of time.

Starting around 8AM EDT we will begin by taking all Virb sites offline as we roll out core code changes to all themes. We are setting aside a maximum of one hour for this first phase, but expect it to take less.

Once sites/themes are complete, we will bring all your sites back online. However, the Virb Admin will continue to be offline while we complete the remainder of all upgrades.

As always, your Virb-built site(s) will be temporarily replaced with a page stating: “Our website is undergoing maintenance. We’ll be back very soon.”

Thank you for your patience during these updates. Next week’s upgrades are only the first of three major improvements coming to Virb in 2012. It only gets better from here.

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention… Our brand spanking new Help Center will be launching next Wednesday too. So. Much. Newness. Preview some of this shiny newness right now.

Here’s the estimated time of our scheduled downtime in your own city: 

See you on the other side.

Brad
—
Founder, Virb
twitter.com/brad

Hello, wonderful customers and comrades.

The following post is not the subject matter I necessarily look forward to focusing on, but here at Virb, we do our best to be honest and completely transparent with you, our customers.

As some of you may know (or have more than likely noticed), we’ve had several unplanned outages of Virb sites over the past few weeks. Sometimes it is for only 5 minutes, other times it has encroached upon an hour.

First off — in case you don’t want to keep reading — let me assure you we are completely aware of these issues and the headaches they have caused you. Despite the problems have continued to resurface, that doesn’t mean we aren’t working furiously behind the scenes to locate and repair the the culprit(s).

To be honest, we’ve had our heads down, aiming to hit our launch date of March 28th for the new Admin upgrades, and sometimes that means we don’t communicate with you as much as I’d like. I sincerely apologize for this — it’s not how we plan to run our company. I’m taking steps to greatly improve our community communication in the coming weeks.

So what’s the cause? Well, to error on the side of non-technical mumbo jumbo, I’m going to classify these brief outages under the category of “growing pains”. Some of it is relating to scaling the servers to better handle increased uploads and traffic, while some relates to improving our datacenter and hardware infrastructure. Either way, we’ve already taken steps to quickly remedy them both as soon as humanly possible.

I want to thank you personally for your patience. We’re so happy you’ve decided to use Virb, and we have much in store to show our appreciation. The upgrades to your Admin next week are only the tip of the iceberg. We haven’t even yet launched these features, and already we’re working on some quite innovative stuff for the Summer & Fall.

All I’ll say now is that we continually strive to make Virb THE easiest way to build your own website. And the plans we have for 2012? I truly believe they’ll put us head and shoulders above the rest.

-@brad 

Designed and debuted at SXSW in Austin, Texas last week, the Virb Tee is finally here. Designed by Virb’s very own Ryan Clark, produced by the unstoppable United Pixelworkers and printed on the heavenly soft American Apparel Indigo Tri-Blend tee. It’s a win-win for your torso.

Don’t delay though. United Pixelworkers is taking orders only until April 6th.

Order now. Go, go, go!

It’s the exciting season finale of Virb Holidays!

Enter to win an iPad 2, DODOcase & FREE Virb-for-life.

But… ya gotta enter to win! Go.

You’ve tweeted, posted and begged for Virb to add store & shopping cart features — so what did we do?

Oh, well, we only just went and partnered with some of your favorite online shopping cart services to offer seamless one-click integration with your Virb site. That’s all.

Virb Stores are coming in early 2012, but you can read more about it NOW. Oh, and enter to win one of 3 free-for-life Virb sites. Go.

We’re smack dab in the middle of a holiday giveaway extravaganza, and we know that our bundle of giveaways just wouldn’t be complete without a few new themes, so we’re giving you three. Without further adieu, let us introduce to you the three new themes joining the Virb storehouse.

Atlantis

The defaults in Atlantis are whites and grays, giving it a super clean look.  But by all means, this theme is anything but simple. The design is subtly complex and relies heavily on the chosen typeface with large headlines, large buttons and large arrows. Atlantis features horizontally scrolling images in the gallery pages, showing off beautifully your collection of images. The layout takes advantage of white space and is sure to give your site a fresh, clean look with an edgy touch of class.

Pearl

Pearl is smooth. With it’s earthy default color scheme and controlled borders and accents, we think you’re going to love this theme. It has a beautiful blog layout that’s both simple and clean, features a large hero area that you can take advantage of if you’d like, huge images in the collection pages, and a completely unique album page. It’s different that other themes, and really easy to make your own.

Nautilus

Lastly, but certainly not least, we present to you Nautilus. Nautilus features a dark look by default, which gives it a strong sort of feel, but at the same time subdued accents to balance the whole thing out. You’ll be able to show off your large images in the collection pages, feature your music on a unique and simple album page, and blog your heart out in the gorgeous blog. In no time at all, you’ll be able to make this theme your own.

Each of these themes have a little something of their own to offer. We’re so happy that they’re ready for you to enjoy and make your own. Head on over to our themes page to see all the details and pick one for your site. Also, keep an eye out for several more themes coming in early 2012. And again, a very happy holidays from your friends at Virb.

Over the weekend we pulled the curtain back on a few of the features we’re working on in 2012: improved Virb Widgets, and a new Help Section for customers. In case you missed it, let’s get you up to speed and go into a little more detail about these awesome improvements.

Widgets

Currently there are only a handful of widgets you can add into your website; this is going to change with the new Admin. For starters, we are going to integrate the most-asked-for widget in the forum: the Facebook Page Like Box. Enter your Facebook account and *boom* an easy widget that fits perfectly into your site and lets your visitors officially “Like” you.

Along with that, we’re hooking up widgets for two other awesome services, Flickr and Google Maps. Now you can easily show customers where your business is located, or share beautiful photos with prospective clients and friends.

Lastly, we’re rolling out an RSS Feed widget to give people a glimpse of your blog from any page. 

This isn’t where the widgets stop either. We have a whole slew of ideas in development that will roll out throughout the coming year. Rest assured your footers and sidebar will never be the same.

Getting Started with Virb

One of the areas we’ve always wanted to improve most is the Help Center. Nothing can be as frustrating as looking at your blank canvas of a website and not knowing where to start. This is where our new handy manual comes in! We’re going to be rolling out a step by step guide to getting your site up and running. Not only will we cover the basics, but this will also include theme-specific tutorials to help you get the most out of your theme-choice. 

Aside from the the manual we will be rolling out a whole new Help Center design that will make finding answers to your questions much easier. Use an intuitive search bar to pull up articles and forum discussions that match your topic, or hop right into the discussion area to see what your fellow users are asking. 

All in all we think that this revamped Help Center will provide the type of support we’ve always wanted our customers to have, and it should help you build your site that much faster, by harnessing the collective knowledge of all our staff and users.