Virb Blog

Hi there.

It was a bumpy road in Virbland today. Early this morning we released several major upgrades and improvements to the databases that power your website and the Virb admin. During this process, which began at 5AM EST, we ran into several unexpected issues that caused our planned downtime period to far exceed the time we promised you.

This maintenance was scheduled so that our engineers could perform upgrades designed to drastically increase the speed of your website, all while allowing us to more easily release new Themes and exciting NEW Page types for your website.

We entered into this morning with the best of intentions. Unfortunately, we let some of you down and I want to personally apologize. We know how important your website’s uptime is to you, and we know you rely on us to keep them operating around the clock. My team and I take this responsibility very seriously, and we will work even harder in the future to prevent any unnecessary or extended downtime.

Thank you for all your tweets and Help Tickets to let us know about the problems you were experiencing. It’s so very important for us to hear your feedback and thoughts. Please know we’ll always strive to provide an outstanding product that makes your life even easier.

Thanks again for all your patience and support. If there is anything we can do to make this better, do not hesitate to let me know. 

And to the small number of you that may still have some layout or design glitches, please tell us about it in our Help Center, and we’ll get right on it.

Thank you for trusting us with your website, and thank you for being such a loyal customer. <3

Brad — @brad
Founder & CEO

Olivia Mew is a self-proclaimed “Debbie downer” whose clever illustrations will, ironically, probably make you smile. She’s a self-taught illustrator living in Montreal, Canada, whose work has been featured on Design*Sponge, Juxtapoz, and The Fox is Black, to name a few.

Olivia’s illustrations feature many different subjects, from flowers to celebrities to her signature apathetic, dark-haired girl. She also started Stay Home Club, where she collaborates with other artists to sell unique products like “passive aggressive paper goods.”

Be sure to check out Olivia’s website to see more of her quirky illustrations, buy her products online, and follow her personal blog at oliviamew.com.

April showers bring May Themes! Or something like that. Last week, we added Atlantis to our Theme lineup. Atlantis is simple to customize and fully responsive, which means it transforms to show off your content optimally on any screen size. This Theme is especially loved by musicians and bloggers, but it can easily adapt to all types of content or styles. View the demo site.

Atlantis has a distinctive design that features a left-aligned, grid-based content area. The header boasts a modern, list-style navigation and large site logo. Gallery items are well-spaced for a clean look that lets your photos or designs shine. Widgets in this Theme are placed in the footer and look great in a pair.

If you haven’t been keeping track, we’re nearing the very end of our Upgrade Roadmap, which means that all the Themes from our old Platform (pre-January 2013) will be updated, mobile-ready, and anxiously awaiting your next project. From there, we’ll keep our list growing with even more beautiful themes. We hope you enjoy this latest addition. Log in now to take Atlantis for a spin!

Our Virb family just keeps growing. This week, we’re proud to welcome Kacy Fortner to the team. Kacy is joining us as a Programmer and will be working to improve Virb’s core and add exciting new features.

Kacy lives in Raleigh, North Carolina (just like Virb programmer Brett) and is a born-and-raised Tar Heel fan. When he’s not building software, he loves to brew his own beer (a Virb IPA would be pretty cool, right?). He’s also a runner, kick-baller, and secret Ke$ha fan.

Kacy has already proven that he’s one of us by contributing some great animated gifs to our Campfire chat, and we’re so excited to have him join the team! Be sure to hit him up at the end of the week for High Five Fridays—his specialty.

Jordan Domont is an illustrator from Portland whose colorful ink masterpieces and expressive portraits have graced galleries, magazines, and newspapers for clients like Business Week, Virgin Atlantic, and VICE.

His realistic drawings are brought to life with brightly colored drawing ink used on Mylar, which is an approach he discovered through experimentation. In regards to this unique process, Jordan says, “Pigments become slightly volatile, even mercurial, and their behavior enlivens the entire process.” Whoa.

Best of all, you can snag your very own prints of Jordan’s work through his shop. He’s currently selling prints from his latest show called “The Years,” which featured 12 incredible pieces representing the Chinese zodiac.

All the beautiful art here is, of course, credit to Jordan Domont. View more of his work on his website at jordan-domont.com.

Love New York? Us too! That’s why we named this beautiful theme after it. Meet the latest theme to join our lineup: Manhattan. View the demo site to get a quick idea of what it’s all about.

Manhattan features a bold, left-aligned header and footer that are simple to customize to your brand or style. One really unique feature in this theme is the styling for page titles: When turned on, your page title spans across nearly a quarter of the screen, leaving whitespace below to let your titles really stand out, and when turned off, your content flows across the page in a single column. It’s up to you to choose which style you prefer.

Widgets on this theme look great in threes so why not add, say, a Twitter feed, your social links, and a blurb of text info? Manhattan also offers header images, which are placed inside the main content area and are great for adding interest to an informational page.

We hope you enjoy using Manhattan. Log in now and explore it on your own site—no subway map required.

(PS: To show our NY love, we’re still offering free sites to anyone using Virb with an organization that helps Sandy victims. Learn more.)

Virb is growing again! We’re happy to announce that Curtis Estridge has joined our team, bringing our total to a whopping 13. (Good thing we don’t have any epic quests coming up.) Curtis lives in Dayton, OH, which means he can exchange frequent high fives with our other dear Ohioans: Ryan C., Ryan B., and Andy.

Curtis will be lending us his front-end development skills to help Virb turn out new themes faster than ever. Curtis is also a skilled designer with experience designing for websites and mobile apps.

When not in front of a computer, Curtis loves being outdoors to hike, mountain bike, and camp but also has a weakness for video games. We’re so lucky to have this friendly and talented guy on our team. As Brad said, “Welcome aboard, soldier!”

We’re so excited to roll out two more themes this week. Our first theme is Nautilus. This revamped theme is simple yet bold and is wonderfully easy to customize for many different styles. It features a centered site layout with horizontal elements that stretch across the screen for a modern look on any device. You can also add an extra wide header image to any page (just drop down the page’s Title options to do this) for extra impact.

The second theme we released is Stockholm, and it’s just as beautiful as the city it’s named after. This is one of our most unique themes, and it works great for musicians, photographers, and artists alike. A large part of this theme’s design is based around its fullscreen background image, which has a semi-transparent overlay to let your content stand out (or you can create a page that features just your background). This theme expands across your whole screen for maximum impact and also features collapsible Widgets to keep things clean and simple. If you’re looking for something completely different, give Stockholm a try.

We’re thrilled to start offering you these new themes. And, of course, they’re both fully responsive so they look great on any screen size or device.

Check out all of our latest themes here.

Greta de Parry is a woodworker and furniture designer based in Chicago. That’s right: woodworker. And did we mention metal welder? This young, female handywoman is breaking the Ron Swanson mold with her line of hand-crafted furniture and home goods.

Greta’s work and story have been gaining increased attention and can already be seen in Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and Luxe Magazine, and her pieces can be seen in hip restaurants and homes across the US.

On her site, Greta states, “I believe there’s a growing movement towards owning things whose origins extend beyond an assembly line. Handmade objects have an inherent history as do the roots of the material.” How can you argue with that? We look forward to seeing a lot more from this talented craftswoman.

Check out her full line of incredible work at gretadeparry.com.

We’ve recently introduced two new Virb themes. For anyone who’s been with Virb for awhile, you’ll remember that these two themes were part of our old platform, and now they’re back with a full mobile-friendly refresh!

Copenhagen was one of the original Virb themes and remains one of the most popular choices for businesses and creatives alike. Copenhagen has a classic architecture (the name was no coincidence) that lends itself to many different types of content. Its left navigation and centered dual columns make it first-rate for user friendliness.

Pearl is a versatile theme that features wide horizontal sections and a bold header option. This theme was originally created for musicians but translates easily into online shops (perhaps an Etsy shop), portfolios, and more. If you use this theme, you can choose to easily add a header image to any of your pages to add impact and visual interest.

Both of these themes come packed with customization options and are built with responsive styles, which means they’ll scale down to look great on any screen size like small laptops or smart phones. Go ahead and drag your browser window around on the demo sites to see how it works.

Keep up with our ongoing theme progress on our roadmap or by following us on Twitter.

Cotton & Flax is a modern home goods shop by Los Angeles designer Erin Dollar. Since 2010, this young entrepreneur has been creating hand-drawn textile patterns that she turns into beautiful products like pillows and paper goods.

The Cotton & Flax shop opened up just one year ago, and, using our integration with Etsy that we announced last week, has now become part of the Cotton & Flax Virb site (view the shop page), allowing customers to get a fuller experience and learn the story behind this talented printmaking shop while they browse.

Cotton & Flax is dedicated to high-quality materials, and all fabrics are hand-selected by the designer for lasting beauty. Erin states that she “hopes to share her love of printmaking and to promote greater public interest in owning unique, handmade home goods.” With products this lovely and well-crafted, we think that message is coming through loud and clear.

See the whole collection: Cotton & Flax

A few folks from the Virb crew are headed to Austin to take part in SXSWi 2013! Read on to see what we have planned.

Connect with Us Online

Follow us on Twitter to find out about fun contests throughout the day. Win Virb swag, get discounts, or even score a VIP Pass for the closing party.

We’ll be teaming up with our partners at Media Temple throughout the week, and they’ve created a live blog to capture all the wonderful chaos—with giveaways galore. Grab Media Temple’s new mobile app (iPhone and Android) for even more ways to win and stay connected.

Hang Out With Us IRL

Come chat with us at the Sennheiser + PASTE Lounge (at Blackheart Bar) on Sunday, March 10 from 6-7:30pm. We’ll be hanging out to talk with attendees and enjoy this hip Austin venue. RSVP and get details here.

Join up with Virb’s Community Manager, Tiffany, for her Community Manager Meet Up on Friday, March 8, to chat with other CMs or to learn why your company might need one.

And of course, we wouldn’t miss the SXSWi Closing Party, presented by our friends at Media Temple. All Interactive badge holders are welcome to join us at Stubb’s for this epic music event. Virb and Media Temple will both be giving away some VIP passes for this event. Keep up with us in one of the ways above for a chance to win!

If all else fails, you’re likely to find us taking a break at our favorite Austin geek hub, The Ginger Man. See y’all in Texas!

We’re so excited to finally announce what we’ve been cooking up for months behind the scenes: Etsy integration. Now, with just a couple clicks, you can pull your Etsy products directly into your Virb site to provide your customers with an immersive brand experience while still benefitting from the powerful Etsy community.

Your product information and cart integrate seamlessly within your Virb site design, but your product details and sales are still managed through Etsy, which means you only have one inventory to worry about. Easy!

(from skullandsparrow.com, who also created our cross stitch above)

We love Etsy because they make it fun and easy for creatives of all types to easily sell their goods online, and we’re thrilled to be one of the very first site builders to integrate with this brand new functionality.

To get going, just create a new Store page and connect to your Etsy account. Watch our video to see how easy it is.

(from heysp.com)

So whether you’re an obsessive knitter, a weekend oil painter, or a secretly skilled metalworker, it’s time to turn those talents into profit (allow us to Google some yachts you could own for inspiration).

Get all the details and spread the word to your crafty friends (along with a great promo code) at virb.com/etsy.

Press Coffee is a modern and friendly coffee shop in downtown Dayton, Ohio. It’s a favorite spot for our three Dayton Virbers (both Ryans and Andy hail from there). Local coffee aficionados love Press for their welcoming environment and dedication to truly high-quality caffeine.

Their Virb site lets them keep their loyal, bean-loving customers up to date with their latest news and local events while giving newcomers a feel for what Press is all about.

As serious coffee lovers here at Virb, we’re proud to host Press and promise to stop by every time we’re in Dayton.

Visit their Virb site at pressdayton.com

Using Virb for an online portfolio? Just have a lot of great images to share? We’ve added a new feature we know many of you will love. Now, you can display your Virb gallery thumbnails in a vertical, masonry-style alignment.

If you have a gallery full of many different-sized images, you can now choose exactly how you want them to flow on the page. Here’s an example of a gallery with horizontal thumbnails, which line up in rows with a fixed height and a jagged right edge. This is the type of thumbnail view you’ve already seen on Virb, and it’s still a great option for many types of galleries.

Below is the same gallery set to our new vertical thumbnail layout. Now, the thumbnails line up in columns with a fixed width and a jagged bottom edge, giving more emphasis to portrait-style images and cascading in a brick-like way. Tetris fans, rejoice.

The new vertical layout is available on all of our themes (if you’re not seeing it, you may need to upgrade) and works great with each one—it’s up to you which style you choose. And with our faster, smoother-loading images, you can’t go wrong.

(Website showcased here is by Elizabeth Weinberg)