Virb Blog

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.

We’ve been working on a new theme selection area for a while now, and have finally put the finishing touches on it. We’re so proud of what we’ve done that instead of releasing it early next year with the rest of the retooled Admin, we’re launching it today! Log in and check it out, http://virb.com/themes.

We’ve replaced tiny thumbnails with larger images of actual site designs, showing off the many ways you can customize each theme. We’ve also linked up our favorite Virb sites that use each theme to provide you with even greater context, helping you to make a more educated decision when designing your site.

PS. Don’t forget that starting next week (Dec 12-23) we’ll be showing off exciting features of the new Virb Admin — and giving away piles of awesome gifts.

Over the last few weeks we have experienced several periods of unplanned service interruptions on Virb. This, of course, affects all of us here, but it’s even more unacceptable for our customers. The purpose of this post is to explain what happened during our last downtime (Wednesday, November 30) and how we’re preventing it from occurring in the future.

At around 7:02PM EST on Wednesday, November 30 our monitoring system notified us that Virb was unaccessible. All of us were online and feverishly looking into the problem within a matter of minutes.

After some investigation the root cause appeared to be that our original settings for PHP on our web nodes were no longer suitable for the amount of growth in traffic we’ve received in the last year. We’ve ensured that our PHP settings are now set appropriately. Also, more monitoring is being put in place to keep watch over this type of issue so they can be seen before they become bigger problems. 

Unfortunately, one thing that exacerbated the issue was our internal Stats tracking. We turned them off over the weekend to ensure that we had solved the problem. This morning we turned them back on.

This outage was not acceptable. We never want to put our customers through something like this again and we’re working as hard as we can to make sure we won’t ever have to. The level of patience we received from our customers—those who had every right to be frustrated with us—was amazing. We’re glad that you’ve chosen Virb to build your home on the internet, and thank you for your understanding.

As always, you can follow @Virb if you’d like to receive status updates via Twitter.

The Virb team recently celebrated our first birthday, and like any company with an exciting new product, we are growing fast. Because of this, we are happy to announce two new job openings: a Community Manager and a Front End Developer.

Our customer-base is growing fast and we need someone to help us stay on top of Support, wrangle our social media, and manage our Customer Showcase and Testimonials. If you think you have what it takes, and love working with people, check out the Community Manager position.

Our code-base is growing just as fast, and we need someone new to help us write the code that powers Virb, as well as develop new themes for our customers. If you love HTML and CSS, write clean semantic code, and love cross-browser testing, then check out the Front End Developer position!

Plus, you’d be showered with bounties like full health coverage, 401K options, a shiny new Mac, and high fives — just to name a few.

Know someone that’d be perfect for either of these positions? Spread the word.

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