Virb Blog

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.

<3

As web designers and developers we take great pride in finding and using the right tool for the job. When it comes to content management systems, the right tool for us is one that makes site management simple, but with the flexibility and power we need to build clients a beautiful, functional site.

If you’ve ever struggled to find that perfect tool and ended up having to adapt or make your own, here are four simple reasons why Virb makes the perfect CMS for your next project:

Ease of Use
Virb is a platform built for users who don’t build websites for a living. It’s safe to assume your clients fit into this target market (otherwise they wouldn’t be hiring you). Because we keep that audience in mind, the normal CMS barrier of tech-jargon and over complicated tools doesn’t exist.

Virb makes it easy for your clients to manage their own site without your help. Your clients can add a page by clicking a button that actually says “Create a New Page” — a refreshing break from adding posts, entries, or navigating a myriad of hover menus.  

With Virb there’s no need for complicated training—eliminate the day-long meeting to go over every nuanced detail of adding blog posts or events, and avoid those calls asking “How do I add an image to this page again?” Virb’s simple-to-use site manager will save you valuable time, and hopefully money.

Customization
Virb makes the task of managing content easy for your clients. It also makes the task of site-construction and customization easy for you.

Click on the Advanced tab of our Customize Widget to access the HTML behind each specific Virb page type. Edit it right there in the browser, or copy it into your favorite code editor. Take note that we do use some custom tags here and there to export areas of content, like <virb load=”widgets/site” />, which outputs the widgets configured in the admin area.

Besides having full access to the HTML of each specific page-type, we give you the full CSS for your site as well. You can overwrite existing styles, or re-write the code altogether.

This access provides a framework that’s easy to work with while still incorporating all the hooks you need to give your clients a beautiful, customized, functional site design. With some basic HTML and CSS you can do almost anything you want, without having to know how to wrangle line after line of PHP first.

Price
Virb sites have all of their features and hosting built into the $10/month price, which makes your monthly invoicing a breeze. You can also switch the billing directly to your clients. Charge your clients for the site design and customization, then let them pay the monthly fee, leaving you free of the dreaded client-service-middle-man role.

Support
Every Virb site comes with our full set of FAQs, docs, and friendly online support. If your client has a problem with their Virb site, they can come to us, not you, for the answers to their inquiries. We’re more than happy to help our customers after they’re done being your customers.

The next time you’re approached by a client looking for a simple site and a great way to manage it, hopefully you think of Virb, a platform built to do exactly what you need it to do—simply manage sites. If you want to see for yourself, start a free 10-day trial, no commitment required… or just check out our website.

On August 16, we celebrated the first birthday of Virb’s new website builder. To properly dedicate such an event, we thought it best to give Virb a fresh coat of paint — and expand a few important areas of the site (and we ate some ice cream cake).

Along with more vibrant colors and illustrations, we’ve expanded our Features section to help you find out what Virb can do for you. We’ve also included a slew of videos so you can see just how easy it is to make a website with Virb. Our video tutorials will grow ten fold over the next few months. Get ready.

We also created individual detail pages for ALL of our theme designs. You can see exactly how each one starts, and where some creative customers have been able to take them. Everyone needs a little inspiration from time to time (and ice cream cake).

This isn’t the only part of Virb getting a little face-lift. Stay tuned for a new and improved Build admin coming later this year. We hope you enjoy the new look. Please watch out for the wet paint.

“I just want bigger images!” 

If you’ve ever exclaimed the above statement while building or designing your portfolio, today is your lucky day. Today is the day Apollo is available as a new Virb theme.

Apollo was designed and built with a singular purpose in mind: Let the images do the talking. We’ve stripped away superfluous UI elements, extra headers and everything else that would get in the way of showing your beautiful photos, posters, or interfaces to the world. What is left is a theme that lets you show off your work in a beautiful, simple, way, with maximum impact.

Apollo starts simple but don’t let that deceive you. The theme defaults are nice and clean—perfect for a photographer that wants a large slideshow or a designer with long web interfaces—but tweak some options and add some custom CSS and this theme will shine with all the rich details you need to get that next project.

If you’ve been looking for a new way to show off your work, just sign up, give Apollo a try and see what happens when you let your work do the talking for you. And if you want to see Apollo in action, check out Rubin’s photography portfolio or Ryan’s design portfolio.

Early Wednesday morning, July 20th, from 3AM-4AM PST we will be performing database maintenance which will affect all Virb Sites.

These upgrades are necessary to allow us to make changes to all primary databases — paving the way to a big wave of new features over the coming weeks and months.

While we aren’t fans of scheduled downtime, we’ve chosen a time when traffic is at its lowest. We will attempt to keep the actual maintenance window to a minimum (though we’re setting aside a maximum of one (1) hour for all upgrades).

During this time virb.com and all sites built with Virb will be unavailable. Your site will be temporarily replaced with a page stating “Our website is undergoing maintenance. We’ll be back very soon.”

Not good with on-the-fly timezone conversions? That’s okay. Check out the Virb maintenance time in your own city.

We’re excited to unveil the new Virb.com design, an improved Admin and accompanying features — all coming later this summer. Thanks for your patience during this maintenance.

P.S. You can follow along with our progress @ twitter.com/virb

Hugs & websites,
Brad

—
Co-Founder & CEO
twitter.com/brad

We’re very excited to launch our new integration with Topspin. Topspin allows you to sell your albums, digital goods, tickets, and merch in ways you never could before, and now it’s easier than ever to link your goods to your Virb site.

Watch the video below to see how easy it is to get Topspin up and running on your Virb site. To sweeten the deal Virb users get a discount on Topspin by signing up here!