Spruz Owners' Community For owners of websites powered by the Spruz Platform

Yesterday we became aware of slower load times on sites in the Spruz network and have been investigating the issue since that time.  The source we found was a malicious attacker flooding the network with massive ammounts of traffic.  I’m pleased to announce that we have implemented a new procedure that automatically identifies an attack and protects against it.

Now all the sites are running faster than ever, and your communities have been protected.  We are continually making improvements; in features as well as security and performance.  

I hope this answered any questions that you may have been having about your site performance and load time recently.

The latest updates are all about growing and managing your community.

First we have added a new area under the Community tab of your administration for inviting members.  This allows you to quickly send out invites, to people that you know, requesting that they join your community.  It even allows you to import your address book and choose who you want to invite.  Best of all, the user does not need to verify their e-mail address when they accept your invitation; making this process fast and easy for your new user.

To go along with member invites, we have also enabled a new option in your site properties that allow you to set your community as invite only.  This means that only people that you specifically invite, using the member invite feature, will be able to join your community.

To make management easier and also to give you a better idea of what is happening in your community, we have released a new site activity area.  The site activity page, also under the Community tab, lets you see a snap shot and full reports of specific activity on your site.  This includes who did what as well as summaries and traffic reports.  This feature will continue to be expanded upon allowing you to see more different activities in the future.

This is a very common question; and most people do not understand how search engines work. Think about this article as search 101 for helping you understand how top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, and MSN work. We want to help you grow yourself by helping you with your site show up first when people search for your site in the top search engines.

 All search engines list sites by 3 basic factors; Times Indexed (Search Spiders find your pages via links and index your pages into the search database), Page relevance (Your content in relation to the search terms used), and site content (Keyword density, Meta Tags, Content Updates, Etc).

When you create a new website it can take months before search engines index your site for the first time. Depending on who hosts and created your website will greatly determine, if you are ever listed in search engines. SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps grab search engine attention and give your pages more relevance. Fortunately for you Spruz is a team of SEO techies that has already done half the work for you to get your Spruz powered website in search engines faster. We have proprietary technology that helps with SEO to help your site to get listed better and faster. However the rest is up to you, Spruz does have optional SEO packages that do all the work for you. Call us toll free at 877-MYSPRUZ

The big question; Do you want to have a top listed site on search engines?

I am sure you answered yes. Everyone does and it is an area few people know how to do. So I will start out on what you should not do first and then go from there;

The important don’ts about building search traffic;

1. Do not change your domain name often;
   1. Google, Yahoo, and all other engines store your index by your site domain name. Pick an name and stick with it.
   2. Find a hosting company and stay with it. Search indexing takes time and the more times your site is indexed the higher your rank will be.
   3. Creating a site, and building it, to something great takes a long period of time and dedication. The longer your site is up and is maintained with fresh content the better your ranking becomes over time.
2. Do not muck up your site with keywords that are not related to what your site is about;
   1. Many people use Keywords that are terms not directly related to your site content.
   2. Find your target Keywords; use a list of no more than 10-12 words or phrases and focus on them. Pick words that are a close match to what your site is about.
   3. Do not use general keywords or phrases. If your site is about classic cars do not use cars or autos as your keywords. It is doubtful that based on keyword competition you would make it event close to the top 100 for those terms. Use Classic Cars, Vintage Cars, Cars as a Hobby. A recent study indicated the average number of words used for a search was 6. The more words a user uses to search, that match your keywords the higher your search rank.
   4. Set your site keywords and stick with them. Remember indexing does not happen overnight.
3. If possible stay away for all image or flash based content and sites;
   1. Sites that are completely flash sites are not indexed well with search engines. While they look nice, the loss in search related traffic is not worth it.
   2. Remember search engines need your site content to find out what you are about. Search engines cannot read images or flash. They can only read text and html tags, the more text you have on your site and subpages the better.
   3. If you place images in your content use the alt tag; you can learn more about this by searching alt tags in Google. An alt tag tells search engines what the image is about, in addition if that ima

New and Improved Game Roster

There had been some confusion and difficulty with the old roster system that was located in the community area.  To make things simpler we have taken it out as a backend system.  We have added a much improved game roster with easy member adding, plus making it simpler to give awards and keep your clan or guild organized.  You can add a game roster to your site through the new page dialog.

Additional information is on your old roster page if you had a roster already.  You have the option of importing old roster information on that page.

Layout Generator – R.I.P.

It was old, I’m sure that is no secret.  Designed before the official launch of Spruz, the Layout Generator has seen its share of action.  As with everything, there is a beginning and an end.  The only hope is that the end of one thing is actually the beginning of something better.

That being said, it is my great pleasure to present to you the successor to the Layout Generator. Taking up residence in the same place under the Design tab, the new editor allows you to modify your themes like never before.

The new Design Editor was a complete rewrite, so to list out all the changes would be quite lengthy.  Instead I have listed out below some of the new highlights.

Easy to Find Controls - All the option are right at the top and instantly visible. They are separated out into logical sections, to help you find exactly what you need.

Real Site Preview - The preview area shows you how your actual site would look with the changes you make.  It is fully functional, so you can even navigate to other pages to see how they look with your new style.  All changes give you instant feedback in the preview area.  You can now full test the design with your content before you save it to your site.

Smarter Colors - Color schemes allow you to change groups of colors at a time or even suggest a color scheme for you with the Smart Color Selector option.  There are also several preset color schemes to get you started. If you want to change individual colors you can do so with the sections color buttons next to the section title.

Image Uploading - Upload or browse for images directly and add them to your style instantly without ever leaving the page.  Easily change between images that you have used during your design session.

Undo Option - You can undo changes that you make by clicking the undo button; which is located next to the save button at the top of your design controls.

Presets - We have added more presets for various styles.  Font sizes, navigation styles, color schemes and border sizes all have easy to use presets to make designing even easier.