Annoucements
Spruz.com Improvements
Category: Annoucements

We’ve been making some improvements recently to the Spruz.com website to better reflect our comitment to our site owners.

With the addition of a Featured Websites section on the Spruz home page, we are able to shocase Spruz Pro websites. This area will bring more traffic and exposure for your community.

Another change that we have made is an overhaul of the Spruz forums.  We now have a better organization structure for you to suggest feature improvments and knock ideas around with us. This is part of a bigger thrust on our part to connect even more with our users and invest resources into the features that you want most.

New Plan Added!
Category: Annoucements

How does $24/year sound?  Let me explain..

The Spruz community is very close to our hearts; as evidenced by the past few years of blood, sweat and tears that we have poored into it. Because of all that we have sacrificed to build the platform and grow our community it was an extremely difficult decision that we made recently to go to a pay only solution, but it was also the needed one. You see, over the last 6 months we have witnessed Spruz growing in a way that would soon cause it to collapse under its own weight. Because of the unrestrictive and user oriented expirince we have been dedicated to provide for our members, we were not able to make enough off of the advertising to cover even our hardware costs.

Already, with less than a week into the change, we have been able to provide much better proformance than was possible with the old model. We have also been able to make improvments to our already industry leading custormer service and support as well. These are huge triumphs and are just the beginning of the premium quality service that we are dedicated to provide to our customers.

Although we know that the change was something that we HAD to do, we strongly empathise with the financial position of some of our current users. Over the past few days we have worked closely with several of our users to create a limited version of Spruz that provides the features required by the majority of the existing site owners. We have worked it down to a price point that is within budget for all the site owners that we have been in cantact with, only $24/year. So now for the price of one redbull a month, you and your site members can take advantage of what Spruz has to offer.

To see a great comparison of how the packages, Spruz Lite and Spruz Pro, stack up take a look at our plans page.

To purchase the new Spruz Lite package or any of the other upgardes we provide (such as adding your own .com) you can go to the upgrade page.

Themes and Design
Category: Annoucements

Now that we have tackled the huge updates, infact total rewrites, of the Content management system and the forums; we are going full force into our next big area users are requesting improvement: Themes and Design

I’m not going to devulge all that we have planed for this update, but will instead go over some of the effects that it will have.

  • Higher quality and much more variety of themes, both free and premium.
  • Easier installation of purchased or shared themes.
  • All existing themes will work smoothly, so no worries that this update will break your existing look.
  • Streamlined premium theme purchases.

We are working hard on this update, but it will take some time to get it ready for release.  While you wait, I suggest heading over to Game Site Templates' Spruz themes page. They do some great work and are very affordable. Also they have released a sweet new premium theme completely free; you can check it out here.

As a side note: what do you guys think of the re-designed Spruz home page? It’s pretty minimal at the moment, but we do plan on soon adding a section on the new home page where we will showcase popular and intresting communites from the Spruz network.

Spruz goes premium
Category: Annoucements

Starting October 1st Spruz will focus on premium services. Our goal has always been to provide the most flexible and robust content platform on the net with the best performance. In order to accomplish this we will be moving over to a premium only offering, so that we will be able to offer our customers a great service with a minimal cost.

Over the past few months we have come to the realization that the current, primarily ad supported, model does not bring in nearly enough revenue to support the needs and desires of you, our customers. We are proud to announce that you have made Spruz a network comprised of 45,000+ websites and over 700,000 members. As more users have elected to “grow yourself” and become members of the popular Spruz platform the main complaint is slow page load times and errors. The biggest drawback to offering free website to anyone, is the people that create a website in order to exploit people, the internet or us. This puts a large unneeded resource drain on the whole network that hurts everyone. We now know that to continue with a free, ad supported, offering is doing a disservice to all our users.

The decision to go to a premium service model has weighed heavy on us and was not made lightly, but the steps we are making now will allow us to focus on the kind of quality we desire to provide to each of our users.

Some benefits to this change include; improved site performance, quality in network websites (You will be part of a premium only network), faster page loads, fewer errors, and improved customer support are just to name a few.
 
On October 1st all sites will be converted to a 30 day trial account for Spruz.com and Clansitemanager.com website services (All your content will be the same, no data will be removed). During the 30 day trial you will have the option of continuing with our premium offering that starts at $9.95 per month based on annual payment or you can pay monthly. This will give you an additional 30 days to decide if Spruz is right for you.

You are free to call us at 877-MYSPRUZ for questions on upgrading your website.

Some Key Features of Spruz powered websites:

  • Completely hosted solution, no software to install
  • Member oriented website with profiles, security, etc.
  • No more advertisements, Ad placement module so you can make monetize your site traffic.
  • No limits, unlimited pages, elements, modifiers, and bandwidth
  • Highly flexible Platform
  • Platform updates, new features, and overall improvements added on a regular basis.
  • No additional fees for software updates or support.

We hope you chose to continue to “grow yourself” with Spruz.

To thank you for supporting us, we are offering members that have been part of our network for over 30 days a 50% discount on all upgrade options (This comes out to only $4.99 a month). This offer will expire October 15th. To upgrade you can go to http://www.spruz.com?page=upgrade

Or if you feel the need to delete your website you can go to http://www.spruz.com?page=site_manage

 

Jay and David

Spruz v2.03 - v2.05
Category: Annoucements

For the last week or so we have been silently releasing mostly minor updates such as bug fixes and usability enhancements of the content manager. A few users have noticed the version numbers changing and were wondering what changes were being made.

The main feature that was being worked on, and was just released, is a re-launch of the Contact Form page element to work with the new content manager. The new Contact Form element has a robust form editor that allows you to add fieldsets as well as add all the standard input and select elements. The system has a full drag and drop interface for sorting and customizing your contact form.

We have also added 4 new themes in a series called Accent; check them out in the Modern category.

We have many more feature additions and improvments on the way, so stay tuned.

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