Has this ever happened to you: you are excited to share your freshly published website or page with your Facebook friends, but when you paste the URL into Facebook's status box, Facebook does not find all the images or gets the title or description wrong?
Today we are launching Social Sharing, which gives you full control again over your page titles, page descriptions and thumbnail images as your content is shared on Facebook and Google+.
You can define Social Sharing settings for each page individually in the Page Options Panel, or for your entire site in the Site Properties Panel. As with Search Engine Optimisation, Page Options will override site-wide settings.
What's even better is that if you have already defined titles and descriptions in Search Engine Optimization, Social Sharing can directly use those. As you can see, you are in full control of how your content gets shared!
Big Santo's Social Sharing uses a technology called Open Graph, which was originally published by Facebook but has since been adopted by Google for its +1 sharing.
Social media has become one of most important marketing channels for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and Facebook - with almost 700 Million users - is the social network of choice. Having an attractive and useful page on Facebook not only helps you engage with your existing clients, it can also bring you new customers.
Today we are very excited to release our new Facebook page layout, which makes creating your own custom Facebook Page tab as easy as any page in Big Santo. Using the new page layout, you can unleash the full power of Big Santo on your Facebook Page.
You can add custom tabs to your Facebook Page, where the content of each tab comes from your Big Santo site. Inside each tab, you can add any content, including our gorgeous image galleries and our powerful applications like the Appointment Scheduler or the soon to be released Gift Card and Deals application.
You can choose to keep the design of your Facebook Page tab consistent with your web site design or use a Facebook-like color theme.
By using section groups, you can create multi-page mini-websites that will show up as a tab on your Facebook page. Having all Big Santo features at your disposal creates endless possibilities for your Facebook Page, limited only by your creativity.
The new Facebook layout is available now for all Big Santo business subscribers. To get access to it, all you have to do is to re-apply your current design by going to Control Panel > Change Design and clicking Apply.
The next time you create a new page or open the Page Options, you will see the Facebook layout option.
To learn how to create your own custom Facebook Page with Big Santo, watch the video below.
Note:List of Big Santo Apprentice based designs: Atlas, Atlas B, Atria, Atria X, Atria X Light, Chara, Electra, Kuma, Meissa, Mira, Pasta Arc, Pasta Oval, Polaris, Sirius, Sirius Light, Vega, Vega Light
Did you know that gift cards and daily deals are a great way to increase revenue and drive new customers? With Evolving Solutions experience with group buying at How She Goin, Big Santo's upcoming Gift Card and Deals application, you will be able to add these to your website with just a few clicks.
Gift cards are a great way to say “Thanks”, “Happy Birthday” or simply “Hi there” and with the new application you can enable your website visitors to buy and send printable gift cards with ease. Also you can run your own Groupon®-style daily deals and give your customers time-limited discount on certain products or services. You can limit the number of deals that are sold, as well as the period during which the offer is valid, and the built-in Facebook and Twitter integration can share your deal with the social network of your site visitors.
This application is not yet officially released, but we will let you know when it is ready. If you want to know right away, please sign up for our mailing list on our home page. (bottom of the page)
Today we are releasing an update to our Facebook Social Plugin application. Facebook social plugins are a great way to let your website visitors share the content on your site with their friends.
The new update includes the latest Facebook social plugin; the Send button, as well as an overhaul of the interface, which makes setting up social sharing easier than ever.
New: the Send button
Almost a year after the introduction of the Like button, Facebook introduced the Send button. While the Like button lets site visitors quickly share content they like with all their friends, the new Send button lets them share it with just a group of friends. The Send button lets your website visitors send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual.
You can add a Send button to your Big Santo site in two ways.
1. Standalone Send button. Add the Facebook application to any content area on any page of your site by selecting the application from the Add Content menu and clicking on one of the green areas that appear. In the Facebook Social Plugin Application Panel select the Send button plugin type. Click Add to add the button to the page.
2. Combined Like and Send button. If you want to offer both Send and Like buttons to your visitors, select the Like button plugin type from the Facebook Social Plugin Application Panel. You'll have to enable Advanced settings and check the Send button checkbox.
Besides the new Send and Like buttons, you can use the Facebook Social Plugin application to add a Like Box, Activity Feed, Recommendations, Activity Stream and Facebook Comments to your Big Santo website, all with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Metrics
Did you know that Facebook offers real-time metrics for the Send button in the Insights Dashboard? To set this up, just claim your domain and you will receive statistics of how many visitors have seen the Send button, how many messages they have sent through it, and how many times others have clicked on the links sent through the Send button.
Interface changes
When you open the Facebook Social Plugin application, you'll notice we've made some minor changes to the way things look. The panel is now a bit wider to accommodate the new plugin and we've moved everything but the required settings under advanced settings. You have one click access to these settings if you need them through the Advanced settings switch at the bottom right of the panel.
As a result, the new interface is a lot cleaner and makes setting up Facebook social plugins less confusing, quicker and easier.
We hope you enjoy the new functionality and look forward to your feedback in the comments.
When Google released the first version of its Chrome browser, many believed it would have a major influence, but almost no one expected things to happen this fast. Now, just over two years later, Google's Chrome holds the third spot in terms of market share with 14.85%, and its growing fast, unlike any other browser.
Chrome has proven to be one of the fastest browsers. It runs excellently on even the most modest computer, making it ideal for home and office use.
At Big Santo, we have worked hard to provide full support for the most widely used browsers, and now this includes Chome. Earlier this week, we launched our application in the Chrome Web Store that lets Chrome users create a new account and log in to their Big Santo website with just one click. And of course now our Admin interface fully supports Google Chrome.
If speed and stability are important for you, we recommend you try Google Chrome. Of course you can use any other supported browser (IE, FireFox, Safari).
Do you know that sharing news and upcoming events with your visitors can help drive more traffic to your website? It also keeps visitors on your site longer, giving you a better chance to turn them into customers.
Big Santo recently released its News and Events application, which makes it super-easy to add short news items and upcoming events to your website in a neat and visually appealing way. You can use an existing news source like a famous blog or online magazine, or you can manually create your own content.
Using existing news sources that are relevant to your business is a great way to keep your site fresh and engaging. Once you set it up, the site will run on auto-pilot, regularly bringing in new content. And with so many businesses who don't update their websites very often, this will make your website stand out. While adding this type of content engages your visitors, don't expect this to improve your search engine ranking.
Creating original content has a direct impact on search results. It is a long-term investment that will help improve your site's overall search engine ranking, but is more time-consuming. One good approach to use our News and Events application in manual content mode to announce upcoming events such as enrollments, trainings, conferences, etc, that may be of interest to your visitors. In this mode the application can be configured to hide any past events automatically, so you don't have to remove them manually.
To learn more how to use this application, check our tutorial or watch this brief overview:
Turning your website into a hub for social interaction used to involve linking your site's visitors to a long list of external social media Web sites, or adding lots of widgets and buttons to your web pages. Now there are better ways to make your website more interactive and easier to manage.
The Apture Site Bar is a new way to give readers more information without leaving the page. this is what Apture authors says about the toolbar, but i’ll try to describe what is this toolbar can do for you, once your visitor scroll down on your blog, this bar will appear loaded with some great features.
Share on facebook button with a counter.
Tweet this for twitter button with a counter.
Share on email
Search box with jquery, and this mean that your visitor don’t have to leave the page when he search for another content.
When your visitor can select any part of your posts text small button will appear that says Search
The new Page Options interface that we released yesterday is a great opportunity to take another look at your site's search engine optimization.
In May 2010, Google's head of webspam Matt Cutts and a team of Google experts held a public review of a number of real websites, in which they commented on what each of the sites reviewed could do to improve their search result ranking. The video - it is over an hour long - is available on YouTube and, if you can spare the time, is tons of fun to watch.
The new Page Options Big Santo interface makes search engine optimization a snap.
Based on the advise from Matt Cutts and his team, the following are several easy steps you can take, right now, to start improving your search result ranking.
We will start by open the Page Options panel; go to Control Panel > Page Options.
In the window that opens, we'll scroll down to the Search Engine Optimization section and click the arrow on the side. A new panel with search engine optimization options will open.
We'll go through the various options step by step.
Step 1. Page address
The first box, labeled Page URL, lets us set a custom URL for our page. A URL is part of the address where your visitors will find your page online and should say something about the content of the page. Give pages a meaningful address so your visitors can easily find and remember where content on your site is.
You could, for example, use a shorter version of the page title as its address.
Step 2. Page title
One of the most important things in search engine optimization is the page title.The page title is used as the title for results on search result pages by Google and other search engines. This is probably the first text that users will see about your site and often the only thing a user looks at before deciding whether to click the link and visit your site or not.Use it to make an impression, be bold, post a call to action, whatever fits the topic of your site.
We'll enter the page title in the second box in the Search Engine Optimization section, labeled Page Title.
The page title should be different for every page on your site and reflect, in a few words, the content of the page. When referring to your product or services, try to use words that your customers would use. Don't use jargon or specialized terminology.
See also the full description of the Page Options panel in our online tutorials.
Step 3. Page Keywords
Though keywords have become less important in recent years than they used to be, adding Page Keywords that describe your product or service can still help search engines help your customers find your pages. As always; use words that your customers would use, avoid using jargon or specialized terminology.
Step 4. Page description
The last box in the Search Engine Optimization section of the Page Options windows is the Page Description text box. The text you enter here is what search engines use on the search result page, immediately underneath your page title. It is what Google calls a "snippet".This text should provide a brief description of the page content, but also is an opportunity for you to draw potential clients to your site.
Write one or two succinct sentences that sum up the content of your page, try to use keywords again.
And that is all there is to it!
Remember; the page options you set in this window only apply to the current page of your site. You will have to do this for every single page on your site. But then again, all of these should be different for every page on your site anyway.
These three easy steps should go a long way in making sure your customers can find you online.
With Big Santo's new Page Options interface, doing your own search engine optimization has become so easy, why not start today?
Let us know in the comments what you have done to improve your search result ranking and how you draw new customers to your site.
Ahead of its public release, we are giving our customers a quick snapshot to the official beta release of our new application platform.
Along with the beta release of our new application platform, today we are announcing a dozen applications that demonstrate some of the possibilities this platform provides. Applications we are releasing now include several social media widgets, a voting poll application, Google maps integration and even an application to search, sort, filter and display database data.
Over the coming weeks and months, we will of course continue to release new applications. With this step we believe we have brought Big Santo closer to a high-end custom web solution at a very attactive price-point.
Below is an overview of the applications we are currently releasing, listed in alphabetical order.
AddThis button makes sharing easy by adding a AddThis button to your site.
Database grid application allows you to display, search and sort information stored in databases on your site. The application can be used in combination with forms or the Voting poll application.
Facebook social plugins let you see what your friends have liked, commented on or shared on sites across the web.
Google maps lets you create and embed a Google map.
Image zoom lets users automatically see large-size versions of any image on your site by clicking on the image.
Media library application lets you add a file download section to your pages, through which users can search and download files from a file library.
Page rating application displays a floating control at the bottom of a site's pages that lets users rate pages on the site using a star-rating system.
Snap Shots application creates Snap Shots for all links on your site. With Snap Shots, users can mouse-over links to get the most appropriate shot of content for that link.
Twitter profile widget lets you display Twitter updates on your site.
Voting poll lets you display a single question and a number of answers on your site, along with result-statistics.
We would love to hear from you in the comments on what application ideas you have for Big Santo.
When Google released the first version of its Chrome browser, many believed it would have a major influence, but almost no one expected things to happen this fast. Now, just over two years later, Google's Chrome holds the 
