Our texture selection has been greatly improved.  We’ve now got 40 textures to choose from.  While this is a great start we will eventually have hundreds and have them categorized.

We’ve renamed the service from Rush Tide to Cool Template.

Hopefully the new name will be more relevant and easier to remember.

Thank you everyone for continuing to use the service as we evolve.

Rush Tide is now FREE to use, but you must maintain a link back to Rush Tide on every page you use a template on, unless you purchase the right to remove them.

As part of this we have removed restrictions on using the various export types.  You can now use any export.  We’ve also removed restrictions on using textures or logos.  So feel free to use all the features now.

The site will now be supported by banner ads.

See our pricing page for more details.  As a bonus if you purchase the right to remove backlinks you will also remove all the ads from Rush Tide as well.

We’ve revised our edit template interface to simplify and clean up the user experience.  We’ve removed the main site navigation when editing a template and added a close button.

We also tightened up the interface so that it takes up less vertical space.  We’ve optimized and moved around some of the controls to make it even easier to use.

Here is a screen shot of the Old Editor.

And here is the new interface as it exists now.

Thanks to the YUI Compressor for .Net we are now compressing our generated CSS style sheet code.

The compression on a default web template design saves 7500 bytes per request. That’s about 30% less data to be transfered over the internet to rendering the template preview, making designing templates even faster!

This change will also make your template more efficient when deployed, which can even help out your search engine optimization, since Google now weighs page load times in it’s rankings.

As promised in our previous post we’ve added support for editing fonts to the following areas:

• Title
• Subtitle
• Menu
• Article Title

We’ll be focusing soon on adding more options for editing the font properties of links.

You can now add Custom CSS to any Rush Tide design.  This should be of great help to advanced users.  By keeping the custom css inside of Rush Tide they will be preserved and you will retain all your changes when you download a new version of a design.

Custom CSS Form

Grow that in your zen garden.