We’ve overhauled our image uploading system.  You no longer need to re-upload your images every time you use them, resulting in a much improved experience for using your custom images.

Image Selection Interface

Image is Everything

We’ve added support for setting the font properties for the following areas:

• Article Content
• Buttons
• Block Title
• Block Content
• Footer

On these areas you can now set the font face, size, bold and italics.  We’ve added a selection of over a dozen fonts that are web safe and should work everywhere.

Font Properties Screenshot

Soon we will also be adding support for setting the fonts for these areas:

• Title
• Subtitle
• Menu
• Article Title
• Links

Also we may be adding support for the very nice drop shadows that are used through out the Rush Tide site.  They are now supported in every browser except Internet Explorer.

Typography Geeks Everywhere Rejoice!

Rush Tide now supports exporting Joomla templates.  Joomla support will enable Rush Tide for millions of additional sites.

Joomla is one of the top two content management systems, the other being Drupal.  We’ll hopefully have support for Drupal someday soon.

Content management systems allow you to build and manage a web site without having to do any programming.

Web Sites for the Rest of Us

We’ve now deployed support for ASP.net master pages.  This will let you easily design for the Microsoft web platform.

The zip file just needs to be unzipped into a project created by within Visual Studio.  If you don’t already have Visual Studio you can download a free express edition.

The master page templates include an example Default.aspx in addition to the master page files.

C# is Awesome

We’ve just deployed a new web design for Rush Tide that was created using Rush Tide.  So now we’re dogfooding the main site as well as this blog.

Also we’re working on an export for ASP.net master pages that will allow Rush Tide to be used easily with the Microsoft web development platform.  The export is used for the new web design and will soon be available for everyone.

Ever onward!

We added a new Frequently Asked Questions page that attempts to answer any questions you may have. If you’ve got a question that’s not on there feel free to contact us.

Also, we’ve fixed our biggest cause of server side web errors, reducing our error rate by over 80%.  There was a problem with sessions timing out after 15 minutes, after which all changes to a design would result in errors on our server.

Die Bugs!

As promised, header and footer texture options are now available.

They are both premium features that require a paid account.

We will be focusing on improving our selection of textures in the future.

Thanks for your support!

Our average load time for the main edit design page with an empty browser cache was over 15 seconds, which is way too high.

This was because the browser was asked to load 110 images.  One for each of the color schemes available.  As we add new options such as background textures this was only going to greatly increase.

We now generate the popup menus via javascript to defer their loading until they are needed, creating a much better and scalable user experience.  The main edit design page is now at least 3 times as fast to load and we’ve got even more optimizations coming soon.

All this work is going to make sure that Rush Tide is a lightning fast web page design experience for you.

Also we’ve added preview images to the background textures and will be adding texture options to the header and footer very soon.

Faster, Better, Cheaper

Background textures are now available on the background tab.  They add a very nice touch to the look of the web designs.

Currently there are only 5 textures to choose from.  We’ll be adding many more in the future.  Also, the background textures will be a premium feature, requiring a paid account.  But for now they are free to use.

Background gradients don’t look right when shown with a background texture, but that will hopefully be fixed soon.

Texture On!