We are very happy to announce the Launch of motigo calendars! It is the first stand-alone product that we have developed ourselves from scratch, and we are more than happy with the result. If you don’t have an account yet, then sign up for a free account and give it a go.

Creating the calendar has been a great example of constrained based development. With only very little time to develop the application, we had to make vital decisions on what our new application was to do and what it was not going to do. The constraints turned out to be a blessing in that it kept our heads focused on exactly what is important for our product for it to work: it has swept the unimportant nice-to-haves away from the must-haves and secured a simple and non-bloated product.

The calendar is really an ordinary calendar application with two views: an administration area that is only accessible for the owner of the calendar (a motigo user), and a public version, which is visible to everybody. The public version of the calendar would look like this.

But it is not only a web calendar. The motigo calendar has two very intersting features:

• Import of RSS feeds
  If you have a blog, a flickr stream, or whatever kind of web content that streams as an RSS feed, you can import it into your calendar. You can also import several feeds into your calendar in order to use it as a feed reader. The possiblities are many!
• Include a small version of the calendar on your own page
  If you have a homepage on your own domain - or just another domain that motigo.com, but still want dynamic content directly inside your page’s main view, then the motigo calendar will help you out. Ad dynamic calendar content directly to your page, like you would add a banner ad.

Now - enough reading - go play around with it!

We just launched a new part of our site called motigo search. Hurray!

In the last few weeks, we have been in a steady stream of solid updates to the motigo website in general. We have come a long way since we started in March earlier this year.

This time we added search capabilities to motigo. The “motigo search”:http://motigo.com/search has been born.

Now you can search the web for pictures and video to reference in your blog posts or in your forum discussions. We feel that we by that have a superior product to many competitors. The search also allows your to search our “webstats”:http://webstats.motigo.com counter catalogue.

The future will call for a full motigo service search, but as we felt the described update in itself provided enough significant value to our users to stand on its own, we decided to push out the search capabilities as they are now in their early state.

Please go try it out and let us know what you think.

Things are really starting to get better at motigo!
We are very happy to announce the launch of the new account overview. A feature that was both widely requested, but also extremely important in bringing the motigo services together.

When we first launched motigo in the end of March this year, the most important thing for us was just to get motigo up and running. It is now - a few months later - that we can actually start to tweak motigo into being what we actually want. The new account overview and the recent “frontpage redesign”:http://devblog.motigo.com/2007/06/04/redesigning-the-frontpage-step-2/ are some of the more visual steps we have taken in this direction.

As usual, we will give you an insight into the design process.

As opposed to earlier redesigns, we actually didn’t have anything to redesign! The account overview has been non-existent until now. We wanted the new page to fulfill a list of things:

• First of all, the overview should bring all motigo services together: giving an overview
• The page should function as the natural “home page” - the page you always end up on when you want to do something new
• We wanted as much of motigo to be accessible from only one page
• We wanted to communicate the colour scheme of motigo, where each service has its own color

Our first thought was to reuse the toolboxes we have so far used for the forum/guestbook/shorturl admin pages as these had the color of the respective service in the header. The result came to look like this:

We chose to take the approach of designing everything straight and only in HTML instead of taking the usual photoshop way that many designers choose. Doing the design in HTML only gave us several benefits:

• The actual interface is at the center of the attention at first. There is no spec: the interface is the spec.
• An interface is not a wireframe that we can just slice up and magically transform into an HTML document. Neither is it a photoshop mockup.
• Creating a mock-up of the interface in photoshop will produce a design that matches the constraints of photoshop - not the constraints of HTML. We should therefore “embrace the constraints”:http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch03_Embrace_Constraints.php of HTML.
• When we build it only in HTML, we can actually use real and live data while building the design. This helps surfacing problems that photoshop would otherwise hide
• The interface is at life from start. You can click it, try it out, and feel it.
• You will get something that works very soon in the design process
• There is no monster integration in the end.

Although the new and colorful proposal was better than anything we had before (we didn’t have anything) - it was too much. Too colorful and tivoli like. Plus - the boxes approach to showing each service did not always line up nicely, when a user had services in one category than the other.

The next approach was to list the services in one big list and now side-by-side. We removed the colorful header of each service and give it a more settled look:

This however proved to be a little too settled. This meant that we didn’t get to indicate any of the colors of the services. So we added a little bit of color:

Again - this was too much. The final solution would be just to have a small box indicating the color of the service:

We also wanted to add several things to the overview page, so that the user would go there as a natural thing to find just the information he wanted to see. These things included basic information about the logged in user: his name and email, but also the current time in the timezone he had selected. As we have users in many different countries, setting the timezone of your account has huge importance as it will determine the time of your forums and guestbooks as well as the base time in your statistics. We also added links to often used and important documents such as FAQs, terms of service, and of course the developer blog ;-).
All this provided the necessary detail to make the Account overview feel like a real motigo home…

Along with the overview, we’ve also added a toolbox that is placed in the same spot on all admin pages, so that you can always find your way to the most important pages of motigo.com. This continuity was greatly missed in the old version of motigo, why we are relieved that we finally got it online.

We also got rid of the top bar with the list of our services, as we now have this list a more natural place: in the account overview. Instead we added a search bar that we plan on expanding to be able to do more in the near future.

We really hope that the newest updates has helped your experience of motigo.com. We are extremely happy about the release ourselves and hope that you will be as well.

Now, go enjoy the new “motigo”:http://motigo.com

We earlier described the long iterative process it was to redesign just a banner on the front page of motigo.com. We recently launched the last part of the front page redesign, which was a result of an even longer iterative task of trial and error.

The starting point for the front page redesign in the start of May 2007 was:

*We had several things that we wanted to change in the old layout.*

• We wanted to promote the “Developer blog”:http://devblog.motigo.com
• We wanted to get rid of the bottom “how it works” box that explained that you could signup and get access to our services - only through icons. It was an idea that looked good in the eyes of our designer, but confused more than did good in the eyes of our users
• With the new front page top banner, it did not make sense to have the signup box so close to the signup-button of the top banner
• The graphics that showed how the blind-down worked was outdated - and is soon to be irrelevant (oops - did I say too much?)
• The static content explaining what motigo.com was all about was more confusing more than explaining.

As soon as we had the change, we changed what we could and removed the bottom “how it works” box, put in a box printing an excerpt of the latest developer blog post, and moved the blue signup banner down lower on the page.

But, what is motigo?

When conducting “heuristic evaluations”:http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html on motigo.com or in other words: When letting potential users browse motigo.com in order to find usability issues, the most often heard quote was: “But what do you do? What can I use the site for?”. Admittedly, this is far from the result we wanted to hear, why we took immediate measures to improve the general usability of motigo.com. The frontpage is only the first of many great changes to come.

Even though we in clear text explained what motigo was on the front page, users answered that they didn’t understand what our concept was. They admitted that the new “frontpage banner”:http://devblog.motigo.com/2007/04/27/redesigning-the-front-page-v1/ had helped dramatically on their understanding, but that they could still use some more guidance. It came clear to us that our visitors did not all visit our “about pages”:http://motigo.com/about/services to find out what motigo is, but sometimes gave up on the front page, when they could not find an immediate answer.

We needed to more clearly communicate what motigo is about - without too many unnecessary distractions. Based on heuristic evaluations and what our analysis told us, we agreed to concentrate on showing:

• *Screenshots* of our services
• *Explanations* of each service and motigo.com *that make sense*
• An excerpt of our Developer blog, as this communicates who we are and what we stand for
• Easy access to sign up

Finding a way to show screenshots of our services in a manner that matches the cleanness of our general look and feel was a dificult task. We had several solutions up on the table:

*Proposal 1:* Looked clean, but did not give room to explanations of each service.

*Proposal 2:* Trying out the bubble layout from our about pages. It unfortunately did not fit all of our services in the way we wanted.

*Proposal 3:* Showing the screenhots alone without too much extra graphics turned out to be a good solution. At the same time, we could put in explanations of each service neatly together with each screenshot.

*Proposal 4:* Adding the color code of each service gave the final touch that added the right amount of style and nice feel to our front page that we feel suit motigo. It also helped show that we use colors to distinguish between our services and what those color codes are.

When inserting the new screenshots and accommodating explanations of each service, the frontpage came to look like this:

We are very happy with the result and have now started working on a redesign of the webmaster administration area, that will bring coherency into play and give a great overview of all your motigo services.

We also have plans to create tutorials and guided tours for each of our service.

Today has been the big localization day.

Two days ago, we announced an update of the forums and guestbooks that was to happen last night. The update was about converting our entire database for forums and guestbooks from latin1 hell to utf8 bliss. The update has allowed us to not only handle special characters without the problems of HTML encoding, but also to offer support for languages which aren’t based on the western alphabet. So this is a happy day for our Arabic, Russian, and Asian users.

Another big update is the support for timezones for guestbooks and forums. To change the timezone for your forum, simply log in with your motigo account, click on “my account” in the top bar, change the timezone to what you prefer, and save your account details. If you wish, you can even change it to another timezone afterwards, and everything will be changed on-the-fly.

We are happy to announce these to features, which has been on the top of the wishlist for a load of motigo users.

If we have to say it ourselves, we just added a really cool feature to “Motigo Webstats”:http://webstats.motigo.com. When you click to see the stastitics of your page, for instance that of our “highest ranked member”:http://webstats.motigo.com/s?tab=1&link=1&id=710309 at the moment, a google map now shows you the most recent visits to your page visually on a world map. The most recent hits are marked with map markers on the map.

We are very excited about this nifty little feature and just wanted to tell you about it. Expect a lot of new cool stuff from motigo soon.

After the launch of “motigo.com”:http://motigo.com on March 31st, we’ve been busy tweaking and correcting small things making sure our users are happy. Our support team has been brilliant in keeping track of the minor glitches which we’re now on top of.

All in all we’re happy about how well our launch went. With existing users in the hundreds of thousands it was only very few existing users who suffered from the minor glitches that happened in transfering them from their former services (webtropia and webstats4u).

As we are finally on top of things again, we can begin to look ahead and concentrate on many of the exciting new features and services we have in store for you. We, the developers, have created this blog to have a direct channel with which we can communicate with our users.

Regarding the future… First and foremost, we will continue to improve the existing services we have, but we’re almost more excited about the new services that are coming. You will hear about all this shortly. We can’t wait to start!

Stay tuned. 2007 is going to be a great motigo year.