If you haven't used your izotz membership in the last week or so...sign in and check it out. This weekend (Nov 10, 2008) we put up a new user interface on the administration page, and it should be a lot easier to do things now. The highlight is a new “Easy Mode” and “Advanced Mode”. In easy mode you can quickly do most things without having to look at all the advanced tools on the page. Most people don't need the advanced tools day to day, so this is much nicer and easier to work with. We know that izotz isn't the easiest set of website tools around, but we're working hard everyday to make it better. It's a razor edge walk between keeping our tools powerful, but making them easy to use. If only everyone out there had a degree in advanced HTML, things would be a lot easier for us. And you. But they don't. So we keep at it.

Here are 10 ways you can really make the web work harder for you using izotz. Most of these ideas aren't apparent until after you've been using izotz for a while, and most aren't available in other online website tools, so you won't automatically appreciate the possibilities even if you are an experienced web person. Hopefully this will kick start your thinking...

1. Unlimited Websites : At first most people say “but I only need one website”. But stop and think about it for a bit. Whether you are using your website to market something, inform people about something, or just having fun, wouldn't you really be able to do whatever it is you're doing if you could build as many websites as you needed? Without spending a ton of money on each one? Marketing people know this. They know that when selling things you need to try a LOT of different approaches. In the web world, this often means different webpages and sometimes different websites. Well, that's why we let you make as many websites as you want on izotz. We WANT you to aggressively try new things. Some will work, some won't. The idea is that instead of thinking about your website as the “final presentation” of whatever it is you're selling, showing, or doing...you begin to think about things as being more dynamic, flexible, and changeable. Izotz lets you create webpages and entire websites in seconds. USE that feature to make the web work harder for you. Nothing is static in the Web 2.0 world...don't get stuck with a stale website.

2. Using Stand Alone Webpages : Unique to izotz, this is another feature that at first seems not very important. The idea is that all izotz function modules can not only be integrated into your website projects, but also can run as stand alone webpages. For example, you can integrate an online newsletter or message forum into your website, but at the same time those modules can run as stand alone webpages. This gives you incredible power over how you interact with your audience. When run within a website, the module inherits the appearance skin of the website. When run as a stand alone page, it can have a completely different skin. This is really useful when you want to start using temporary pages for special occasions and don't want to make them fit into your main website, or when something is so special it should stand alone (for example...the izotz online magazine runs as a stand alone website, but could also be put into the izotz.com homepage). Play around with this feature and I think you'll begin to get some ideas.

3. Ad hoc temporary webpages and modules : Related to the previous point, but worthy of its own mention...izotz lets you build as many pages, websites, and modules as you want. In addition, everything can run stand alone. Start thinking less in terms of “permanent” websites...and more about how useful it might be if you could throw up ad hoc webpages and websites to accomplish something over a limited time period, and once it's finished, remove the website or module from the web. One of the things we think is extremely valuable about the web is how dynamic it can be. Things happen fast in the world, and the web responds instantly. The izotz tools are designed around that idea. They make it easy to throw up pages and entire websites whenever the need comes up. Think ad hoc.

4. Share Your Pages and Modules : Making a website is pain enough. Making multiple websites could be even worse. All the webpages and modules you make in your izotz universe can be shared between the different websites you build. In other words, you can put the same Message Board on multiple websites. You can place the same homepage content on multiple websites. This critical feature saves you a ton of work. Write it once...distribute it to a hundred websites. Update it once...and everything is updated. After you play around with this feature for a while, you'll really begin to see the value in how you can create multiple customized websites, but reduce your work load by sharing content between them.

5. Ask For Help : We really mean it when we say that you got a partner in izotz. It's our mission to help you make the web work harder for you. Throw us some problems to solve. We may not always be able to make it work, but we'll try. There is a new membership called the “Partner Membership”. This membership gives you unlimited customization services. That means we'll customize your modules, skins, and other web things as much as you need. It's kind of like those prepaid legal services, where you pay a monthly fee and have access to legal services when you need it. The idea is that since we're trying to get you to make your web presence dynamic and flexible, you'll need someone to help you implement all the great ideas you come up with on a regular basis. So we created this membership for those of you who really get into this concept. It costs $250 a month, which is a lot more than the Basic Membership, but still REALLY CHEAP considering it's pretty hard to get even a simple custom website for less than several thousand dollars, and you can in fact spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on more advanced websites. I know web designers that will charge $3000 for a complex email web form. First of all...the izotz Email Form module can probably let YOU build almost all the email forms you'll ever need, but if it can't, and you have a Partner Membership, we'll do it for you. Most people spend more than $250 at Starbucks every month, And end up with nothing more than empty cups all over their car.

6. Using Multiple Modules in Websites : You know that you can build as many of whatever you want as you want. What you may not realize is that this lets you do some really unique and flexible things in your projects. For example, you know you can add multiple Photo Galleries to a website. Well, what that means is that each of these galleries ends up being separate and distinct from each other. In other words, the photos in one gallery aren't shared with the photos in another. This allows you to put separate and distinct photo galleries serving different needs in your web projects. For example, maybe you are a school teacher, and on your classroom website you want to put pictures of the 2004 class, the 2005 class, the 2006 class, and so on. Simply add a Photo Gallery module for each year, and you got it. This unique izotz feature gets even more interesting when you apply it to other modules like the Message Board, Online Newspaper, Social Network and others. In effect, you end up with the ability to put multiple variations of these modules out there that are each custom tailored for a targeted audience. Pretty power stuff once you get the idea.

7. Tell Us What You Need : We try to make a big point about inviting you to tell us about things you need that our tools can't do right now. We always wish more people would do this. TELL US WHAT YOU NEED. A unique feature of izotz is just how nimble and flexible and willing we are to accommodate your ideas. You got a good idea? You could see it appear in an izotz tool TOMORROW. Try THAT at Microsoft. A few years ago I had a great idea for a Microsoft Word feature, so I sent it to them. That feature still hasn't appeared in Word. They are pretty slow about that I guess.

8. Don't Get Stuck On an Appearance Skin : Look, there are a million ways to skin a cat. Cat lovers don't like to hear that cliché, but fact is, there are. We put a lot of appearance skin templates in our skin library. Some of our competitors put THOUSANDS of skin templates in their libraries. But we don't do it that way. Why? Because most people don't want a stock skin...they want something customized exactly the way they want. So instead, we put some basic templates out there for you, but enable our tools to let you go to town on anything you choose to use. In other words, think of the skins in the library as a starting point down the road towards a totally custom website. Yes, if there is one thing at izotz that's more complicated than others, it's learning to customize appearance skins. That's because the whole webpage HTML/CSS design thing itself is a fairly complicated...and quite often extremely frustrating...process. Whoever invented those so called HTML “standards” should be shot. Mainly because they've been pretty unsuccessful in getting Microsoft and the Firefox people to play nice and get along. At any rate, that's why we try to make tools to help you manage your website appearance without having to learn HTML or CSS, and when that doesn't work, we'll help you do the things you need to do through our custom services. The point is...don't get discouraged if you can't immediately make your website look exactly like you want it to. We'll help you figure it out. But more importantly, if you get into this whole “dynamic web” thing, the appearance of your web things will begin to change a lot more often, and maybe you'll want to start designing your projects to allow that to easily happen. If you can find some generic templates that accomplish what you are trying to do, and don't need a whole lot of real specialized customizations, your ability to act dynamically with your projects becomes a whole lot easier.

9. Learn About Wiki : People have different definitions for what “wiki” is, but in our case we're calling it “the ability for your website visitors to contribute content...in the form of comments...to the content that YOU put on your webpages. In other words, if you put a FAQ on your website, you can enable wiki for that module, and your website visitors can add their own comments to your FAQ pages. Or your news articles, or your newspaper articles. Wiki can be enabled in many of the content modules simply by enabling a setting in MODULE OPTIONS. Those that follow the whole “web 2.0” thing know that enabling users to participate in your webpages is one of the backbone concepts behind bringing a whole new level of useful interactivity to the web. Yes, people can say some pretty dumb things if you let them post stuff on your pages, but the izotz wiki feature allows you to manage most of those problems. Anyway, check it out. One of the important things that makes izotz really different is just how committed we are to enabling all these Web 2.0 features in websites. Hopefully the overhyped “Web 2.0” name will go away soon, but the underlying concepts are pretty powerful when it comes to making the web work harder for you.

10. The izotz Magazine : If you really get into all this website stuff, and begin to see that izotz is really something different than all the others, then start reading our online magazine. That's where we put all this kind of useful information that just might trigger some glorious epiphany that ends up making you billions and billions of dollars off your website projects. Or, if not that, maybe make you famous. Or, if not that, maybe help you keep your job because you made your boss so happy. That's nothing to sneeze at these days. Having a job. So, read the magazine. It may just teach you something you don't know. The magazine is at http://izotz.net/myizotz/magazine.