uCoz Official Blog

Welcome the Spring with New uCoz Templates!

mikhail_malsyhev — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 14:14:32 GMT

What's new?

We have added 8 new templates. They are already available in the builder — these are templates under numbers 1811, 1812, 1813, 1814, 1815, 1816, 1817 and 1818.

Update Plan — Spring 2020

In the coming months, we plan to give our E-commerce module the most attention, but we won't forget about the other modules either — expect updates there, too! Have any ideas on what to improve on uCoz? Contact our support team for uCoz to make sure your voice is heard - we process 100% of your feedback, and appreciate it!

Happy Spring to You from uCoz

Spring brings along many holidays, and we wish you to enjoy it to the fullest. Just don't forget about your uCoz website — there’s never been a better time to create and promote your own website!

Top 5 Best Newsletter Services

karolina_nukhrikian — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 18:46:28 GMT

Some people think that a newsletter is always a pesky ad. But it’s not true, actually. Today, more and more companies focus on their newsletters and work hard on the style of the emails turning them into a branding tool.

You can find plenty of newsletter services on the Net. The only question is which one to choose?

1. SendPulse

Price: free (limited features)

Localization: English, Russian, Ukrainian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Turkish, Spanish (Mexican)

Customer Service: English, Russian, Ukrainian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Turkish, Spanish (Mexican)

SendPulse is an easy-to-use platform for creating and managing emails, as well as other channels of communication with customers such as web push notifications, SMS, etc. One of the best things about the service, apart from the user-friendly interface, is the free plan: you can send up to 15 000 emails to 2 500 subscribers, which is pretty enough to serve an average personal website. The free plan also lets you send web push notifications, carry out A/B tests or create a chatbot for delivering bulk and personalized messages to Facebook Messenger.

SendPulse offers 60 email templates starting from vivid and aggressive ones for sales emails to calm and relaxing layouts that are aimed at wishing your subscribers happy holidays and showing your care for them. After a newsletter is sent, you will learn the exact number of the sent out emails, the open rate and the click-through rate (CTR). All this and more will let you analyze how effective this or that newsletter was and, as a result, improve further emails to increase the engagement rate.

SendPulse provides you with reports based on the sent emails and email errors. You can even download reports to your PC.

2. MailChimp

Price: free (limited features)

Localization: English

Customer Service: English

MailChimp is a time-tested award-winning service for email marketing (established in 2001). The only significant downside is that it has the English localization only: the website and support language is English. Nevertheless, you can find instructions in some other languages on the Internet that might be quite helpful.

The free plan lets you send up to 10 000 emails to 2 000 subscribers monthly. However, other pricing plans are not that affordable: the Essentials plan costs $10 but you can’t even conduct A/B tests or configure the newsletter so that subscribers could receive it according to their time zone. It’s sure to reduce the open rate. As a result, you will have to opt for a better plan that is more expensive.

Nevertheless, MailChimp has advantages such as a rich library of templates for the free plan subscribers. You can also enable statistics and split your audience into groups according to those who delete emails or didn’t finish reading, etc. The platform also provides DKIM that allows the receiver to check that the email was sent by a real company and not by frauds. This can increase email deliverability.

3. GetResponse

Price: from $15/mo (30-day trial period)

Localization: over 20

Customer Service: English, German, Frech, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish

If you have an unlimited budget for running your website, take a look at the GetResponse service. Despite a little bit higher prices compared to the competitors, you get numerous powerful features such as an integrated landing page builder and a wide range of templates (over 500!).

One of the most important metrics for email marketing services is the email deliverability rate. For GetResponse it’s over 99% that is in the top best results on the market.

The customer service works like a charm in all the languages, no matter if you contact by email or LiveChat. During the trial, you can compile a database of up to 1 000 contacts, use pro analytics and tools for A/B tests. The platform offers a module structure and an easy-to-use newsletter editor for beginners and HTML editor for pros.

4. UniSender

Price: free (limited features)

Localization: English, Russian, Ukrainian

Customer Service: English, Russian, Ukrainian

Another reputable and trustworthy email marketing platform is UniSender. It has an intuitive user-friendly interface, but with the free plan, you can send up to 1 500 emails to no more than 100 subscribers a month. In addition, you have access to the features of the service including a number of modern high-quality templates for emails.

If you are not aware of the size of your database but know the approximate number of emails you’re going to send, UniSender gives you a special option — you can purchase a package of 50 000 emails in bulk.

The UniSender platform boasts integrations with external services like CMS, CRM, and analytics. However, its competitors have them, too.

The deliverability rate — 99%.

5. Sendsay

Price: free (limited features)

Localization: English, Russian

Customer Service: English, Russian

Sendsay is a powerful email marketing service with a deliverability rate of up to 99,9%! The free plan offers to send up to 1 000 emails to 200 subscribers a month, which is quite enough for the A/B test.

The interface might seem a bit confusing first but, in reality, it’s well-thought-out. It just requires some more time for exploring all the basic features and tools. However, it’s not a big deal unless you want to spend no more than 15 min on creating your first newsletter.

What you can enjoy most is enabling statistics as it’s heaven for analysts: illustrative charts and a lot of data at hand.

The only drawback is a limited number of ready-to-use templates compared to competitors.

Feel free to share your feedback on these services and write your suggestions in the comments below :-)

Where to Find Great Free Stock Images for Your Website

Gromov — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 14:48:27 GMT

How to Download Pictures From Google the Right Way

The key point when looking for images in Google is to filter your results to find those that are allowed to use by third-parties like you. To do this, you can go to Images > Tools > Usage rights and choose what kind of license you want the content to have:

Creative Commons (CC) License

One of the easiest ways of finding free visuals for your website is to go to photo stocks and download Creative Commons licensed images. But there’s a little trick — there are various types of CC licenses because the right owners can specify the conditions of distribution and usage of their content.

For example, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license lets users edit, modify and use an image for business purposes only if the user mentions the owner. So before downloading a free image, pay closer attention to its license description.

Licenses and Public Domain

Another thing to keep in mind, when it comes to licensed content, is the public domain law that, by the way, is different for different countries.

In the USA, for example, every work published before January 1, 1923, is in the American public domain. If a work is published later, it can be protected by copyright. If it’s been 70 years since the death of the creator, their works enter the public domain. However, there’s a number of exceptions that can let a piece of creative content enter the public domain beforehand.

The Russian law is quite alike: a work falls into the public domain if the creator died 70 years ago. If the owner created it during World War II or fought in the war, the copyright protection period extends for 4 more years (the overall period is 74 years).

In Canada and China, the copyright period is 50 years as it used to be in Russia until 2004.

Where to Find Free Stock Images for Your Website

Obviously, Google search with a specific filter and copyright expired pictures isn’t the only option. There are many sources where people publish their works and give full or partly limited rights.

Unsplash.com — a source of totally free images, the owner mentioning isn’t required.

Flickr.com — a big source of images where you can find free-to-use ones.

Pixabay.com — one of the biggest free image stocks. Owner mentioning isn’t required, but it’s better to read the license descriptions.

Pexels.com — a stock of free images and videos.

Rawpixel.com — another stock of free images and videos.

Flaticon.com — a rich collection of free icons in vector graphics and .PNG formats.

The great news is that all the image stocks are updated every day because many owners eagerly share their content with the public without making money in return. So good luck with your search!

Connect CloudPayments to Your uCoz Online Store

Gromov — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 14:30:24 GMT

CloudPayments is a useful service for processing e-payments by Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, and Visa Electron. To connect it to your uCoz site, follow the steps below.

Create an account with Cloudpayments. To do this, follow the link and fill in the form.

Once the request form is filled in, you will be contacted by a CloudPayments manager and receive a message to the specified email with a system authorization link to set up a password.

After that, you will be redirected to your CloudPayments account. Go to the Sites tab on the left panel where the list of sites connected to the system is displayed.

Click on the gear icon next to your site to view your Public ID and API Password

Save the received information. To activate this payment method go to the Control Panel of your site and click on the Online Shop tab.

Then, go to Payment, shipping, currency and rates section and click on Add a new payment method.

Tick the Use electronic payment module box and select the CloudPayments option from the list.

Then, go to the Module Settings.

Public ID and API password — this data сan be found in your CloudPayments account;
Seller Currency — used to display the currency of the order amount;
Rate of the shop currency vs CloudPayments — the rate at which the total order amount will be recalculated;
Use the current currency of an order — instead of settings from the fields Seller's currency and Store's currency rate to CloudPayments currency the currency and its rate from the settings of the store where the order will be placed will be used;
Payment system fee (shop's currency unit) — an extra option specified when it’s necessary to add a margin to the total order amount. It’s taken from the shop by the payment system;
Send receipt information via 54-FZ form — an extra option activated when you want CloudPayments to send data to a POS when paying for the order. It allows you to set up all the necessary data to be correctly generated and sent a receipt to a buyer;
Require the user's email address in the widget — an extra option that can be enabled in the Payment widget to mark the email field as required;
Widget design — an extra option that allows you to set one of the Payment widget designs;
Purpose of payment — a payment description. You can use the $INVOICE_ID$ tag that will be automatically replaced by a number of the paid order.

Specify the values that are displayed in the payment method settings in your CloudPayments account (where the "Public ID" and "Password for API" values are located) for the Check notification, Payment notification, and Receipt notification options.

And that’s it! If the data you filled in is correct, your online store is ready to accept payments withCloudPayments!

Happy Birthday to Us — We've Turned 14! Get 50% Off!

Gromov — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 17:00:11 GMT

What About a Birthday Present?

So what's the best thing about birthdays? Of course, gifts :) We're glad to announce the special offer which is valid November 6-13. To redeem the offer, go to the Plans tab on the uCoz Control Panel and select any Pricing Plan (except Minimal) for a year or more and get 50% off.

Your Feedback Is Our Muse

We love to hear back from you and are always looking forward to your comments on what can be added to the system to make it work better. We do appreciate ideas of each and everyone on what functionality would come in handy for developing uCoz-powered sites.

So feel free to send us your suggestions on improving the modules. We keep track of all comments and analyze them to have a better understanding of what should be implemented.

When Is the Next Update?

Before the new year, we’re going to release at least one new feature. And it goes without saying that we keep on improving some bits and pieces of the builder that are sure to make it more powerful under the hood.

Thanks for being with us all those 14 years! The best is yet to come!

Your uTeam!

New Widgets for Control Panel and Comments Management

Gromov — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 12:20:55 GMT

Broad Choice of Widgets

All you need to do to add the desired widget is to get to the ‘Page appearance settings’ by clicking on the gear icon located in the Control Panel’s top right corner.

Currently, there are 11 widgets to choose from and each of them can be placed where you need those. All you need to do is to drag a necessary widget with a mouse cursor.

Let us know what kind of widgets you want to see added via a comment and we’ll consider your suggestion.

Comment Management

We’ve added enhanced features for the website comment management tool. One of the most crucial options is to automatically remove all user’s comments at once.

The comment management feature can be found under the Tools section:

Now it’s easier than ever to monitor spam or other unwanted comments, and all the posts by a violator can be removed in a couple of clicks:

Stay tuned because as we’re going to present more interesting things soon!

Autumn Updates & Bug Fixes

Gromov — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 10:26:44 GMT

Online Shop Updates

Page of service forms

$COMPARE_JS_CATEGORIES$ – the compare list of product categories for JavaScript features of the page (product comparison page);

$COMPARE_TABS$ – block of tabs with compared product categories (product comparison page);

$COMPARE_ITEMS$ – block of compared products (product comparison page);

$COMPARE_SPEC$ – specification block of compared products.

Product view on the comparison page

added

fixed

textarea

fixed

param

fixed

The default options set

/panel/?a=shop;l=opreset

added

Page of service forms

$ALL_COMPARE_NUM$ – the number of products in all tabs;

$CAT_COMPARE_NUM$ – the number of products in the current tab.

API key

Access denied. Session period expired

fixed

Robokassa

Current order currency

Order currency

Сhat Box Updates

Сlasses for a block of messages elements are now available:

mcm-time is used for the block that displays the time when a message was added to the chat;

mcm-user is used for the block that displays user’s avatar and username;

mcm-user-profile is used for the user’s avatar link;

mcm-user-name is used for the user’s username link.

List of words and their substitutes

fixed

Other Updates

Users

Manage spam statuses of posts (the possibility to forbid reporting certain posts)

added

Comments

Display new comments: top/bottom

fixed

Forum

fixed

Mobile

$SMILES$

fixed

Social Media Publisher

Twitter

Tumblr

fixed

Mobile

$ERROR$

fixed

FAQ

fixed

Page editor

fixed

$MICROMARKING$

$ITEM_NAME$ – the name of the post where the comment belongs to (no structured data);

$MICROMARK_DATE_PUBL$ – the time when the comment to the structured data was added.

uCoz turns 13 — you get 50% OFF!

Gromov — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 13:59:14 GMT

How Do I Get a Discount?

The discount will be applied automatically when buying any plan (except the Basic) for 6 months or longer between October 29 - November 2. The special price for the Basic plan gets activated when upgrading for 12 months or more.

One More Present

Is there anything a user wants besides a discount? Updates, that’s for sure! We want to bring you some good news: bunch of new cool and modern templates is on the way. Stay tuned with our official blog and social media pages.

On a final note, we would like to express our gratitude to everyone for these 13 years, during which you are creating and improving your websites with uCoz. On behalf of each member of uTeam - a big thanks to all of you!

Launching uLanding Builder

Piglet — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 10:02:23 GMT

What Is uLanding Now?

It’s a service that allows you to quickly test your marketing idea with real traffic and find out which page will best serve its purpose, whether it’s collecting leads, selling products, getting new subscribers or signups.

Now you don’t need to wait for a mockup from designers, then drive traffic, embed code for A/B testing, filter bots - with uLanding, all this can be done in a few clicks.

The functionality available in the new builder is similar to the features of the Pro plan in uKit.

In uLanding, we offer a 7-day free trial, during which you can try out all the features of the builder to create one project and 5 landing pages.

All of you who are reading this post now can use this promo code to get a 25% discount: FORGOODSTART

Examples of Landing Pages Made with uLanding

1.ulanding.me

2.ulanding.me

Product Development

uLanding in its current version is the initial development stage of a full-fledged service for traffic arbitrage. In the future, we are going to add all the necessary features to simplify the work of those who seek to boost the conversion rate of their landing pages.

A little more about how uLanding is going to be developed:

The builder will get new widgets and ready-made blocks that are most often found on standard landing pages in order to make creating of the necessary pages faster and more convenient.
The project will integrate with the largest CPA-networks that will be featured like ready-made project templates for network offers.
Templates will include a few ready-made landing pages with a high conversion rate, which you can always customize and adjust to your liking. Additionally, there will be a collection of pre-landers for them.
Personalization and markup.
All landing pages will be marked up for working under your ID, and all you will need to do is send traffic to them.

Having a good landing page and driven traffic is not enough though — it's also important to make these two work together. For this reason, integrations with popular trackers and TDS are on the roadmap, which will allow you to manage the traffic and deeply analyze the effectiveness of traffic funnels.

Now the product is at the stage of its active development, and you have an actual opportunity to influence it so that you can get the tool which is really useful for YOU in the end.

Feel free to share your feedback on the current version and submit your suggestions in the comments below :-)

Bug Fixes Digest and System Updates

Gromov — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 07:58:56 GMT

Over 16 updates were rolled out since our previous release notice. In addition to some minor improvements to the new Control Panel, we’ve released dozens bug fixes and a series of useful features.

Here they are!

Forum module: switching between the pages error on the search page of user messages → fixed;

Photo Albums module: system Lightbox operational issue → fixed;

$ENTRY_CATS$ variable displaying an incorrect category URL → fixed;

SEO module: the Monitoring of positions tool operational issues → fixed;

$ORDER_GROUP_UID$ variable not working as it should → fixed;

Forum module: the mechanism for recounting the number of pages in a thread after deleting messages → fixed;

Specifications errors while displaying description, removing or adding new ones → fixed;

Price list upload: error of displaying products in the configurator, if there are several merged cells → fixed;

Video module: filtering operational issue → fixed;

Blog module: the page of the entries archive operational issue → fixed;

Polls module: the bug with changing the rate order after voting and groups restrictions → fixed;

System Updates

The import feature for the Online Shop module was improved.

The parent tags with the ‘faq-name-add’, ‘faq-usrnm-add’ classes were added to the FAQ module.

The Thread manager feature was added to the Forum module.

The parent block with the ‘subscribe-forum’ class was added to the list of Forum threads a user is subscribed to (/forum/0-0-1-46).