Currently our fees for custom flash websites for Showit begin at $2000. Effective today we will  be offering custom flash websites for Showit with NO monthly fees starting from $3500. That’s right…no monthly fees. A fully editable custom built flash website for life with no monthly fees starting from just $3500. With Showit you also have the power to create an unlimited number of +Sites; miniature satellite websites that revolve around your main site. If you don’t have Showit then what are you waiting for? Download Showit through us and receive the entire collection of tutorials from Learn Showit absolutely free.*

Browse our portfolio to see the 30+ Showit websites we’ve designed for others, then contact us when your ready to make the jump.

*New accounts only

SMD wants to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. We will be out of the office from December 24th – January 1st 2010, however we will be available for a few days next week via email if you have an emergency. We want to take this time to thank all of our clients for making this first year for us an incredible success. SMD has built and launched 34 Showit websites this year, and next year we hope to more than double that figure. To help us with that goal we’ll be introducing some “all inclusive” packages with…well…you’ll need to stay tuned for those details.

In the mean time drink lots of Egg Nog, eat lots of cookies, and go to bed early tonight.

*Edit* – This method is obsolete. Showit pushed out an update that will do this for you automatically. Click here for more information.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Houston-TX/Spilled-Milk-Designs/137013621744?v=app_4949752878

Facebook won’t allow you to embed your Showit site the normal way using the embed code.  We have to use Facebooks own coding language dubbed Facebook Markup Language or FBML. Luckily we’ve figured it all out for you and will explain how to embed your Showit site into your Facebook page.

*The particular Facebook app FBML mentioned in this post only works with Facebook Fan pages. Use the Facebook application My HTML for personal profiles.*

We’re going to assume that you already have the embed code provided to you by Showit, and we’re going to assume that you want to embed your entire site. The sizing inside the code doesn’t matter so don’t worry about it. If you have music on your site, you may want to duplicate the style group and embed one without music as to not surprise your visitor. Facebook doesn’t have ANY audio coming from it so it would be a shocker. Your code will look very similar to this one below:

<object width="800" height="540"><param name="movie" value="http://sites.showitfast.com/pl/site.swf"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><param name="FlashVars" VALUE="sid=10803/715&sp=home-1&fw=800&fh=541&it=0&ip=1&pc=00000d&sc=00000d&cmp=1"></param><embed src="http://sites.showitfast.com/pl/site.swf" FlashVars="sid=10803/715&sp=home-1&fw=800&fh=541&it=0&ip=1&pc=00000d&sc=00000d&bc=d4d4d4&cmp=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="800" height="540"></embed></object>

There is only one line of code that you need; the site ID line which is in red above. This is different for everyone so please use yours unless you want to promote our site, in which case we are fine with that as well.

You’ll need to change the “800″ and “541″ to “760″ and “513″ in the code marked in red above. 760px is the maximum width of the canvas space on Facebook.

With your line of code handy, open up Facebook and find the place to browse for more applications. Search for FBML, and add it to your fan page. Next, go to the profile view of your Facebook page, and click the “edit page” link. Scroll all the way down until you see the Website-FBML application, and click on “edit.”

Rename the Box Title to Website or whatever you’d like, then copy and paste the following code into the FBML box:

<fb:swf swfbgcolor="000000" imgstyle="border-width:3px; border-color:black;"
swfsrc='http://sites.showitfast.com/pl/site.swf?PLACE SITE ID HERE' imgsrc='IMAGE URL'
width='760' height='513' />

Where it says, “PLACE SITE ID HERE“, you’re going to paste the site ID line from above that you took from your embed code from Showit.  Make sure there is no space between the ? and the start of the site ID code.

You’ll need to give your visitors something to click to activate the canvas space. We’re not sure why this is, but hey it works. Take a screen snip of your site, and re-size it to 760×513. Upload it into Showit and grab the link to the asset. If you don’t know what that is then upload to Flickr or somewhere else. You just need somewhere to host the image. Replace the “IMAGE URL” with the URL to your loading image, then click on “save changes.”

Next, go to the profile view of your Facebook page, and click the “edit page” link. Scroll all the way down until you see the Website-FBML application, and click on “application settings.” It should be set to Box: Available | Tab: Added.

Good luck and if you run into any glitches just ask for help in the comments section. If it doesn’t work you did something wrong. If you like these little hacks then let us know!

*Updated*
Screencast tutorial here

Google is most likely going to change their search algorithm to account for site loading times. In laments terms, if your site loads slowly then you will not rank well. Are you ready for that?  Want to find out if your site is loading slowly as compared to other sites?  Measure your site speed with Google Webmasters Site Performance Tool. This can be found in your Google Webmasters account (which you should be using for your Showit site anyway), under the “Labs” section and is listed as “Site Performance.” If you don’t already use Firebug then don’t worry about installing the plugin. That’s mainly for development and debugging purposes.

If you don’t have any data yet, don’t fret. Your site may have not been up for long enough to collect data. Also, don’t worry if it says your “average load time” is more than a few seconds. That is average, and is accumulative. What we’re looking at is the example load time from the / URL which is the first page of your site. It should be under 1 second. If it’s not then you may want to re-think what you have loading right off the bat.

Here is a screenshot from our site. It says our average loading time is 2.5 seconds, but that our site loads in 0.8 seconds. That is FAST for a flash site. It’s also interesting to check out our other sites, for example learnshowit.com has an average loading time of 0.8 seconds, which is faster than 93%of all sites. Pretty impressive for a Showit site. These figures also DO NOT account for the Rapid Hosting that Showit just released yesterday. With Rapid Hosting, there is no wait for your Showit site to load, as long as you don’t bog it down with 50mb videos, 5mb photos, and 8mb mp3s. Compress that junk down and save your visitors some time, and their sanity. We’re going to keep an eye on this as we just setup our site for Rapid Hosting. We’ll post back our findings after a few months of collecting more data.

*Update – Well that didn’t take long. After the above tests we’re run we flipped the switch to rapid edge hosting. Once that happened our load time was cut in half! Our Showit site now loads in 0.3 seconds, which is faster than 98% of all sites measured. See for yourself.

Yesterday Showit secretly rolled out an update bringing it to 2.2. Believe me we’ve been wanting to tell you what we’ve been playing with for some time now. I’m just glad we can now!!  With each new update, we can do a few more things that we couldn’t have before. There isn’t a software solution in the world that can match what Showit can do for you and your business. The official post from Showit can be found here with all the nitty gritty stuff.  What we’re going to do is highlight our favorite additions, all of course FREE to PRO subscribers.

+Site – Create and publish unlimited subdomain sites (mini sites)! For example, take yoursite.com for instance. You can make coolsite.yoursite.com, sadsite.yoursite.com, ect. Photographers would use these for client sites. Ex: http://charlieandsined.haskinsphotography.com

Captions – Showit users have been asking for this for A LONG time! Well, Showit listened.

Rapid Edge Hosting – If you have folks visit your site from Germany, they will be served your site from a server in Germany. This means your site will load faster!!  This is important since Google announced they may be ranking sites based on how fast they load.

Simple Gallery – This one is worth the look. Set the transitions to “slide left” and the images will slide in and out. We used to have to mask this kind of stuff. Transitions within the gallery with one click now!  To top that off, each picture will link to anything now. Amazing!

Library Sync – Making it EASY to work on one site across multiple computers. Awesome!

Of course we see the softy side of DJ shine through so he threw some falling snow in the mix. You can find it in your media library. What’s cool is that you can change the size of the snow, speed of the snow, etc. The developers at Showit really deserve props for this, as they typically work 20 hours days in a dungeon at the Freedom House under DJ’s command. Go leave those guys a comment here or congratulate ‘em on Twitter here.