The EverWeb 2021 End of Year Review!

Wow! Here we are again, at the end of another year! And as we always do at this time, we look back at EverWeb‘s year and look forward to what’s going to happen in 2022!

EverWeb Product Releases 2021

The year saw two major releases with EverWeb 3.5 and 3.5.1 out of the gate in July and September respectively. Although only billed as a maintenance and stability release, EverWeb 3.5.1 actually packed in a few noticeable new and updated features to make it a significant release in itself.

EverWeb and New Operating Systems 2021
Perhaps one of the biggest changes to EverWeb in 2021 was that it was updated to be able to run natively on Mac machines running Apple Silicon. This means that both Intel and Apple Silicon are now fully supported with EverWeb 3.5 and higher being a Universal Binary. If you’re running EverWeb 3.4, or earlier, on an Apple Silicon Mac, it will still run through Apple’s Rosetta 2 ‘translation’ program. Rosetta is no slouch in terms of app performance on an Apple Silicon Mac, but running apps natively is the way to go as eventually Rosetta will stop being supported.

The other new OS that EverWeb’s compatible with is, of course, Mac OS Monterey which was released in October 2021. This new OS has a slightly modified User Interface to that of previous macOS versions, with rounder, more iOS influences. Indeed this also sparked EverWeb to update it’s logo and macOS icon too with a new more 2021 look!

New EverWeb Features 2021
The big new feature of 2021 for EverWeb was the introduction of website Search. EverWeb makes it easy to add search terms to your website’s pages and it also intelligently looks at other criteria as well, such as the Web Page Description, when building a results set for a site search. The beauty of website search in EverWeb is that it’s all built in to the Search Engine Optimization section of the Page Settings tab and the new Search Field Widget. The widget is powerful as it enables you to setup a fully customizable search bar as well as defining how the search results are presented to the user: as a dropdown menu, popup window or, when used with the Search Results Widget, a fully customizable search results set that can be displayed on its own results page.

Blog Posts are also searchable with the addition of Short Summaries and Keywords that can be applied on a post by post basis adding weight to the new website Search feature.

EverWeb Addons in 2021
Although launched in 2020, 2021 saw some minor refinements for EverWeb’s EverWeb SEO Power Up Addon. As you may already know, EverWeb builds Search Engine Optimization in to the product so you don’t have to worry about it if you don’t want to. If you do want to tailor your site for SEO, then it’s a good idea to initially follow the SEO for EverWeb Video Course. SEO Power Up Addon takes SEO one step further by giving you the ability to fine tune your SEO with options such as Priority and Frequency giving you the ability to tell web crawlers which of your pages are important and how often to crawl them. In addition, you can exclude pages from SEO and add your own keywords and phrases to the pages of your site. If focusing your SEO is important for your business, EverWeb SEO Power Up Addon is the tool for you!

Faster Working in EverWeb in2021!
Sometimes it’s the small things that make a difference and EverWeb in 2021 added the neat feature of letting you select multiple items in a Widget’s Assets List allowing you to update all the items at one time if you need to. This is especially useful e.g. if you are using the Text Section widget and want to change the color of all of the buttons you have at one time, or in the FlexBox widget when you want to update all of the Embedded Objects minimum width values at once.

In addition to being able to update assets in a Widget’s Assets List all at once, you can also update widget’s simultaneously when you have more than one of the same widget on the page. The most common use for this is probably with the PayPal widget. If you have e.g. three PayPal widgets on your page, just select all of them then make your change in the Widget Settings of the last selected widget. All of the PayPal widgets will be updated. This is great if, for example, you want to use a Custom Button instead of a default button. Just remember to de-select the widgets when you’re done!

Looking Ahead for EverWeb in 2022?
As we end 2021, EverWeb 3.6 is imminent with the new Fill Slide Show feature and new EverWeb Site Shield Addon features to make your website even more secure! We’ll be covering the release and these new features when they land – either right at the end of 2021 or very early 2022! There’s also the prospect of EverWeb for Windows coming in 2022 which could be a fantastic new expansion of the EverWeb Universe! There’s a lot to look forward to!

What would you like to see in EverWeb in 2022? Let us know in the Comments Section below, and finally… Happy New Year!