‍Image protection

‍How you feel about protecting images is a personal matter. Inevitably putting something on the web makes is public, and might invite someone to steal it. While someone who’s determined to steal your content is always going to find a way, there are a few things that can be done to mitigate, while still showcasing your work.

‍At the simplest level you can prevent the image from being dragged from the page, or saved after a right click.  For many of our customers this has historically been a “good enough” solution that they were seeking.

‍Embedding copyright information in the image, which will be taken from the original image if available, is often also a good solution. So for example photographers will find it from the camera or from their processing software such as Lightroom.

‍Both these techniques are not going to help with slightly more sophisticated users, who will view the page source, or crawlers that download images on behalf of AI systems or image search services. So for those we developed a novel “Hide from Search and AI” option, that is not impossible to work around, but needs a focused adversary who is technically knowledgeable and wants your image specifically.

‍Ultimately if you recognize that the image will just be grabbed by who wants it, but still need to show it, you can opt to reduce the image resolution, so that whoever manages to grab it never has the best image quality.

‍AI bot protection

‍We can certainly be of two minds about AI, in it being both an opportunity and a threat. This feature is designed to address the negative aspect of AIs training on your content. You can now prevent AI crawlers from accessing your website and collecting the page text for training purposes.

‍Gallery borders, rounding and shadow

‍The image gallery slides can now can be configured with borders, rounding and shadows. This helps you match the gallery to the overall style of a page or section, or can be used for fun effects like this one.

‍We also added customization options for the left/right arrow shape and size.

‍Privacy compliance enhancements

‍The cookie banner now support all the cookie types (e.g. functional, analytics, marketing) that compliance with regulation requires you to ask the site visitor about. The first time you open an older project, you will be prompted to update your cookie banner with the new checkboxes and buttons, something you can also defer to a later time.

‍The cookie types your site visitor picks on the banner will be matched up with the third party content on your pages, so that only elements matching the user selection is unblocked. For example if a site visitor doesn’t select “marketing”, most third party content won’t be unblocked.

‍For code embedding, where you paste some third party code provided by a vendor, by default it’s assumed that it will produce all types of cookies, and it’s up to you to check with the vendor whether they do not, and select the appropriate cookie types in the embed settings.

‍All third party content, whether built-in or in code embed elements, now supports two-step activation. This lets a site visitor unblock a specific embed even if they denied consent when first visiting the website, for example they want to see a Google map of your store even if they denied consent to all cookies. In the case of TTDSG in Germany, it’s a requirement to block third party content and unblock it individually, even if the site visitor accepted the cookie banner and expressed consent.

‍The user choice of cookies needs to also be reflected in Google Analytics and Tag Manager, a relatively recent change in their service in what they call “Consent Mode 2”. Sitely’s privacy management acts as a consent management platform in integrating with Analytics and Tag Manager, supports this, which allows for richer data collection in full compliance, for users that consent to all cookies.

‍When you first open a project file from an older Sitely version, if you had the privacy feature active, you’ll be prompted to update the cookie banner, and to fix the cookie classification of any embed element.
If you want to postpone that you can go to the privacy page, select the cookie banner, and click the update button in the settings. The update prompt and manual button add the missing cookie type checkboxes, and the “accept selected” button. You then need to update their position and style to match your existing ones.

‍Color gradients

‍We gave gradients a huge upgrade. In addition to being able to pick multiple gradient steps, and radial and conical gradients, it’s now possible to pick the color space for the color ramp. While color spaces can be hard to visualize, the idea is that instead of a continuous variation of red, green, blue (natural on a computer screen), it’s now possible to have a continuous variation in color parameters that are more akin to human vision. The more natural color space is called “OKLCH”, and a gradient in OKLCH tends to preserve the hue or luminosity, whereas RGB gradients tend to end up with color hue or saturation that’s unrelated to the gradient starting and engine points. 

‍To make this super clear we added a visualization of the gradient path through a hue color wheel, you can see how the three blending path options affect the gradient.

‍The new gradients can be applies to box and and button backgrounds and,  new in version 6, to boxes and button borders as well.

‍Applying the gradient border is a matter of picking the new gradient style, you can then use the same gradient settings. With buttons the additional twist is you can set a different gradient for the mouse hover, so have the border gradient that changes on hover.

‍Contact form improvements

‍Contact forms have several new great features, to help with more complex data entry, as well as streamline simpler home pages.

‍For a simpler contact form experience in smaller websites, you can now replace the contact form thank you page with a thank you popup. This communicates the successful email delivery without switching to a different page.

‍A new setting in the option selection lets you select similar options to “On Click” settings (go to a page, open an email, etc), and that includes opening a popup or disclosing a hidden layout block. This lets you create longer forms that span layout blocks and popups without making the user experience more complex. The form submission will consequently now let you pick input fields from the base page and from other layout blocks or popups, all to be delivered in a single email.

‍To cope with longer and more complex forms, you can now opt to format the contact form email on two side by side columns, the email will be sent as text and HTML.

‍A common contact setup issue is the choice of a “From” email address that can't work with your domain, due to domain-level anti-spam settings. Sitely will now check and detect those settings, and inform you of potential deliverability issues.

‍Sitely 6 also adds the ability to integrate the result of a calculator smart field into a contact form email.

‍Finally, spam bots are evolving and we have consequently hardened the bot detection, that like in earlier versions doesn’t require any interaction from the site visitor (no annoying captcha) and doesn’t expose them to third party services.