Drew Wilson just released the latest Valio Bundle, and we’re proud to be featured alongside a number of other fantastic apps and resources that help designers and developers rock.

What does $49 get you?

We won’t list everything here, but some of our favourites on the list include:

• LittleSnapper by Realmac.
• Smaller for minifying your CSS and Javascript.
• Vinilla – beautiful UI elements for your designs.
• Pictos Font by the man himeself.
• GoSquared – 2 months of the Standard plan. By us.
• Plus a whole lot more.

That’s 2 months of GoSquared Standard (worth $19.98) included alongside a package with a total value of $438!

This awesome offer is only available this week until Sunday so get it while you can!

* This deal is only available to new users, sorry to all of you wonderful existing members – we’re doing lot more to keep you happy. Promise!

Update: The Valio Bundle deal is now over! Sorry if you didn’t get a chance, you’ve gotta be quick in this game.

Today, we’re very excited to announce the latest version of GoSquared LiveStats – version 3.

We’ve rewritten LiveStats from the ground up to focus around seeing which content is popular on your site at a glance. The centre of the interface shows a list of all the pages people are viewing on your site. The left side shows where your traffic is coming from – what people are tweeting, which sites are linking to you, and what people are searching for.

Learn more about the great new features of LiveStats 3, and sign up now!

Today we’re announcing two huge improvements to GoSquared. We’re introducing a new structure for user accounts and plans to make GoSquared more affordable, easier to join and simpler to upgrade. We’re also releasing an overhaul of the Site Manager application and renaming it Settings.

The new Settings app

Introducing a completely redesigned application for managing everything in your GoSquared Account, along with all the websites you’ve added to GoSquared.

Settings will look familiar if you’ve been using GoSquared for any period of time – it’s replacing what was previously known as Site Manager for managing the sites in your GoSquared Account. All the settings that were there before – editing of website name, URL, updating your site image preview, sharing options – are all still available.

Along with managing your websites, you can also edit your personal details, change your password, and upgrade your GoSquared Account (more on that shortly).

Updates to GoSquared Accounts

The most notable change introduced with the Settings app is that there is a new option in the sidebar called “My Account” – head here to upgrade your GoSquared Account.

Until today, when you signed up for a plan (see plans and pricing), that plan would apply to a website on GoSquared. From now on, plans will apply to user accounts rather than to websites.

What does that mean? Before – if you signed up for a premium plan, that plan would only apply for one website, so even if you had 3 websites in your GoSquared account, you would only gain the increased pageview limit and additional features of the premium account for one website. We didn’t think that was fair – and a lot of people requested we change things so that the pageviews they were paying for could be shared across all sites in their account.

From today onwards when you sign up for a plan on GoSquared, the features and the number of pageviews on that plan will apply to all sites in your GoSquared account.

If you’re only on the free plan and you currently have multiple websites in your account then not too much will change except the pageview limit on the free plan – 10,000 pageviews monthly, will now be shared across all of your websites.

If you have any queries about the latest changes to GoSquared accounts, have a look at this support document.

Behind the scenes

We’ve improved the functionality of the Settings app to be easier to use, and even faster than before by utilising the latest in HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery goodness. You won’t have to reload the screen at all – everything refreshes immediately, and tabs switch as soon as they’re clicked without any waiting.

Settings is there to be quick and easy – people want to jump in, change a detail, and get back to looking at their stats. That’s why we designed the URL structure to allow you to bookmark any screen in Settings and return to it at a later date. It’s also why you can jump straight to Settings from the sign in screen by clicking the Settings icon. Small things, but hopefully they’ll save you some valuable time.

I don’t understand! Help me!

We’ve put together a support document outlining some of the top questions you may have regarding the changes to GoSquared accounts. Have a read of the support page, and if you still have questions please feel free to email us, tweet us, facebook us, or leave a comment on Get Satisfaction.

Still not using GoSquared for real-time web analytics? Sign up now

This has been a huge project behind the scenes for the whole team, and we hope you like the changes. It’s very easy to keep adding new features when building software, but this is one of those occasions where we dedicated considerable time to simplifying, clarifying, and improving a core part of our offering. We look forward to your feedback!

Enjoy,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

Our friends at Realmac have just launched the latest version of their award winning app for creating beautiful websites in minutes. And we’re very proud to be a part of RapidWeaver 5 – with completely seamless integration of GoSquared’s real-time analytics tools.

If you’ve purchased a copy of Realmac RapidWeaver 5, you’re entitled to sign up to GoSquared for free on the RapidWeaver plan and monitor any websites you may have with up to 10,000 pageviews per month, and a completely ad free interface.

For more information on RapidWeaver 5, head on over to the Realmac site. For more information and support documentation on integrating GoSquared with your RapidWeaver site(s) head on over to our support site.

We’d love your feedback, so feel free to get in touch at any time! Enjoy.

A few days ago we released our new sign in screen. If you’re already a member of GoSquared you’ll probably have noticed it’s a whole lot better than what it replaces.

Try it on iPhone

There’s a few handy little things you may not have noticed, though. For example, if you’re on a desktop computer, or anything with a fairly large screen size, you’ll see the default sign in screen – with icons for each of our main apps, some handy links at the bottom of the screen, and of course the all important email and password fields. However, if you load the same page on your iPhone or any other small screen mobile device running a modern browser, you’ll get a specifically designed screen that cuts out everything you don’t need to see on a mobile device. That’s not all – we’ve gone an extra step and implemented an optimised design for when your mobile device in in landscape or portrait. We hope this will make it easier for people to keep up to date with the status of their site while on the go.

Responsive Web Design

For those web designers among you, we optimised for these different screen sizes by utilising some of the modern technologies available in CSS3. This is an increasingly popular method called “responsive” web design – pages adapt to suit the device they’re being shown on. There’s a great article about responsive web design on A List Apart.

Form + Function

Another little feature you may not have noticed – the app icons (for LiveStats, Trends and Settings) you see when using the sign in screen on the desktop are not just for looks. Simply click any of them while entering your email and password and you’ll be taken straight to the chosen app. It’s only a small thing but we hope it’ll save a second or two of your valuable time that could be spent watching your site’s traffic.

If you have any feedback, please drop us a line in the comments, get in touch on Twitter, or give your feedback on Get Satisfaction.

Enjoy.

At GoSquared, we send out a lot of emails. Don’t worry – we don’t spam people, we simply have a lot of users who need a lot of important actions confirmed. One of the first and therefore most important actions a user can make on GoSquared is signing up in the first place.

We decided it was time to have a look at exactly which emails we were sending out – it’s an easy thing to overlook when running a business – emails fly out every minute to users, all controlled “under the hood” of your application, often with content that may have long since become neglected and outdated. Thankfully, we’ve now overhauled the emails we send out to new users.

Previously

Heading to a Mailbox near you now

The screenshot below is of the email you’ll receive if you sign up as a new user to a premium plan on GoSquared. We want to make every new user welcome, so we’ve designed it to the same standards you’d expect from GoSquared, and provided all the information you could need to get off the ground with real-time analytics. There’s a simple 3 step process to help you install the GoSquared Tracking Code on your website, and easy links to your website’s stats on GoSquared, as well as useful links to get help and reach us on Twitter.

A Couple of things We Learned

Test. Test. TEST!

We spent about a day designing the original email, getting the right content in, and ensuring the layout was attractive and readable. We spent the next 2 days hacking it to look acceptable in all of the various email clients out there. To save time, ensure you’re using a testing environment like Litmus, otherwise you’re going to be sending a lot of emails to a lot of different clients.

Google Mail and Microsoft Outlook are evil

Carrying on from the last point – about 70% of the “hacking” time was spent trying to ensure these emails looked reasonable in Google Mail and Microsoft Outlook. Google Mail strips your emails of any inline stylesheets so you’re forced to apply CSS styles to individual elements. Outlook likes to ignore some of the most basic CSS properties.

Have a good idea of which CSS properties you’ll need

Once you’ve come up with your basic design, assess which parts are going to be the most troublesome. A great reference we found was Campaign Monitor’s Guide to CSS Support in Email Clients. Ignore this at your peril.

Don’t ignore Mobile devices

With email it’s sometimes easy to forget where it’ll be read. Many people use mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads as their primary email reading devices so it’s pivotal that your emails display as expected on such devices with smaller screen sizes. Thankfully, the iPhone, iPad, and many Android devices have email clients that render emails with the wonderful WebKit rendering engine. WebKit is, in our opinion the best rendering engine out there – if you’ve ever developed for the iPhone’s MobileSafari, Desktop Safari, or Google Chrome then you’ll feel right at home.

Delivery is Everything

It’s all good having a great looking set of emails to send out, but how do you know anyone’s actually receiving them? Before, we received a lot of support requests after new users had signed up saying that they never received an activation email. We don’t send activation emails any more, but we now have a very good idea of every email we send out, every email that’s received, every email that’s reported as spam, and every email that bounces back. How do we possess such magical powers? We’re using Postmark – for fast and reliable transactional email delivery. We highly recommend it.

Hope we’ve been helpful

Thanks for stopping by. If you have any other tips on designing HTML emails, or know of any other decent solutions for email testing and delivering then drop us a line in the comments!

It’s been a while since we posted some resources on the GoSquared Blog, so we thought it was time we shared something great with you.

Introducing our latest icon set – 2400 Flags. We’ve created a flag for every major country in the world, plus a few more. And we’ve created them in several sizes so they’ll look great no matter where you’re using them – 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48, and 64×64. We’ve also provided them in 2 variants – as flat and standard, and with a lovely glossy finish.

We’re using these flag icons in our own apps – sign up for a free trial of GoSquared and see for yourself. Sign up for a free trial now if you’d like to see more!

Some of our Personal Favourites

Get the download now! Donate as much as you want

We’ve organised them by country name and also by ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 country code where available, so hopefully you’ll be able to find all the flags you need, and integrate them into your next project in seconds.

Download Flag Icon Set (3.8 MB)

Pay whatever you want

We put considerable effort into the resources we make and until now we’ve always given them away for free. This time around we’re asking anyone who actually gets some use out of these flags to pay for them, and for the time we spent creating them. We won’t set the price point, so pay whatever you like. Hate them? Don’t pay anything!

Using these Flags commercially

If you want to use these flag icons commercially (on your company’s website, in client work, in any scenario where you’ll be profiting from the work they’re in) then we kindly request that you donate at least $40 to justify the time and effort we’ve put in to creating them. It wasn’t a small job, and your money goes directly back in to creating more quality design resources.

If you need a flag that isn’t here, please drop us a line in the comments and we’ll add it as soon as we can.

We hope they’re useful for you, and that you share them with the world.

Enjoy!

Need to see who’s been on your website in the last day? Week? Month? Want to monitor your website’s traffic without having to read a manual first? Want an elegant web analytics solution that updates in minutes rather than hours and works beautifully on all devices? Maybe you should check out Trends.

Since we first launched LiveStats, our web app for monitoring your website’s traffic in real-time, we’ve been determined to figure out how to store historical data at a large scale. Due to the number of sites we serve, and the speed at which we store data for quick retrieval, it’s been a huge challenge but we’ve finally figured it out.

What is Trends?

Trends is a web app for monitoring your website’s historical traffic data. All the information you need is easily readable and quickly scannable with bold graphs and readable lists. There’s a separate Widget for every metric (like referrers, visitors or top content), making it easy for the whole team to know what’s been popular and what’s not on your website.

Open Standards

There’s not an ounce of Flash in Trends, or any of GoSquared. We’re really proud of the graphing engine behind Trends. Because we haven’t used Flash, graphs in Trends display just as well on your desktop as it does on your iPhone or iPad. These are the best charts in a web-based analytics service anywhere on the web.

Customisable Interface

The interface of Trends consists of a series of beautiful, easy-to-use Widgets. You can set up every Widget just as you want – choose the time frame for your stats, whether you want to look at a graph, pie chart, bar chart, or just the figures, and even move the Widgets around. Trends will change to suit you. The whole interface will stay the way you set it when you return – every Widget, every state, every time frame will be remembered so you can jump back in where you left off.

Part of GoSquared

As we wrote recently, Trends may be a separate app, but when you sign up to GoSquared you get both LiveStats and Trends as part of the package. You can sign up for GoSquared for free, or if you need more pageviews there’s a series of affordable premium plans starting at just $9.99/month.

Check out the Plans and Pricing now – every plan has a 30 day free trial, and you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time.

Enjoy!

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

We quietly launched a new web app into beta a few weeks ago called Trends. Trends enables you to monitor your website’s trending traffic data from a single dashboard, with a separate widget containing graphs, charts, and tables for every metric that matters.

We’ve had some great feedback on Trends, and have continued to improve the app over the past weeks while people have been trying it out. Trends works great with LiveStats – which shows you what’s happening on your website right now. LiveStats shows every visitor browsing your site, what pages they’re on, which referrers have sent them to your site, and how long they’re spending on each page, all in real-time.

What’s New?

The price. Until now, we’ve been charging for LiveStats as a web app on its own. Now for the same price, we’re giving you a whole new app – Trends, with incredibly accurate data recording, an intuitive and beautiful interface, and redundant data backups.

New Plans

We’ve also made a few changes to the individual Plans we offer. We’ve improved every Plan in a multitude of ways including the number of pageviews, and the number of features. Now every Plan comes with unlimited team sharing, SSL page tracking, Event tracking, and Map View with Geolocation monitoring.

We will continue to offer a free plan, and we’ve doubled the number of pageviews to 10,000 pageviews/month. We’ve also integrated a single, unobtrusive ad placement on the free plan. We’re working with BuySellAds to ensure the ads shown in GoSquared’s apps are consistently high quality and have as little impact on your experience as possible.

Already added a website to GoSquared and want to upgrade its Plan? Sign in and head to the Site Manager.

We hope you like the changes we’re making at GoSquared. If you have any suggestions or feedback we’d love to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, or via email.

Your chance to earn money from GoSquared has arrived. Today we announce the release of our Affiliate program, which enables you to earn cash from promoting LiveStats to your audience. Upon referral of a paying customer, you’ll receive a cut of up to 50% of the amount paid.

If you’re already a member of GoSquared, you’re already set up to start earning money. If not, sign up now and you’ll be ready to start earning in under 60 seconds. On the Affiliates Dashboard, you’re given a unique affiliate URL and a selection of banners we’ve carefully designed for you to use on your web pages to promote LiveStats to your audience. Every time someone purchases a LiveStats plan, you’ll receive a tasty slice of the pie.

We’ve been busy

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes for the past few months, making countless improvements and feature additions to the underlying infrastructure of our system. Our improvements to infrastructure have been largely focused around increasing performance and developing a more scalable platform to build upon. The front-end changes have been subtle, but we’re starting to roll out better navigation within GoSquared Account screens and between GoSquared apps such as LiveStats and Site Manager.

Map View for the Masses

Until now, Map View was only available to Standard and Pro users. Starting today, all LiveStats users will be able to experience the power of LiveStats’ real-time geolocation panel first hand. Observe exactly where your visitors are browsing from, in the context of time of day, by navigating the beautiful interactive world map.

Dramatically Improved Performance

In our minds, performance is the key. That’s why we always design our applications and the engines powering them with performance as a top priority. Recently we’ve made a bunch of tweaks under the hood to make LiveStats more streamlined. Now you can enjoy faster loading times as the LiveStats loading bar slices swiftly across your screen when the application starts up.

New and Improved Signup Process

We’ve redesigned the way new users get started with LiveStats. Implementing that tracking code can be a tricky business, so we do our best to guide them through the process in a clear and concise way when they first run the application. First impressions are the most important.

Check out the sign up and welcome process for yourself – sign up for LiveStats now.

We really hope you enjoy these improvements to the GoSquared experience, and that we can help you earn some extra cash on the side through GoSquared Affiliates.

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team