Changes are first announced in the New Features forum, and if you want to be notified of what's new then subscribe to email notifications by going to the Email Preferences tab in Your Account.

Updated Documentation

First up, anyone who has struggled to get to grips with administering their site will be pleased to know that the Voice Documentation has had an overhaul. In particular I recommend the Getting Started Helpsheet for those who would like a refresher on how to set up their website.

If there are topics that are not covered in the documentation that you would find helpful, please let us know! Email or post in the forums.

New Theme

There's a new theme, called Clarity, available to all sites. It is used for the Voice Documentation so you can see how it looks on there! The main features are:

• Really clear and easy to read, with big text and lots of space.
• Popup side menu on all screen sizes, with access to all pages - no difference for desktop/mobile.
• Pick from a range of Google Fonts as well as standard web fonts.
• You can pick any colour for background/text/highlights. So if you really need a purple background with bright green text then this might be the theme for you!

To try the new theme go to the Look & Feel section of your site's admin pages, and select the Clarity theme. Or, you can try it out risk-free on the test site!

Colourful Banners

• The Fresh and Bootstrap themes now have an option to give the banner area at the top of the page the Primary Colour background - which can look really nice and give a good contrast compared to the rest of the page.
• In the Bootstrap theme you can now also make this banner area full width rather than in a box, which I think looks much nicer!
• Bootstrap remains the only theme where you can add a background image into the banner area.

Other Tech Updates...

• Lots of improvements to the Surveys app and the Our Files app.
• Using the new Survey includelet you can now embed a form on a page.
• The FAQs app now shows questions and answers in attractive expandable boxes, rather than links to separate pages.
• The Child List includelet (as used by default in the News section of new websites) now shows each page in a separate box with the Title and Subtitle (and related image if there is one). This looks much nicer than the boring list it used to be!
• A big change to the way Private Members' Areas are managed.

Voice User Group

We've had a couple of successful Zoom meetings for website administrators, where we've demonstrated new features and had useful question and answer sessions. There's another meeting coming up in April. For more details check out the Voice Users website.

Video Editing?

There's been a suggestion of some new forums or a user group around photo and video editing - if you think this could be of interest to you or members of your community then have a read of the discussion post, and respond accordingly! :-)

Trustpilot

I've added a listing for Voice Online Communities on Trustpilot. I thought it might help get the word out that we're active and busy and keen to get lots of people to sign up!

If you have had a positive experience with your Voice website then please do leave a review! It'd be much appreciated!

You're also welcome to leave a negative review of course - but if you've had a negative experience I'd prefer it if you got in touch first to see if we can help turn things around for you!

Noticeboard

I've added a newsy noticeboardy section to the Voice site, where I'll post updates periodically. This will be less tech-orientated than the forums - so something to keep an eye on if you want to see what's happening but aren't so interested in new features!

I'll also post the updates onto Twitter, so if you follow @VoiceOnlineCom then you will also find out what's going on, assuming it's not drowned out by the latest Gary Lineker update.