This week's featured site is the perfect destination for music lovers. Michael Hutchinson is a highly acclaimed conductor, musician, and teacher. With a track record that boasts conducting bands at performances at the Olympics, the Sydney Opera House, and the John F. Kennedy Center (among many other concerts), Hutchinson's site and story is not one to miss.

Using the photo album, video, and guestbook tool to gather testimonials and comments from guests, everything added to the site helps display just how impressive both Hutchinson's career and site are. 

Congratulations, Michael! Keep up the great work!

Visit Michael's site here. 

If you want to see your site featured next Friday, submit your site here. 

This week's featured site comes from graphic designer, Melissa Yost. Melissa's site is simple, functional, and perfectly showcases her design work.

You can click through Melissa's portfolio to see the great design work she's done so far (we can only see it vastly expanding!). Her background in Interior Design shows that she has always thought with a creative mind and we only expect to see more great work from her in the future. If you wish to contact Melissa, she lists her Facebook and a form to contact on her site.

Visit Melissa's site here.

Submit your own site at featured-site.angelfire.com!

This week's Featured Friday site comes from a company right down the highway from Angelfire! Baby Bear Daycare is brought to you today by Patricia Coward. Baby Bear is located in Tewksbury, MA (right near Waltham, our headquarters!) and based on the website, it looks like the kids have a ton of fun there.

Here's what Patricia had to say about her site: "I have been using Angelfire for many years. I am not a professional web designer but Angelfire has made it easy to create my own website. I put a lot of time and effort into creating something that I think is attractive to my clients." We totally agree! Babybeardaycare.org is warm and inviting and you can definitely tell that Patricia has been working hard to make it look as great as it does today. 

What I think is unique about Patricia's site and daycare is that she gives you all of the information about what she plans on doing for day-to-day activities up front. You can check out the menu, curriculum, and daily schedule all off of the home page and decide if it's the right daycare for your child. 

Don't just take our word for it that this site is well organized and delightfully cute (you have to check out the slideshow of pictures on the main page!), here are some entries from the guestbook from those who have stopped by to admire the site: 

"You have an outstanding good and well structured site. I enjoyed browsing through it." - Mckenna, USA

 "I am a provider in Minnesota. Thanks for sharing your site with me... I absolutely LOVED it! You did a great job. Your site definitely deserves an award." - Nicole, Minnesota 

Hopefully being Angelfire's featured site of the week is a step towards the award Nicole thinks Baby Bear Daycare deserves! Congrats, Patricia! Keep up the good work both with your site and your daycare!

You can visit this site at babybeardaycare.org. If you want to see your site featured here next week, fill out and submit the form at featured-site.angelfire.com! 

Want to update your current site design with a fresh new style? Check out our newest offerings:

Black Mamba:  Perfect for your personal site, art site, or whatever funky site you have created!

Brown Stripe: This simple template is ideal for businesses that want to keep their sites clean and simple.

Escape: Use the Escape template to give your site a refined layout with a little tropical flair. 

Emerald City: It's not easy being green - use this hip style as a cool "about me" site or even a trendy site for your business. 

Rainy Nights: Feeling a bit blue? Use this site to showcase your writing, photography, or anything you please!

Exciting news! Today we have selected our first Angelfire Featured Friday site ever, and that site is ... The Vincent Price Exhibit! 

The Vincent Price exhibit is an amazingly designed site about (you guessed it) the famed Vincent Price. This wonderful display of everything Price is brought to you by webmaster, Richard Squires. "It's been extremely popular since its creation in 1999, and has been featured in various magazines, news reports (the BBC featured it several years back) and websites" Richard says about his site. Not only does he cover the films that we all so fondly remember Vincent for, but he sheds light on some of Price's more obscure accomplishments that the average horror fan may not be aware of. 

Richard states that his main audience is "fans of actor Vincent Price, film buffs and horror fans" but I believe he can add those who are just interested in well designed sites as well. The website is so easy to navigate and the content is so interesting, you can lose yourself searching through the articles and stories about Vincent Price's life and career as well as Richard's experience with growing up being a Price fan. 

Some of my favorite tidbits from the site were not the common facts about Vincent Price, but the personal comments from Richard. One of my favorite quotes: "I was such a Price nerd at 14 that I begged my parents to buy me American International Pictures stock for my birthday!" If that doesn't prove to you that this site is more than your average informational site about an actor, I don't know what will! You can tell that Richard has put a lot of time and effort into creating his incredibly popular site. With interesting images like a ticket stub from the first time he went to see Price in person or his actual AIP stock certificate, The Vincent Price Exhibit gives you more than you would find on say, IMDB or a generic Vincent Price informational website. 

With all that said, congratulations to Richard for claiming the first Featured Friday spot on Angelfire! You really deserved it as The Vincent Price Exhibit is not a site to miss!

If you want to see your site featured here next Friday, fill out our submission form by following the link below:

You know it, we know it - you built an awesome site on Angelfire. The question is, does anyone else know it? We want to help you get the word out about your amazing web design skills and let the whole Angelfire community see your website.

How does this help you? The more links to your site boosts Google's impression of your site (they love backlinks). First you get a link on the blog, then on Facebook, then on Twitter. THEN, whoever retweets, reposts, or links to your site is giving you yet another link! Not to mention the increased traffic just from the blog, Facebook, and Twitter. If those reasons don't resonate with you, it's also just pretty cool! Get bragging rights - post on your Facebook page that you are Angelfire's site of the week! Who knows - maybe we'll even come out with badges soon for your site!

We love seeing your sites, so submit them here!

Our ever-expanding library of add-ons added two new members today: the Weather add-on and the Weather Zombie add-on. Now you can share the weather from your hometown, where you are on vacation, or wherever you choose with your visitors and you can even give it an undead twist. In the editor, you can choose your city, region (for the US & Canada), and country plus you can select your unit of measuremet as either Fahrenheit or Celsius. Add additional weather add-ons to show different locations or allow your visitors to search for their own locations by displaying the search bar. 

Your add-on will look different depending on where you place it on your page (in the content, sidebar, header, or footer). Here's an example of the weather add-on placed in the content section: 

You'll see the last time that the weather was updated, the high and low for the day, current conditions, and the times for sunrise and sunset.

 The Weather Zombie add-on has the same editor and displays the same information but is a little more animated. Depending on your weather, your zombie forecaster will change! For example, today's a scorcher in Cairo so... 

The Zombie is dressed for the weather! Whereas in Fairbanks, AK, the weather is much nicer...

So the Zombie changes for the occassion.

Whichever add-on you choose, either makes a great addition to your site and keeps you updated at the same time!

To better supplement any current themes you may have, we have included a new picture add-on called Picapp. With Picapp, you can select a search term which grabs up to eight images, depending what section of your website you place the add-on in, and inserts them into a stream. Click on any of the images to browse through additional similar pictures and even share your favorites with your friends through different sharing options. So if you have a site dedicated to fashion or even baked goods, use this add-on to dress up your page.

Picapp will store your search terms so if you delete one off of your page and want to use it again, you can place your Picapp add-on back on your website and choose to add a new gallery or choose from existing galleries. To make this process easier, be sure to name your galleries so you remember what images each gallery holds.

Mood:  energetic

We are so happy to let you know about the new features we've released today... two new Add-ons that have been highly requested by you for some time. And also some upgrades to existing Add-ons that ought to improve your use of them significantly.

1.) PayPal Shopping Cart Add-on
We have released a PayPal-based Shopping Cart add-on that will allow you to list products, images, prices, and information on your site and allow your site visitors to purchase those products and check-out securely using PayPal, one of the safest and most trusted e-commerce gateways online.

The Shopping Cart add-on is very easy to set up and configure. All you need is a PayPal account and something to sell and you're off and running.

The Shopping Cart is available to Angelfire "THE Plan" accounts.

2.)  Poll Taker Add-on
This snazzy new add-on will let you set up a poll on any topic you like, keep track of the votes, and then display the results in an attractive popup window. Also keeps track of visitor's IP address and will only allow one vote per visitor.

3.) Add-on Upgrades:
The Form Creator add-on will now format the responses it sends to your email. It will show all the questions that you asked in bold with the response below. Ought to make it a lot easier to read and generally consume this data.

The Page Counter add-on will now count only the unique hits to the page that it's on instead of counting all traffic to every site under your account... a significant improvement.

Thank you so much for your continued loyalty and use of our tools and services. Please if you haven't yet go ahead and take this survey about upcoming features. Your responses to that will make a large impact on what we work on this year... we are reading all of your responses and comments out loud to each other... what you say and think about our products is so valuable to us. You are the reason we are doing all of this in the first place!