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  • Mike Phillips of Website Magazine interviews Nicole Denil on "Computing in the Cloud"

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Friday, February 13, 2009 6:45 AM
    Website Magazine InterviewI was recently interviewed by Mike Phillips, senior editor of Website Magazine on how cloud computing can change the way companies use IT. Here is an excerpt of my interview with him (or, alternatively, you can read the full article).

    “Perhaps the most immediate benefit of computing in the cloud is the cost savings for businesses. By using services in the cloud, many costly overhead items can be bypassed, such as servers, storage and expensive software.

    There are many complete solutions for small and medium businesses that will enable a fully functional website without ever needing a server, Web host, design team or self-hosted, costly software. Sitemasher is one of them, offering hosting, design, SEO tools, CMS, analytics and more for one monthly fee. ‘Hosted CMS are very expensive,’ says Nicole Denil, VP of Marketing for Sitemasher. ‘Through research, what we found was that companies were looking at cost of implementation, but not every day costs, like hosting and management.’

    But working in the cloud does more than save startup costs. Beyond the need to purchase software, servers or storage space, traditional website management involves allocating large chunks of resources in order to keep everything operating at the most basic level. But by easing the burden on infrastructure through cloud computing, businesses can get back to what’s really important. ‘Cloud computing is changing the way that companies operate,’ says Denil. ‘It shifts the way people think about their infrastructure and whether or not they should be spending their resources on it. You can shift resources to the actual business itself.’”

  • Vote for Sitemasher at CEO World 2008 Web 2.0 Awards

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Friday, December 19, 2008 2:32 PM
    Sitemasher has made CEO World Magazine's "short list" of Top Publishing & Content Management web application for it's 2008 web 2.0 award!
    After scrutinizing the web for Web 2.0 sites both new and old, CEO World Magazine developed a “short list” of over 25 sites in each category. The jury was formed by 15 top Internet and Web 2.0 experts from US, India, UK, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Australia, Sweden and South Africa.
    The websites were evaluated by majority of votes based on ten main criteria:
    • Content
    • Authority
    • Navigation
    • Design
    • Accessibility
    • Innovation
    • Business sense and growth expectations
    • Degree of competition mix in their market
    • Team
    • Traffic type: blog, wiki, Services using tags, Mash up based on Google / Yahoo / Live.com maps, Feeds and social networking sites etc.

    VOTE for Sitemasher today and read more here!

  • Sitemasher Moves up on Techvibes Vancouver Startup Index

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Friday, December 05, 2008 2:24 PM
    Sitemasher has moved up 5 spots in the last month from 23rd to 18th on Techvibes Vancouver Startup Index! Techvibes is a hyper-local technology blog, events calendar, job board, and company directory across a growing network of 11 cities - Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Victoria, Seattle, Portland, and Denver-Boulder. Our unique mix of content and functionality has helped grow the Techvibes global community to over 50,000 members over the past six years. The Techvibes Start-up Indexes are a monthly ranking of local start-ups based on an average of Alexa and Compete rankings. The criteria for companies to appear on the list:
    • Located in or around the specified city or area.
    • Less than five years old
    • Not a public company
    • Is a tech company (either hardware, software, web application/service, or mobile)

    The Index is intended as a jovial comparison of local companies. Comprehensive traffic data is difficult to obtain, and neither Alexa or Compete’s numbers are perfect; we average them to smooth out bias.

    See how Sitemasher ranks up to other Vancouver startups here.

  • Start-Up of the Week on Babeofbusiness.com: Sitemasher

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Monday, November 17, 2008 8:52 AM

    Crystal Williams, a diehard entrepreneur interviews Shannon Yelland, Sitemasher's online marketing manager.

    Crystal's blog called Babeofbusiness.com is all about "A Little Business Know-How from the Chick in the Skirt…"

    "Building, maintaining and optimizing great Web sites takes time, effort and experience. It also takes some special tools and software – which usually have to be researched and bought from multiple sources. At the end of the day, it can be a time-consuming and expensive process – researching, buying, installing and using - for freelance Web designers and small businesses relying on limited resources and personnel. But don’t get down in the dumps just yet."

    Read more at www.babeofbusiness.com.

  • Sitemasher Launches Partner Program

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Tuesday, October 28, 2008 8:00 AM
    Website Platform Enables Designers To Boost Revenue and Reach New Markets

    VANCOUVER, British Columbia – October 28, 2008 – Sitemasher’s new online website platform puts the focus on the website and not the programming and IT development needed to create it. Today, Sitemasher goes one step further in letting professional web designers be web designers and not IT people by launching a partner program aimed squarely at firms focusing on website design, development, and brand marketing and consulting. With Sitemasher’s website building platform, partners will be able to earn more revenue by speeding the design and development process and to access new markets by maximizing the skills of the entire team.

    Sitemasher changes the game in building and managing websites. Traditionally a sophisticated, interactive site requires several people, including a designer, developer, back-end IT administrator and a project owner, to implement a full project. But the Sitemasher website platform enables designers to create pixel-perfect, full-featured custom sites that can be implemented easily without programming and IT integration.

    “Sitemasher lets us focus on what we do best. My team is now not constrained by the need for mechanical processes such as CMS setup,” said Erik Themmen of Level2wo, a marketing & creative agency with offices in Miami, Atlanta and Boston. “Now my designers are free to design, and our IT staff can focus on finding new, creative ways to use technology.”

    Benefits of the program include listing as a partner on the Sitemasher partnership page, customer leads, a free subscription for the design firm’s website, support, and volume discounts or commissions.

    “We strive to help design, development and marketing firms find ways to make money faster. Most are artists and designers at heart, not technologists. By removing the technology side and giving them powerful design tools, our partners can increase revenues, profitability and even reach out to new markets,” said Sitemasher Vice President of Marketing Nicole Denil.

    About Sitemasher

    Established in 2007, Sitemasher (www.sitemasher.com ) provides a fully managed, hosted website solution that seamlessly integrates website building, content management, analytics and search engine optimization (SEO), all within a single platform. Sitemasher can be found at www.sitemasher.com.

  • Sitemasher Launches Free Website Design Contest

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Wednesday, October 08, 2008 8:54 AM
    Invites Students and Professionals to Showcase Their Design Skills Using Sitemasher’s Online Platform

    VANCOUVER, British Columbia – October 8, 2008 – Sitemasher’s newly released online website platform unleashes the design process from the complexities of coding. To encourage both students and professionals to experience this design freedom, Sitemasher today launched a free website design contest that rewards the best in design, usability, functionality and ease of maintenance.

    The Sitemasher Website Design Contest, which runs through August 1, 2009, is a professional development opportunity for those looking to prove themselves in the fast evolving design market. Tools like Sitemasher change the rules for website building, making it fast, easy and inexpensive to develop and manage highly interactive websites. Participants in the contest will get an opportunity to showcase their skills by tapping into the power of this new platform, which combines an intuitive website builder, content management, analytics, search engine optimization and website hosting in one powerful online tool.

    “At Sitemasher, we foresee a day very soon when folks strive to prove themselves as ‘mashers’ – ones who have mastered our platform and are able to deliver sophisticated, pixel perfect websites in record time,” said Nicole Denil, Sitemasher’s vice president of marketing. “Our goal is to give the design community the power and performance of high end, high cost tools but in an affordable, much more manageable manner. Our online platform automates the complexity of building and managing a website so the emphasis can be on delivering a killer website in less time and less cost.”

    Website Design Contest Details
    Sitemasher created the Website Design Contest to recognize excellence among design students and design industry professionals in implementing powerful websites using Sitemasher.
    • Design students will receive a cash prize for education and an award they can use to grow their career and resume.
    • Design professionals will receive a cash prize and an award to promote their excellence in design and proficiency with Sitemasher.

    To enter the free contest, participants simply visit www.sitemasher.com/website-design-contest.

    Websites will be judged by a panel of experts and will be scored on the following:

    • Design: Judged based on overall visual concept, an intuitive navigation scheme and a high quality of execution.
    • Usability: Judged based on basic techniques such as label links and images that enhance usability throughout the design.
    • Functionality: Judged based on the extent participates maximize multiple media types and promote user interactivity.

    About Sitemasher
    Established in 2007, Sitemasher provides a fully managed, hosted website solution that seamlessly integrates website building, content management, analytics and search engine optimization (SEO), all within a single platform. Phil Calvin, chief technical officer, began developing Sitemasher in 2006. Ron Moravek, chief executive officer, joined the new corporation in August 2007 along with Curtis Terry, chief financial officer and chief operating officer for Sitemasher, both from Electronic Arts, Canada. Eric Dorgelo, vice president of development, joined the team from Rockwell. Nicole Denil joined Sitemasher from Microsoft Corporation. Eric Carlson became the sole venture capitalist and partner in December 2007.

  • Sitemasher to reduce developers' cutting, pasting

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Tuesday, October 07, 2008 9:18 AM
    Briony Smith (07 Oct 2008) has written a story on Sitemasher at ITWorldcanada.com

    A Vancouver startup launches a hosted offering that simplify the work that goes into designing Web sites and content management systems. It's also putting its money where the cloud is

    Web site development service Sitemasher went live Monday with a new service geared toward making developers’ lives a little easier.

    “We wanted to take the complexity out of Web sites,” said Sitemasher’s CEO, Ron Moravek. “Usually you have to deal with the CMS, the hosting, and the design."

    Sitemasher instead offers developers a hosted solution that makes the more annoying parts of Web design less hideous. The browser-based system offers a simplified design structure, along with a completely integrated CMS. Said Moravek: “The CMS maps in real time as you go along, building in the roles and permissions as well.”

    The drag-and-drop feature updates the schema easily, while the software-as-a-service functionality cuts down on maintenance time, courtesy of fast updates. “We talk to a lot of companies that employ armies of people who just cut and paste all day long, but this allows you to cascade the information to all your networked sites,” said Moravek. This keeps the designer and key developers in the equations, but cuts out costly and unnecessary coding staff who man the Dreamweaver or SQL, he said.

    Read more at www.itworldcanada.com.

  • Sitemasher to Unveil Sitemasher Site Network

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Thursday, July 31, 2008 11:56 AM
    We’ll be unveiling our newest addition to the Sitemasher product family – Sitemasher Site Network – in the near future, so I’d like to explain the concept. Sitemasher Site Network allows you to network multiple websites in order to share assets among the sites without duplicating pages, graphics, styling, and so on.

    What problems does Sitemasher Site Network solve?

    Over the past few months, I’ve met with countless companies that deal with not only the pain of managing their corporate parent website, but also the pain of updating their many regional websites. There is duplication of information and assets among websites, and maintaining all of that duplication is burdensome.

    Any company with several websites has to look for ways to let information flow or be inherited from the main corporate website (the parent site) to the many sub websites (the child sites). Now think about that – can you imagine trying to keep pace with hundreds of websites instead of just one? Tools such as WordPress and RSS feeds enable companies to share articles, and some companies use custom XML or data-entry tools to make changes to user interfaces, and so on. However, these complex, custom systems are often cumbersome, and merely sharing articles is pretty limiting.

    So we shared the concept on Sitemasher with early adopters and asked them to give us their “wish list” in order to change the way multi-site companies run their online businesses. Here’s what they said:
    • What if I could have parent pages from a corporate website that could share site assets (logos, movies, forms, graphics, styling, and content) to related child websites?
    • What if I could publish or update any kind of content to any number of websites in real time, through a system of parent-child sites?
    • What if I could make all of these changes without having to make changes to multiple sites?

    The solution!

    Sitemasher Site Network allows the corporate parent site to create several common assets just once – such as advertising, branding, forms, search functionality, and labeling – and then publish these common assets to the libraries of all the child sites. The child-site creator can then create their customized website from a blank canvas and simply place the parent-site assets onto the page where they see fit.The critical point here is that once placed, the parent site is still connected to the child site and can update the assets at any time. And if you look at the breadth of an offering like this, you can do something as simple as I described here – publishing a connected library – but you can also create parent templates with locked assets that only the parent site can change. Plus, the number of sites you can publish to is virtually unlimited.

    Coming soon

    Sitemasher Site Network will be available in the Sitemasher product by late August 2008.

    Have questions or want to be influential in this product’s feature development? Then send an email message to Ron Moravek, Sitemasher’s CEO, at Ron@sitemasher.com.