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  • 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's Innovative Website Platform Goes Prime Time After Extensive Community Testing

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Monday, October 06, 2008 8:30 AM
    All-in-One Online Web Site Development and Management Platform Enables Collaboration Throughout the website Lifecycle

    To help simplify the website development and management process, Sitemasher today introduced the full availability of its online website platform. Unlike other systems on the market, Sitemasher combines an intuitive website builder, content management, analytics, search engine optimization and website hosting in one powerful online tool. This tool and workflow enables everyone involved with the design, launch and maintenance of a website to collaborate easily throughout the project lifecycle.

    Sitemasher is built around the four primary roles in advanced Web design and development: the business or site owner, site designer, information technology expert and marketer or content person. Traditionally, players in these roles operate in their own spheres causing problems as a site moves from vision through development. Sitemasher creates a collaboration platform with an intuitive interface that makes the most cutting-edge website elements simple to implement and update.

    Website designers and developers can increase profitability by implementing designs without having to worry about technical requirements on the back end. They can also deliver more value to customers by reducing implementation time and cost, as well as providing analytics and websites that are optimized for search engines. Website design firms can assign customers the ability to manage their own content through user roles.

    “Nearly 80 percent of the design and development process is repetitive. We’ve automated most of that process, leaving the design and IT teams free to innovate and add business value,” said Nicole Denil, Sitemasher’s vice president of marketing. “Tools today either cater to large companies with significant IT staffs or individuals who don’t need dynamic, interactive websites. We’re focused on making it easy for site designers and owners to take a site from vision to implementation in a matter of days.”

    “As a growing firm looking to maximize productivity, Sitemasher’s suite of tools could help us significantly streamline our Website design and development process,” said Chris Ramaglia, web development project manager at Discovertec. “We can deliver more business value to our customers while reducing implementation time.”

    The new Sitemasher platform features the following benefits:
    • Single platform – Sitemasher covers the entire lifecycle of websites –site builder, integrated CMS, analytics, SEO, all in a scalable hosted (SaaS) environment. The integrated environment allows an extremely rapid development, implementation, and content management.
    • Powerful Interface – The building environment is a professional, pixel perfect builder for fully customized sites with the ease of use of a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG tool.
    • Reduced back-end coding – Design elements such as form creation automatically create a database, thereby eliminating the need for complicated coding to accomplish simple tasks.
    • Collaboration – All of the stakeholders (designers, marketers, website owners, and the IT teams) can all access the site 24x7 in a collaborative way, speeding time to implementation.
    • User roles and workflows – The site owner can easily set user roles to work with the corporate workflow, giving users the permissions to update the site content or design based on their skills. So a marketer cannot make accidental design changes to a live site while trying to update content.
    • Site analytics and SEO – Sitemasher’s SEO friendly platform and SEO toolset makes it easy to layer in meta tags and other elements of SEO without repetitive coding for each page. It also enables site owners to easily see what programs are working and to easily make any necessary adjustments.
    • Managed hosting – Sitemasher hosts the tool as well as the website through its partner Peer1. This provides all tools with the latest infrastructure, security, and hosting requirements, including software maintenance, updates, and upgrades.

    The Sitemasher tool is the result of years of research, development and implementation from a team that has a unique understanding of online communications. The Sitemasher executive team all played key roles in such companies as Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Citrix, Rockwell International and a host of other high-profile and innovative technology leaders. Sitemasher first became available in April 2008 when it was opened as a beta version.

    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.

  • Join Sitemasher at Web 2.0 Expo in New York

    Posted by Sitemasher on 
    Thursday, August 07, 2008 3:46 PM
    Sitemasher is excited to be attending and exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. This event is happening September 16-19th, 2008 at the Javits Center.

    Web 2.0 Expo was launched to connect the builders of the web with the brightest minds, hottest ideas, and most valuable tools - and with each other. New York has long been where the world's biggest industries go online, and as Web 2.0 grows up and gets serious, the time is right to convene the East Coast web communities under the umbrella of the next generation web. It's time to come together to learn, share and network. And it's time to celebrate the size, power, and innovation of the East Coast web industry.

    Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next generation web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists, people who have experiences to share and a passion for learning - the hot new thing, lessons from failures, innovations and inspirations, and the practical applications of all of the above.


    Read more on Web 2.0 Expo in New York here...
  • 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.