Webvanta Launches Powerful Hosted CMS for Designers

Sebastopol, CA (PRWEB) September 8, 2009

Webvanta’s new hosted content management system is giving designers new options for deploying sophisticated web sites at low cost.

Until now, like most professional web designers, Jeff Boyd had three choices when it came to building CMS-based sites with custom databases: invest months learning back-end programming, pay a server-side programmer, or turn away clients who want a content rich site.

“I hate to turn down any project,” says Boyd, owner of a small local design studio. “But many clients don’t have the time or budget to develop custom database software. And to be honest, I often wish I didn’t have to mess with PHP or MySQL. I’m a visual design guy; I prefer to stick with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.”

Boyd is exactly the type of designer Webvanta was created for.

Webvanta is a radically different type of content management system: a CMS that packs the power of a customizable back-end system into an easy-to-use hosted service that is perfectly tuned for a web designer.

“The web has moved beyond static sites, but many business sites are still built this way. Savvy designers know that to stay relevant they have to find a way to give clients easy-to-update, content-rich, interactive sites,” explained Webvanta CEO Michael Slater. “Webvanta gives designers the ability to take on more complex projects. They can build better sites faster and for much less money.”

With Webvanta, designers can easily organize the site’s information, whether it is business listings, photo galleries, resource lists, project profiles, or just about anything else, using a database that they customize just by filling out forms.

“Webvanta is a great Drupal alternative. It’s just as powerful but much easier to learn and use,” said Charlie Magee, a web designer using Webvanta to create a content-rich site for one of his clients. “I was up to speed building a fully functioning site in about 3 hours. That’s a fraction of what it takes to even get started with Drupal.”

Although there are countless CMS products, most require a technical user to set them up, and few provide the complete design flexibility and database power designers need for larger business websites. The few systems that are available as hosted solutions lack the flexible database capabilities that Webvanta offers.

“Webvanta is more powerful than WordPress. WordPress offers a hosted service, but if you want much more than a blog, you’ve got to download the app and host it yourself. And then, to really customize it, you need to write PHP,” added Magee. “Webvanta has every database feature I need without having to worry about the headaches and costs of software development and maintenance.”

Webvanta is free for designers as they develop a client website. Once the site launches, the designer or their client pays a low, flat monthly rate for site hosting, monitoring, and support.

“The SaaS model has proven very successful for personal websites,” added Slater. “We expect SaaS to rapidly be adopted for business websites, which have been stuck in the outdated model of individually programmed and hosted sites. Webvanta is poised to lead this transition.”

About Webvanta Inc.

Webvanta Inc. was founded in 2007 by two Adobe veterans, CEO Michael Slater and CTO Christopher Haupt, to deliver superior SaaS solutions for building content-rich web sites. The Webvanta hosted CMS for designers, the company’s first product, has been in beta testing since December 2008. Webvanta has offices in Sebastopol, CA and Auburn, CA.

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Webvanta Launches Powerful Hosted CMS for Designers

IndexTank Launches New Hosted Search API; Secures $1.6M in Seed Round of Funding

San Francisco, Calif. (PRWEB) February 15, 2011

IndexTank today announced the launch of its real-time, easy to customize, hosted search API for developers. Created to wrangle the massive data available on todays web, IndexTank enables developers to easily import datasets from APIs and databases and quickly leverage them to build or test application ideas. For example, using IndexTank, a developer could create a Yelp experience in just a few hours by indexing a local business dataset freely accessible on the Internet; prior to IndexTank, similar projects would require extensive search expertise and days of search stack engineering work.

The IndexTank search API is free to try and pay-as-you-go. Unlike self-hosted search tools such as Sphinx, Solr or Xapian, IndexTank scales elastically and frees up developers from the heavy lifting of administering and scaling a service. As a result, they can focus more development hours on building the logic of their applications instead.

Before IndexTank, we seemed to continuously outgrow whatever we had in place at the time, said Jeremy Edberg, operations manager at reddit, an early IndexTank adopter. As engineers, we thought about building our own search implementation but the fact that IndexTank worked so well, the decision was easy to make. To have a huge to-do like search off our list is a massive relief.

IndexTank technology is new and different from search tools of the last decade that were designed for simple document retrieval. Able to reflect the dynamic social data on todays web such as tweets, comments and likes, IndexTank features include: real-time feed indexing, instantaneous availability of search data, geo search, automatic faceting, range search for e-commerce and instant insights about the applications indexed data.

Todays web is live with high velocity social content and users expect their contributions to be reflected immediately for a more engaging and fun experience, said Diego Basch, chief executive officer, IndexTank. IndexTank was designed to index and search this new, real-time, social world of content creation filled with votes, tweets and posts. IndexTank gives developers a powerful tool for building exciting new applications based on the creative ideas they envision from any of source of data they discover on the web.

The company also announced today that it has secured $ 1.6 million in seed financing led by Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal and Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Freestyle Capital, K9 Ventures, Patagonia Ventures, Wenceslao Casares, Paul Gauthier, Mike Hennessey, Dave Hersh, Othman Laraki, Ben Smith and Tim Stevens also participated in the round.

We are thrilled to have received this level of support from our investment partners and proud that with their strong track records, they see true potential in our hosted search technology, added Basch. We look forward to working closely with Baseline and Harrison Metal as we focus on expanding our development efforts and and empowering developers to create the next wave of great web applications.

Currently powering some of the worlds largest search implementations such as reddit and WordPress, IndexTank will use this funding to continue building out its development team and expanding the core functionality of its search platform technology. Mr. Dearing will join Diego Basch, chief executive officer of IndexTank and Manolo Espinosa, co-founder of IndexTank on the companys Board of Directors.

About IndexTank

IndexTank is a real-time, easy to customize, hosted search API for developers. Created to wrangle the massive data available on todays web, IndexTank enables developers to easily import datasets from APIs and databases and quickly leverage them to build or test application ideas. Free to try and pay-as-you-go, IndexTank is unlike self-hosted search tools and scales elastically and frees up developers from the heavy lifting administering and scaling a service. IndexTank technology is new and is different from search tools of the last decade that were designed to be simple document retrieval systems. IndexTank features include: real-time feed indexing, instantaneous availability of search data, geo search, automatic faceting, range search for e-commerce and instant insights about the applications indexed data.

Located in San Francisco, Calif., IndexTank is backed by notable investors including Harrison Metal and Baseline Ventures. For more information visit http://www.indextank.com

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IndexTank Launches New Hosted Search API; Secures $1.6M in Seed Round of Funding

Webvanta"s Private-Label Hosted CMS Boosts Designer Profits

Sebastopol, CA (PRWEB) December 10, 2010

Webvanta, provider of a hosted CMS and site-building services for designers, now offers a complete private-labeled version of its system as part of its design partner program.

By becoming Design Partners, professional web designers can customize all the branding of this powerful, easy-to-use hosted CMS, reinforcing their brand whenever their customers log in to edit their sites. It remains a fully managed SaaS content management system, eliminating all concerns about hosting, security, and upgrades.

Design Partners also get personalized training, priority support, discounts, and a listing in Webvanta’s web designer directory.

Webvanta already has more than 30 Design Partners, and their experience demonstrates how it helps them increase their productivity, profits, and customer satisfaction.

Design Partner Outer Banks Internet Boosts Profitability

From its founding in 1995 until recently, Webvanta design partner Outer Banks Internet performed all development in-house with staff programmers. Now, since the company has become a Webvanta Design Partner, most of its development work is handled by the Webvanta team — or made unnecessary by the features built in to the Webvanta platform.

With the opportunity to create database-driven sites more easily, OBI completes projects faster now. “Webvanta allows us to offer additional capabilities to advance our clients’ sites,” Hess said. “It was very important to us to have a solution where the software is continuously updated, patched and advanced without our having to get involved.”

By comparison, Hess notes that other content management solutions like WordPress and Joomla would require regular patching, plug-ins and upgrades, all of which would add additional cost to the client.

Additionally, OBI now affordably offers greater site control to all clients with Webvanta’s CMS. Clients can edit their own content without waiting or having to engage OBI, helping keep content fresher.

“By completing sites faster, we can take on more projects, which increases our monthly revenue.”

Inspira Digital Reduces Development Time by One-Third

Webvanta design partner Inspira Digital is a full-service web design firm in the U.K. “If it’s easy for customers to update their content,” said Luke Green, director, then they are inclined to keep it more current, and get more value from their sites.”

Inspira’s search for a web content management solution focused on a number of key areas. It had to be easy for customers to use, and have the technical breadth to empower the firm to deliver more effectively and efficiently for its clients.

Webvanta emerged as a perfect fit and has become the first choice web platform for many Inspira Digital clients. The software-as-a-service content management system (CMS) enables web designers to build dynamic, database-driven websites easily and quickly.

“Because we can bring many of our database-driven sites into our core team, we now have more control over the direction of projects and consequently the quality control. We can be absolutely sure we’re delivering the best product to the client.”

“We’ve cut about a third off our development time. We’re more efficient and responsive, and more profitable when delivering websites using Webvanta,” Green adds.

About Webvanta:

Webvanta provides a hosted content management system that enables designers to create more effective sites with less effort. Founded in 2007 by two Adobe veterans, Webvanta offers site-building services as well as a hosted CMS. The company’s new Design Partner Program enables designers to private-label the system and gives them access to customized training and priority support.

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Webvanta"s Private-Label Hosted CMS Boosts Designer Profits

Hosted CMS Enables Web Designers to Build Dynamic, Database-Driven Web Sites Without Programming

Sebastopol, CA (PRWEB) April 12, 2010

Webvanta, the powerful Software as a Service CMS that enables web designers to easily and quickly build hosted dynamic websites, today announced the release of version 2.0 of the Webvanta platform, which gives designers even more control and flexibilty to design and manage sophisticated, database-driven websites without needing a programmer. Webvanta 2.0 provides more power and flexibility than other hosted CMS solutions, which typically do not support custom databases or structured content. It is an easier-to-use alternative to systems such as Drupal, Joomla!, and Expression Engine, which typically require much more time to complete a site, and it is more powerful and easier to customize than WordPress.

“Since releasing version 1.0 of Webvanta last September, we’ve been listening attentively to the designers who have been using it. As a result of this feedback, we’ve rewritten the administrative interface to make it even more efficient for designers and site owners,” said Michael Slater, Webvanta CEO and co-founder. “Webvanta allows designers who don’t want to deal with PHP and SQL to create database-driven sites without needing help from programmers. Designers using Webvanta tell us that it enables them to provide a CMS for even their most cost-sensitive clients, and that these sites deliver oustanding SEO.”

The Webvanta Solution

Webvanta is a SaaS (software-as-a-service)-based solution designed to empower designers to deliver better business results for themselves and their clients. Designers can use whatever tools they want to create their page designs, and then integrate their HTML, CSS, and JS code into the Webvanta system to construct the site. There’s no limitations on the design of their pages, and no complicated theming system to deal with – setting up any arbitrary design is easy. Easy-to-use CMS features include a full blog system, photo galleries, calendars, RSS feeds, and a membership system, as well as fully customizable database-driven content.

Webvanta makes it easy for clients to make updates on their own, enabling site owners to keep their sites fresh while keeping their costs down and preserving the integrity of their sites’ design.

Webvanta’s hosted CMS eliminates all the hassles of software updates, security risks, backups and systems administration, so designers can focus on design while being assured of reliability.

Designer Louis Plante commented, “I had no trouble learning Webvanta, since it leveraged everything I already knew. I dropped in my front-end code and was building customized, content-rich sites in far less time than with any other CMS I had used. I’ve saved clients up to 70% in total costs.”

Availability

Webvanta 2.0 is available now. Pricing starts at as little as $ 15 monthly for use of the CMS and database system, site hosting, monitoring, and support.

About Webvanta

Founded in 2007 by CEO Michael Slater and CTO Christopher Haupt, two former Adobe executives, Webvanta is at the forefront of the SaaS/web design revolution for business websites. Webvanta’s mission is to provide a radically different type of CMS that marries a powerful back-end system with an easy-to-use hosted service, optimized for the needs of the design community. Every day Webvanta designers are expanding their business, sharing information, and building the next phase of the Web. See how web CMS design is joining the SaaS revolution at: http://www.webvanta.com .

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