Webvanta Web Design and Information Architecture Resources

New Horizon School

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:24:30 GMT

The New Horizon School site uses the CMS to create a variety of static pages and the database to provide resources for its community.

Auburn software engineer markets new service for Web designers

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:18:16 GMT

All About Shopping Carts. Part 3. Payment Gateways

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:41:30 GMT

jQuery for Designers - Tutorials and screencasts

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:54:48 GMT

Non-Profit Health Center Builds Itself a Substantial Site

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:35:01 GMT

A few months ago, we volunteered to help build a new web site for West County Health Centers, a non-profit organization that is a major provider of medical care in west Sonoma County. As with so many small businesses and non-profits, their existing site was small and, to be blunt, just plain awful, and no one knew how to update it.

We got them started by building them a template with their header image, set up the navigation and an initial set of empty pages, and created a database to manage the information about the various clinics.

The staff and interns at West County Health Centers gradually built a large and impressive site. Because the Webvanta system made it easy for non-technical folks to edit the content, the staff was able to do most of the work, with occasional support from Webvanta.

It's great to see how a small team of dedicated (but non-technical) people can built a rich site using Webvanta.

We provide a special $19/month hosting price for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations. We also discount our custom development fees for non-profits, and a few times a year we take on a pro-bono job like West County Health Centers. If you help manage a non-profit that needs web help, send us a message and we'll see if we can help.

Webvanta is Sponsoring Boagworld

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:22:29 GMT

We're pleased to have become one of the sponsors of the Boagworld podcast, which I've listened to for years and have found to be the best general web design podcast out there. Paul Boag and his cohort Marcus Lillington, based out of Dorset, UK, strike a good balance between entertainment value and useful content. It's an enjoyable way to keep on top of what's happening in the world of web design.

Look for it on iTunes, or visit their site.

jQuery for Designers - Tutorials and screencasts

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:40:42 GMT

New Customer: Alkemie Ice Cream Launches On Webvanta

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:12:05 GMT

We're always excited to help another startup company get going, and the launch of Alkemie Ice Cream, LLC is a novel example.

Alkemie makes a family of non-dairy ice cream products that we're looking forward to trying out. The site they built tracks the story of Alkemie, how they are progressing with the product and company launch, information about the ice cream itself, and through an integration with Google Maps, a basic store locator.

Alkemie will be selling their ice cream in Northern California initially through Whole Foods Market. Check out Alkemie's locator page for specific store information.

Welcome and good luck to Alkemie Ice Cream.

New Feature: Pagination

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:50:10 GMT

When you have lots of items to list, sometimes there's more than you want to show on one page. The universal solution to this is pagination: break the list up into some number of pages, with a maximum number of items per page. Of course, you then need some sort of control to navigate between the pages.

We've just added an easy-to-use pagination control to Webvanta, which you can use with any database information. For details on setting it up, see Displaying Paginated Database Results.

You can use this today anywhere you want. We'll soon be updating our "starter site" code so new sites will have blog archive and knowledgebase list pages that are paginated.

8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:46:08 GMT

The Evolution of our Blog Features

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:31:05 GMT

This morning we deployed some deceptively small changes to Webvanta that lay the groundwork for some significant enhancements to our blog system.

In the past, Webvanta treated blog posts as articles that were in a special category. Blog posts are, after all, just articles that are presented in a blog fashion.

The use of "blog" as a special category, however, came with some limitations; you couldn't categorize blog posts in the same way that you could other articles. With this week's deployment, we've changed the way blog posts are represented internally. Rather than being articles that are in a special category, blog posts are a new creature, just like an article, but different in how they are typically presented (in reverse chronological order, instead of topically).

Since blog posts now have all the same capabilities as articles, you can now assign them to categories, just like any other article.

We've automatically converted all existing blogs to the new structure, so the change should be invisible, except for the new ability to assign categories to blog posts.

In the coming weeks, we'll extend our blog cookbook examples and initial implementation to deal with sorting blog posts by categories.

Create a Cool Site and Get a Free MacBook Pro or iPod Touch

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:31:47 GMT

If you're like most of our customers, you're chronically overwhelmed with new tools and services to try. Once you find a groove and become comfortable with a tool set, it's natural to settle in.

That's one reason we created the Webvanta Design Contest: to give you an extra incentive to learn to build a site with Webvanta. During the next few months, build a cool site and you could win a MacBook Pro or one of three iPod Touches.

Start your site for free today, and complete it by the end of January.

We're looking for sites that are beautiful, easy to use, and make innovative use of Webvanta's back-end capabilities. See all the contest details at www.webvanta.com/contest.

Whatever you build, you retain all rights, so you can enter a site you've built for yourself or for a client; you don't need to create something specifically for the contest.

We can't wait to see what you create!

27 Creative Website Designs of Art and Design Schools

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:02:42 GMT

CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:49:20 GMT

Website Design Contest Offers Great Prizes

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 02:30:49 GMT

Sebastopol, CA (PRWEB) October 12, 2009 -- Web designers can win a free MacBook Pro or an iPod Touch just by designing a great web site using the new Webvanta hosted content management system (CMS).

Designers don't need to install any software to use Webvanta, and they can continue to use whatever HTML and CSS design tools they want. Unlike most other content management systems, designers have unlimited design flexibility with Webvanta.

Webvanta is the first CMS that makes it easy to create sites with structured content. Designers have reported that Webvanta enables them to create more powerful sites more quickly, making them more competitive and increasing their profits.

Designers can read the contest rules and sign up for a free account at www.webvanta.com/contest. The deadline for completed submissions is January 31, 2010.

Sites submitted to the contest remain the property of the designer; they can be sites of their own, or sites for one of their clients. Webvanta will provide free hosting for all submitted sites through the end of the contest, and the winners will receive free hosting until the end of 2010.

The submissions will be judged on the following criteria, weighted equally:

Visual beauty
Navigation and information architecture
Effective use of the Webvanta database

The contest will be judged by a panel of top web designers, including Micah Bowers, Creative Director, Bluefire Productions; Bill Mead, Web Design Instructor, Art Institute, Sacramento; Andrew Crow, senior experience designer at Adaptive Path; Veerle Pieters, Founder and graphic/web designer at Duoh!; Elliot Jay Stocks, Freelance designer and author of Sexy Web Design; and Ryan Taylor, Head of Web Development, Infinite Path and producer of the Boagworld podcast.

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 is the company's first product. Webvanta has offices in Sebastopol, CA and Auburn, CA.

Eric

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:02:09 GMT

This website will be a project ETA tracking tool. It will be applicable to anything that needs to keep track of its estimated time of completion.

Website Navigation Then and Now

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:12:03 GMT

A nice collection of nav bars from major sites, showing how they have changed over the past few years.

A Unique Ecommerce Site: www.simplyslater.com

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:17:46 GMT

Today we launched the first full-featured ecommerce site on Webvanta: SimplySlater. It's a boutique furniture store that initially sells only classic butterfly chairs.

The design of this site was a challenge, because the site owner (who happens to be my sister) had very specific ideas of how she wanted it to look, and the products connected in specific ways (e.g., chairs, covers, and footstools). And there were variables such as fabrics, discounts for two or more of the same items, and free shipping if over a certain amount.

She had previously launched the site using Volusion, and abandoned it after it was completed because she could not get it to look or act the way she wanted.

Because of the flexibility of the Webvanta system, we were able to create a site that met her needs precisely.

The shopping cart used on this site is FoxyCart, and we will soon be providing a complete shopping cart setup as an option on all new Webvanta sites.

30 CSS Best Practices for Beginners

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:34:38 GMT

Showcase of Case Studies in Design Portfolios

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:53:04 GMT

File Uploading and Image Management Revamped

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:14:12 GMT

We've just deployed a big batch of improvements to Webvanta, and we look forward to your feedback.

The majority of the changes relate to uploading of images and other files. The Content > Images and Files page has been completely redesigned, and you can now navigate the folder hierarchy, rename files and folders, and much more.

In the next few weeks, we'll be adding the ability to delete files in bulk and to move files and folders.

In addition, you can now upload images from within the rich text editor, and you can also browse the images that have been previously uploaded.

You can read all about the image uploading changes here:

http://www.webvanta.com/article/9166

There's lots of other smaller refinements as well. For example, if you make changes on any admin page and then attempt to navigate away without saving, a warning dialog will give you a chance to stay on the page and save your changes.

There's a lot of custom JavaScript in this batch of work, and we've been working hard to ensure that it performs consistently across browsers. But as always, we'd really appreciate any feedback if you run into issues.

Fresh Free High-Quality Icon Sets « Smashing Magazine

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:06:21 GMT

How to Design Buttons to Help Improve Usability - Inspect Element

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:05:14 GMT

Webvanta 1.0: What's It Mean?

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:20:32 GMT

Last week, Webvanta reached an important milestone: we took off the Beta label and declared it "1.0". We're very excited to have crossed this milestone.

What does it mean to no longer be in beta?

In essence, it means that Webvanta is ready for prime time. We've worked with about 30 clients during the beta period to create sites for them, and we've interviewed dozens of designers to get their feedback. We've continuously refined the system based on this experience, and we made ourselves a "must have" to-do list before we would declare it 1.0. And we've made it to the end of that list!

In my years at Adobe, the release of a product was a huge, and inflexible, milestone. When we shipped a version of Photoshop Elements, for example, that marked the end of being able to add any features for a year or so. Even fixing bugs from that point forward was painful. And when it came to choosing the new features that would go into a release, a major decision factor was "will this convince people to upgrade?", since driving upgrades was critical to the revenue model.

I love being in the web-based software business now, instead of in the shrink-wrapped software business. We've declared Webvanta "1.0", but that doesn't imply any slowdown in the rate at which we'll be adding new features and making refinements. We have lots of great stuff in mind for Webvanta 2.0, but the change will be gradual, not sharp. We typically deploy new features every two weeks. In fact, you'll see some major enhancements rolling out in a few days.

I'd like to thank everyone, both web designers and site owners, who participated in our beta program, sometimes enduring periods of inadequate documentation and features that came and went. Thanks to you, Webvanta is a much stronger product.

Presentation 9/23 in San Rafael: Programming-Free Dynamic Web Sites

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:11:08 GMT

I'm going to be giving at talk at Softech in San Rafael next week, about the benefits of database-driven sites and how Webvanta makes them much easier to build.

We believe that many web sites that are using static designs today would provide a better user experience, have better SEO, and be easier to maintain if they were database-driven. In the past, the cost and complexity of building sites in this way discouraged most designers from considering it. Now that's changed.

If you can make it to San Rafael, please join me there: Softech meeting signup.

No Coding Required: Hosted CMS for Designers

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:30:47 GMT

Beautiful CSS: Organizing Your Stylesheets

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:29:16 GMT

How I draft an information architecture

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:42:06 GMT

Webvanta has turned 1.0!

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:54:13 GMT

It's been an exciting week, with the official launch of Webvanta on Tuesday. We've had a great response, and we look forward to working with all of our new customers. And I'd especially like to thank all of the early believers who have been working with us during our beta period.

As you have no doubt noticed if you've been to our site before this week, we also launched a complete redesign of our marketing site, which we're delighted with. Thanks to Jeff Boyd of Sport Casual for the design work.

We've added a press page to our site, so you can see some of the coverage we're getting.

We'd greatly appreciate your support if you could blog about us, add us to your Delicious links, or add us to Digg, StubleUpon, or your social network of choice.

We'd also love to have you as a fan of our Facebook group.

P.S. Note that declaring our service "1.0" doesn't imply any slowdown in the pace of advancement; we'll be adding new features every couple of weeks. Look for some big improvements to the asset management system very soon.

Designing With Web Standards

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:23:32 GMT

Webvanta's first product hits market

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:30:17 GMT

New Feature: Comment Pre-Moderation

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:26:12 GMT

Webvanta includes comment spam filtering, via the Akismet service, which does a remarkably good job of keeping spam comments from appearing. We also have another trick in place that stops most of the robots.

But not all undesirable comments are spam: there's also trolls and abusive comments.

By default, Webvanta sites display comments as soon as they are spam-checked. As site admin, you'll get an email each time a comment is posted, and you can then choose to reject a comment.

Some site owners want to be able to prevent such comments from appearing at all, however, so we've added the option for comment pre-moderation. If you enable pre-moderation, then comments are not publicly displayed until you accept them.

To enable pre-moderation, go to Site Admin > User Comments, click the Settings button in the upper right corner, and check the box to enable moderation.

When this setting is chosen, commenters will see a message that their comment is pending moderation, and the notification email you get will include a link to the comment moderation page.

Webvanta launches easy service for building complex sites

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:49:46 GMT

Webvanta Launches Powerful Hosted CMS for Designers

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:53:23 GMT

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 most business sites are stuck in the past. 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.

For more information, contact Michael Slater, CEO, at 888-670-6793 x2, email michael@webvanta.com, or visit www.webvanta.com.

Why You're Safer With a Hosted Service

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 05:00:14 GMT

Robert Scoble recently blogged about how he no longer feels safe with WordPress, after hackers broke into his site, deleted archives for which he had no backups, and added a lot of spam content.

This is a painful situation that I wouldn't wish on anyone. And it is all too common.

WordPress isn't really to blame here. Security exploits come up all the time, so if you're managing your own software, you'd better keep up to date with the security patches. And if you're writing your own back-end code, you're on your own -- writing secure back-end code is an ongoing challenge.

It's also common for backups to not happen as reliably as we'd all like. It's human nature to ignore things when there's no apparent problem.

These are some of the reasons why I believe a hosted content management system is the way to go for most sites. The hosted CMS provider (such as Webvanta) can leverage its software development and operations across hundreds or thousands of web sites. They're likely to have a lot more discipline about things like backups and security patches than any individual site owner.

It's a matter of what business you're in. If you're in the content business, you don't want to be in the software development and server operations business unless you absolutely have to.

New Feature: Icon Images Associated with Articles and DB Items

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:54:44 GMT

Often, it's very helpful to a visual design to have an image associated with each item. Until now, you've had to explicitly link these "icon" images into articles and database items, as part of the HTML code, rather than being able to handle them in the template.

Now, you can associate an image with an article or any other DB item by selecting that image in the "icon picker" in the admin form. Then, in your template, you can access the image and generate the appropriate markup automatically, so author articles don't need to worry about it. You can access an automatically generated thumbnail version of the image for use on index or list pages, and then use a larger version of the image on article pages.

Read all about it in our latest User Guide article, Associating an Image with an Article or Database Item.

Web Design Tools

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:44:39 GMT

Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:16:17 GMT

AnythingSlider

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:04:32 GMT

Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of Typefaces

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:55:56 GMT

Marketing Rules and Principles for Freelancers

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:52:20 GMT

Open Source Web Templates Free Xhtml Css Templates by Web Designers

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:32:38 GMT

5 Advanced Photoshop Techniques for Web Designers

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:16:11 GMT

Build better CSS font stacks

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:29:28 GMT

Better CSS Font Stacks

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:28:55 GMT

Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices | How-To | Smashing Magazine

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:09:44 GMT

Automatically generate table of contents using jQuery

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:08:45 GMT

Wireframes Magazine

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:06:22 GMT

75 Free Useful Icon Sets for Web Designers and Developers | Icons | instantShift

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:39:50 GMT

New Webvanta site with some remarkable historical photography

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:20:59 GMT

We've just launched a new Webvanta site that showcases a remarkable collection of historical photography by the late Alfred T. Palmer. Check it out at www.alfredtpalmer.com.

Many more photos will be added in time; the site owner can simply upload photos and tag them to them appropriate category, and everything else is handled automatically by Webvanta.

The photo gallery is essentially the same as the one automatically installed on every new Webvanta site.

The visual design of the site was done by site owner Julia Gennert, who is Palmer's daughter.