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Maybe you're a photographer. A fine artist. A designer or decorator. If your business demands that you show clients visual portfolios, then you already know how difficult it can be to create and keep current a website that showcases your work. That's because you're an artist - not a web programmer. And building and maintaining a website means hiring designers and programmers who not only cost a considerable amount up front, but charge you every time you want to update your portfolio. Even worse is the time it takes to make each update, no matter how small. ImageSquirrel changes that. Now, you can have a dynamic website built to your visual specifications that you can instantly update yourself without any programming knowledge or outside intervention. Whatever your content - images, text, products - with ImageSquirrel you have total and immediate control over your Web destiny...
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ImageSquirrel delivers cost-effective, database-driven dynamic websites for the visually discriminating.
Right now, the standard website is a static site. With static sites, pages are created by web designers and programmers in either HTML or Flash. Even the smallest change to a single page must be done by working in the programming files. If you have a static site built for your business, the day the site is delivered to you is only the beginning of an endless relationship with your designers and programmers. You will be paying them to add content and make changes for as long as your business is on the Web. Even more frustrating is the fact that you have to wait for them to make and test these changes before they appear online. The Web element of your business is not under your control.
Dynamic websites change all that. With a dynamic site, all your content is contained in a database and delivered to the web pages. You add the content and make changes using simple forms that you access on the administration portion of your site. You need know nothing about programming to do this; filling out these forms is equivalent to entering credit card information on Amazon or listing an item for sale on ebay. This means you have immediate and direct control of your site's content. Imagine logging into your own administration site, filling out a form, hitting submit, and instantly seeing your site updated. And it works for every element of content on your site. If, for example, you are a photographer, you can add images, delete images, organize images in different portfolios and write titles and text describing each portfolio and image, as well as update your news section, client list, biography, contact information, and all other sections without having to pay anyone for help and with no need to know anything about designing or programming web pages. Need to create a special portfolio for a specific potential client? It takes only a few moments. Want to create a special promotion to email to your client database? Just as simple.
Sound too good to be true? Well, up until recently it would have been. Building dynamic websites typically had high costs and was only undertaken by large companies. Not anymore.
We've built ImageSquirrel to provide a low-cost platform for anyone who can benefit from having a dynamic website. By using ImageSquirrel you are taking advantage of a dynamic engine that has been thoughtfully built with your business model in mind. In fact, the initial construction costs of building your site with ImageSquirrel should be about the same as for building a static site built just a few years ago (unless your static site was built by one of those billing-crazy dot-com agencies, in which case you'll probably save a few million dollars).
With ImageSquirrel, you pay only a very reasonable initial design fee and even more reasonable monthly hosting fees. And that's it. Forever. If you want to update your site 40 times each day, go right ahead. It won't cost you a dime.
You might be thinking, "aren't most dynamic sites ugly?" Sadly, this is often true. Dynamic sites tend to be ugly because most of them are built AND designed by computer programmers who know nothing about graphic design. In general, if you've wanted to have an attractive dynamic site you would have had to hire a programming company to make it work right and a design company to make it look good. Imagine those costs. But guess what? We're both an award-winning interactive design company and an innovative programming firm. We have the symbiosis of aesthetic and logic that most companies do not. Look at our portfolio and judge for yourself.
If you're ready to see what the Web can do for you in the 21st Century, get in touch and we'll be happy to help you take control of your Web destiny.
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Dynamic. Self-reliant.
An ordinary, or "static," website is made up of a set of HTML files. HTML is the most common programming language for coding websites, and all websites utilize at least some HTML; most are composed entirely in HTML. HTML is a fairly simple language, but you still must be fluent in it in order to create or even to make minor changes to a Web page. This is great for the designers and programmers who create Web pages, yet it makes life difficult for business owners who operate one or more sites as part of their business. No matter how small or simple of a change you want to make to your business website, the odds are you can't do it yourself. You have to pay someone else to do it for you. Think of it this way: for most businesses, owning a website is like having a bunch of Microsoft Word documents without having a copy of Microsoft Word. You can't do a thing with them other than read a printout...
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That's why we created ImageSquirrel. ImageSquirrel is an inexpensive equivalent to the database-driven web platforms used by large online business (Amazon, the New York Times, and so on) to efficiently and cost-effectively manage their web content. With ImageSquirrel, your web pages are composed of HTML templates -- which dictate the design -- but all content is drawn from a database that you manage yourself using simple online forms similar to the forms you fill out when you buy something from Amazon. Once your existing site is reconstructed to work with ImageSquirrel or your new site is built with ImageSquirrel, you're done with outside vendors. From that moment on all your content is added, revised, updated and deleted by you - without you having to learn anything new, and especially without you having to write a single line of code.
ImageSquirrel provides a way for you to give form and function to your content, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
ImageSquirrel is designed with visual portfolios in mind. It provides your website with sections including portfolios, profile, news, contact information and guestbook, all of which you dynamically update through the administration site we provide. All of the data is stored in your ImageSquirrel database and can be published on the web in a variety of styles and forms.
One of the strengths of ImageSquirrel is how it handles visual content. We have developed an easy way for our clients to manage a library of images so they easily publish on the web. The tools at your disposal are simple to use yet very powerful. You will have a secure administration website that you use to control your website. This administration site is where you will add, revise, organize and delete all content that appears on your website. As you make changes on your administration site the changes can immediately be seen on your website.
Through your administration site you will upload images to our server using only a web browser with an Internet connection. When uploading, you are given the option to specify copyright information that will be imprinted on the lower left corner of each image. Once uploaded, the site will display a comprehensive list of images in your library, which can be sorted and filtered according to your criteria. Once your images are in the library you can enter a title and description for each image and change that information at any time. From this library, you can quickly compose a variety of visual portfolios by selecting images to add to each portfolio. Additionally, you have the option to password-protect any portfolio, which makes it viewable only by those clients to whom you have given the password. You can easily and quickly create a customized portfolio or proofing page for a specific client. Whenever you have a new image to add to your library, you can quickly and easily update the site yourself within a matter of minutes at no additional cost.
Your administration site is private and secure and can only be accessed by providing the correct password. It is always completely invisible to the public. To access your administration site the only software you need is a standard web browser, which means that your site can be managed remotely from anywhere as long as you have a Web browser and a connection to the Internet. You can be in Japan, France, Argentina, or Russia; you will still be able to upload new images and create new portfolios. If you have offices in multiple locations your staff in can all contribute to updating your website. If you travel a great deal, you can update the site from wherever you may be. Your site does not have to be controlled from a central location and you do not need specialized software. Your data is centralized, but your access isn't.
With ImageSquirrel, it's now possible to re-think how the Web can work for you. Sites no longer need to be unchanging pages of information that grow stale over time. Now, your site can be a powerful software application through which you communicate and interact with the world. ImageSquirrel provides a strong backbone for you to maintain your brand identity on the Web, simply and cost effectively.
Art and Science
ImageSquirrel is a proprietary application that we've created from the ground up. We therefore have total control over the code and its continuing development. The most common functionalities that you'll need for your website have been incorporated into our various modules, which are included in all ImageSquirrel sites. This allows for rapid development of most ImageSquirrel based sites. Since all ImageSquirrel clients share the same base code, we are able to deliver a sophisticated, database-driven website solution in a cost-effective manner. As ImageSquirrel develops, all of our clients will immediately benefit from improvements made to the core application. ImageSquirrel is not a one-shot purchase that you'll need to continually buy upgrades for; instead, you become a licensed user of a software application and are entitled to on-going improvements, supports, and upgrades for the modules you have acquired. Unlike most websites that go out of date in six months or a year, ImageSquirrel sites will continually evolve.
ImageSquirrel was designed to allow each website it powers to have its own visual identity. This means that even though all clients of ImageSquirrel share the same basic application for content management, the visual front end of each site is entirely unique to each client. Aesthetically and stylistically we wanted to make sure that you wouldn't be bound by any limitations. Our group is not simply a design firm or a software developer. We are engineers with a deep appreciation for great design. We believe in aesthetic engineering: integral harmony between art and science.
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