Webvanta Web Design and Information Architecture Resources

West County Health Centers

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:06:27 GMT

One the basic setup was done by a designer, staff and volunteers were able to build a large site.

Skyridge PTC

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:05:02 GMT

Supports a local parent-teacher organization.

Post Carbon Institute

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:01:26 GMT

Large content site, converted from Drupal; design by Groove11.

Reach Center Eugene

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:58:20 GMT

Built by designer Charlie Magee for a community education center.

Equine Guided Ed. Assoc.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:56:15 GMT

Conference registration and product sales, with shopping cart. Built by designer Janet Zagoria.

Backstop Media

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:54:37 GMT

Marketing and portfolio site for content-creation firm.

Alkemie Ice Cream

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:51:05 GMT

Marketing site for a new kind of ice cream. Converted from WordPress.

Accreditation Helper

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:49:11 GMT

Marketing site for a hosted application for medical equipment companies.

North Bay Internet Society

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:27:46 GMT

Uses the database to organize a variety of resources for this professional organization.

Freestone Fermentation Festival

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:26:47 GMT

The Freestone Fermentation Festival site was created in just a few hours to support this fundraising event.

Occidental Community Choir

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:25:37 GMT

Combines a variety of static CMS pages with database-driven pages for sample music and the choir roster.

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 Martial Arts Center

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:22:49 GMT

The Auburn Martial Arts site provides a variety of photos and videos, as well as an inquiry form.

Alfred T. Palmer

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:20:30 GMT

Showcases the remarkable photos taken by one man, from around the world, starting in the 1930s.

CoolBizApps.com

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:19:29 GMT

The CoolBizApps is a review site that lists dozens of SaaS services for small businesses.

BuildingWebApps.com

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:18:02 GMT

An information portal for web application developers, the very first Webvanta site.

Spartina.com

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:17:09 GMT

A resource site for Internet enterpreneurs. Design by Raspberry Media.

Commercial Space Gateway

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:15:49 GMT

An information portal for the commercial space industry. Converted from Drupal.

A.R. Sanchez-Corea & Associates

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:07:34 GMT

Uses database for profiles of projects the firm has completed. Staff can add projects independently.

Highlands Resort

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:39:22 GMT

The Highlands Resort is a small hotel. The site uses the database to store room types and prices, specials, and activities.

Allyson Seal

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:37:55 GMT

Artist's site, includes hundreds of images in slideshows following the structure of the artist's work.

Simply Slater

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:35:01 GMT

E-commerce site that sells select indoor/outdoor furniture. Product database with customized presentation.

Osmosis

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:24:06 GMT

Dozens of static pages built by marketing staff. Uses the database for restaurant and lodging pages.

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