InstaSite & InstaSitePro Features

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You can now build a professional looking website even if you don't understand HTML or programming! It really is much easier than it sounds.

If you can use Microsoft Word, you can use InstaSite. You don't have to download or install any software. You don't have to read any complex instruction manuals. You can access InstaSite using only your web browser. InstaSite web sites are SEO-friendly InstaSite web sites can work on top of or in conjunction with other pages (forums, blogs, CMS's, bulletin boards, etc.) InstaSite's customization options are among the most powerful for online site builders.

Don't take our word for it. Take InstaSite for a Test Drive With a Fully Functional Demo:

If the demo does not launch in a new window your pop-up blocker is likely to be the cause and should be disabled. Note that some firewalls also have pop-up blockers built in.

NEW: The sitebuilder software now contains more robust undo/redo feature for text editing, support for Google Gadgets and friendly URLs that make analytics much easier. You can now add Google gadgets to a web-site.  Access the library of over 20,000 ready-made gadgets available for syndication.  We include a Google Map gadget to display your business or event.

Salient Features of InstaSite Web Site Builder.

What You See is What You Get

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) is a term that describes the concept of visualizing the end result while you are working. In the case of a site builder that simply means that you should see your page and be able to change things directly on the page. InstaSite lets you edit text anywhere on the page and use the familiar word processing style tool bar for formatting text, inserting pictures that flow with the text and creating tables for items that need to line up.

What is truly different about InstaSite is the way it handles page layouts. Traditionally, web page layouts were done by creating complex tables which may have included tables within tables and spanning of rows and columns to get things positioned exactly where they are needed. This is a very cumbersome way to control layout and one that is best left to the experts. InstaSite has a simple approach - just drag around page elements and InstaSite will take care of building these complex table structures without user intervention.

InstaSite gives you two views of your page:

The Edit Text tab lets you edit the content of the elements. In this tab all of the elements are actually part of an "invisible table structure" so the page will flow as you add text.
The Edit Layout tab lets you move elements around on the page. You can drag and drop them, size them and set properties such as decorations, background colors and borders.

Fully Automatic Navigation with Multiple Menu Levels

InstaSite menus are fully automatic. Unlike other site builders, InstaSite can employ graphic features into menus such as the ones you see in this site. An intuitive "Explorer" view of pages shows the navigation structure. This structure is automatically reflected in the menus and is instantly updated.

You control navigation by

* Renaming the page using the edit box at the top - the name change appears immediately in the menu
* Dragging pages to change the order in the menu
* Pages within folders are the second level of navigation and have a second level menu
* Moving pages in and out of folders automatically scales them to account for the second level menu

With InstaSitePro you can control the stylization of menus including:

* "Stretchable" images for buttons
* Colors
* Fonts
* Different style for when the menu is the current page or hovered over.

InstaSitePro also allows for an infinite level of nesting of menus.

60 Decorative Fonts Create Exitement!

Web browsers come with a very limited set of fonts and the ability to download fonts is not universally supported. Most web designers simply create graphics with an offline program such as Adobe Photoshop™ or Macromedia Fireworks™. This requires having such programs available and knowing how to use them. Then end result is also graphic headlines that search engines cannot "see".

InstaSite uses Macromedia Flash™ based technology called sIFR to support a wide variety of fonts for use in headlines. Headlines are visible to the search engine and a stand-in font is provided for those rare instances where a viewer has Flash disabled. You can create and edit headlines directly within InstaSite. A unique drop-shadow effect makes the headlines come alive.

We include 60 fonts from the Font Encyclopedia collection by Soft Horizons:

Powerful Image Handling Capabilities

Images can be included in three ways with InstaSite:

* In Text - Inserted into text where they will flow along with the text.
* In Boxes - Created as stand-alone elements that can be positioned anywhere in the layout.
* As Albums - Uploaded in bulk or individually and stored independently from the web pages. They are automatically included in "Photo Album" web pages, creating as many pages as needed to display all images. Menus are also created to help the viewer navigate across photo albums and within albums. Captions can be created and a slide show is also available.

Today's digital cameras produce huge images that are very time consuming to upload and consume valuable disk space. If left unprocessed they can cause customer sites to load slowly. InstaSite has a multi-faceted strategy to deal with this without requiring any effort or knowledge on the part of the user:

1. First, we provide a simple desktop utility to upload batches of images directly from a digital camera directory. The images are scaled to a reasonable size before uploading so they upload very quickly and conserve disk space on the server.
2. We store images at a moderate resolution so that detail will be preserved no matter what size they end up being used on the web page.
3. We resample images after they are dragged to the correct size. This provides for very crisp images that are more detailed than simply applying size attributes to an image.

Consider these two images.... The fuzzy image to the left was dragged to a smaller size but without resampling. IE and Firefox don't resample and simply scale the image to fit. The clear one on the right was created using InstaSite which uses high-quality image resampling. Notice the smoothness and crispness of the image even at this small size.

Optimize Web Sites for Search.

There is no shortage of theories on optimizing a site for search. The four most important factors are:

1. Making sure that your site is search engine friendly. Since InstaSite generates all of the HTML, doing this is easy. We even provide space for meta-tags such as descriptions and keywords

# Write content that is relevant to the subject at hand. This means choosing keywords that you expect people to search on and using them frequently in the text of the web site. InstaSite provides a handy keyword density analyzer to show how often words are used on any page.

# Submit sites to the important search engines in a format that they prefer. InstaSite will automatically create Google Sitemaps which are becoming the standard for defining the pages in a site and making it easier for search engines to crawl a site and know when it is likely to be updated.

Make sure that other important sites link to your site. Having an attractive well constructed site is more likely to be considered by important sites for outbound links.

A Simple and Easy to Use Shopping Cart

For customers wanting to sell items online InstaSite fully integrates with Paypal, the leader in internet payments. Paypal lets customers sign up quickly and accepts all leading credit cards.

InstaSite integrates shopping with the regular content of the site. This is more intuitive for most users than a "catalog" approach and grants more flexibility in laying out the descriptions of products . Paypal is ideally suited for InstaSite as it does not require a separate product database. All of the product information is contained in the "Add to Cart" button which is automatically created by InstaSite.

# Start with a pre-fab shopping page in choice of layouts to help get started with the formatting of products.
# Enter text and pictures for each item with our regular rich text editing capability. There are no limitations on formatting or size.
# Double click on the Add to Cart button and use the form wizard displayed here to enter the details of the product.
# All of the account setup information is kept in one place so that it can be changed at any time without updating the Add to cart links.
# When the site is published it will link with the PayPal shopping cart and visitors may purchase the items. PayPal sends an email to confirm the purchase.

Introducing the "Widget" Architecture

Today's web sites have active content that uses technologies such as Javascript and PHP. Embedding active content on a web page is part of our new "widget" architecture. It allows scripts to be placed anywhere on the page by using the familiar "box" model.

Widgets allow a script to be packaged in a way that can easily be incorporated into a web site by novice users. The script is "wrapped" such that it has an interactive properties dialog where the user can configure the widget with a user interface of the author's choosing. When added to the web-page a template is used to configure the script based on the properties set by the user. Most new functionality in InstaSite will be packaged in this way. We will eventually open this up to third parties to allow for the packaging of scripts that can be fully integrated into InstaSite.

To date we have implemented the following widgets for use with InstaSite:

* A Photo Navigation and Slide Show - This navigates the viewer through the photo album and pops up a slide show. By pre-loading pictures the slide show works well even at lower bandwidths.
* Google AdSense - This widget allows code from the Google AdSense program to be used for the creation of advertising. The widget accepts pasted code and interprets the parameters to automatically size the AdSense box on the page.
* sIFR Fonts - This feature is implemented entirely as a widget. It is a great example of the power of the properties dialog where fonts and font properties can be set.

We have also implemented fundamental building blocks for users who have programming skills and wish to create their own active content. These widgets are only available in InstaSitePro:

* iFrame - Allows content from other sites to be embedded directly onto a web page.
* Javascript - Allows Javascript and/or HTML to be entered and tested. It is very useful for embedding pre-configured scripts such as the Google Map API or banner advertising scripts. The widget reports Javascript errors so the code can be tested before placing it on a web page.
* PHP - We have chosen PHP as the language for active server content because it is the most widely supported in the web hosting industry and contains the security features that most hosting companies demand. Scripts can be debugged using the widget interface before inserting on a page.

InstaSitePro has CMS Features for Advanced Site Design

Page Masters: Site templates have common headers, footers and navigational elements. With InstaSitePro, these can be updated and the changes reflected throughout the site. Multiple levels of page masters are used so that elements that are truly common throughout the site (such as the footer copyright notice) get changed in one and only one place.

Color Palettes: Palettes provide global control over all colors used in the site. Changing colors in the palette will change the colors throughout the site.

* Color shifting technology can even change the color of images.
* Color selection is based on the same user interface as is used in Adobe Photoshop.
* Preview the color changes before committing to them.

Style sheets: Style sheets provide global control over style attributes. This gives web-sites a consistent look and feel and provides a central place to change style elements such as

* Font faces, sizes, colors and decoration
* Control of margins, padding and line height
* Decorative backgrounds such as rounded corners
* Images for bullet lists

Multiple stylesheets can be maintained and can be associated with individual elements on a web-page.

Composite Graphics: Today's web sites use simple graphical concepts such as rounded corners and decorative borders on text blocks. InstaSite uses multi-part, 'composite' images for complex shapes so that they can be stretched and sized while preserving the integrity of their design. These composite images can be applied as backgrounds to any element on the page. New composite images can be created with InstaSitePro.

Multiple Sites: Customers can create multiple web sites with InstaSitePro. The way that this works depends on the control panel being used, but includes support for sub-sites (sites that have a suffix on the domain name), sub-domains and 'add on' domains.

Start With a Clean Modern Site Template

Each template has a variety of color themes which can be selected during the site creation phase and changed at any time. Templates also come with an assortment of over 20 different page layouts. Our new open template architecture lets you create your own templates or re-organize the stock templates.

Tutorials: The following tutorials are available for using InstaSite and InstaSitePro

Tutorials for InstaSite:

Creating a Site - Create a site by choosing a template and selecting a color scheme.

Editing Text - How to edit text in your site.

Working with Images - Uploading and managing images.

Creating Pages - Create pages from the library of 'pre-fab' pages in a variety of layouts.

Pages and Menus - See how pages are automatically included in the menus.

Creating Hyperlinks - Create hyperlinks by pointing at the page you wish to link to. See how hyperlinks are also used for maps, shopping carts and more.

Changing the Layout - Change the layout of a page by moving, resizing and stylizing the various text and picture boxes that make up a web page.

Creating Boxes - Create new boxes and see how to place them in the headers.

Creating Tables - Create tables of various sizes.

Editing Tables - Edit a table once it is created.

Photo Albums - Create a photo album with an unlimited number of pictures and a built in slide show.

Tutorials for InstaSitePro:

Page Masters - Make global changes to your site with page masters.

Style Sheets - Make global changes to the text styles, colors, backgrounds and spacing metrics of your site.

Color Palettes - Make global color changes to your site. See how everything (including graphics) changes as you adjust the colors using color controls inspired by Adobe Photoshop.

Menu Styles - Stylize menus by pointing and clicking.

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