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We've recently added a new capability to the Webvanta platform, which we call mini-sites.

It's been a long time since we've blogged about all the great new sites being built on the Webvanta platform. There's one site we're particularly excited about, not just because of the site itself, but because of the accompanying iPad app and mobile site.

We're expanding, and we're searching for an outstanding front-end web developer to join our team.

It's been an exciting couple of weeks at Webvanta—we've moved into a new office and added two new staff members.

We are adding to our team, and we have a full-time position in our Sebastopol office for an experienced front-end web developer with excellent communication skills.

Extensis, which provides a webfont service called WebINK, has launched the coolest tool yet for experimenting with web fonts: the FontDropper.

Yesterday, we presented a DesignCast for HOW Magazine about how designers can create great sites without getting buried in technology. Apparently we struck a cord, because we set an all-time attendance record for one of HOW's webinars, maxing out the GoToWebinar system when it hit 1,000 attendees.

We've launched a new series of talks for the North Bay web design community, which we'll be hosting at the Webvanta offices in downtown Sebastopol. And we're even providing lunch.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you already know that we’re big fans of An Event Apart. The world of the web is moving quickly, and attending a conference like this is a great way to make sure you’re on top of the trends and current with the latest techniques, as well as to meet like-minded folks.

The last of the interviews we did at An Event Apart in Seattle was with Jeffrey Zeldman, the cofounder of the event. Jeffrey has been a prominent figure in the web design world since its earliest days.

The web is a publishing and marketing medium unlike any that has existed before. I would think this would go without saying, except for the attitudes and behaviors we see all the time, which reveal that many site owners don't really get it.

Information architecture is a big topic. However you are building sites, it's essential to think deeply and clearly about how best to organize a site's content. If the site is a simple brochure site, then there may not be much to think about, but the more content a site has, the more important it is to invest effort in this area.

Webvanta makes it easy to set up connections between database items of different types.  You can also associate assets (typically images) with any database item.

Webvanta has a built-in full-text search engine, which searches all of your database items. This allows you to provide site search with full control over how the results are presented.

There is a better way: store the site’s information in a database. Each page then is created from a template that provides the page structure, with content drawn from the database. This approach puts the information at the center of the site, rather than its presentation (the pages). It brings many powerful advantages over the static HTML approach:

We've recently added a new capability to the Webvanta platform, which we call mini-sites.

"Happy New Year" message from Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress: My last message to you this year is an important but unfortunate one: we've fixed a pretty critical vulnerability in WordPress' core HTML sanitation library, and because this library is used lots of places it's important that everyone update as soon as possible.

We've recently adjusted our pricing plans to increase the capabilities of our most popular plan, the $29/month Pro plan.

Once you have your site coded, you need to choose how those coded web pages are going to be delivered. The first fork in the road is to choose between static web site and a content management system (CMS).

We've recently added a new capability to the Webvanta platform, which we call mini-sites.

Webvanta now includes built-in analytics for all paid sites. Within a day of when your site goes public, you'll see a new tab show up in your control panel, labeled, curiously enough, Analytics. And that's what you'll find there. No setup required.

If you want to sell things on your web site, you need a way to accept payments. There's many ways to do this, depending on your needs.

Rather than building payment processing into Webvanta, we've chosen to make it easy to integrate your Webvanta site with a variety of different solutions, so you can choose the one that best meets your needs. We've partnered with FoxyCart to provide an easily customized and nicely streamlined shopping cart and payment processing solution.
 

Webvanta makes it easy to set up connections between database items of different types.  You can also associate assets (typically images) with any database item.

Webvanta has a built-in full-text search engine, which searches all of your database items. This allows you to provide site search with full control over how the results are presented.

We recently worked with designer and project manager Tyler Wantulok to build a deal-of-the-day site, EponME, initially serving the Bozeman, Montana area. By leveraging three existing hosted systems—Webvanta, Foxycart, and MailChimp—Tyler was able to deliver his clients a very effective, custom deal-of-the-day site for a fraction of what a custom web app would have cost.

Santa Rosa's Thai Taste restaurant recently launched a new website, built on the Webvanta Restaurant System. With a desktop site, mobile site, online ordering, and Facebook integration, the system is already bringing new business to the restaurant.

Our design partners tell our story more compellingly than we can, so we've been conducting a series of interviews. We've just published the first one, with Luke Green of Inspira Digital.

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.

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.

Yesterday, we presented a DesignCast for HOW Magazine about how designers can create great sites without getting buried in technology. Apparently we struck a cord, because we set an all-time attendance record for one of HOW's webinars, maxing out the GoToWebinar system when it hit 1,000 attendees.

If you weren't able to attend my presentation for AIGA San Francisco on Building Dynamic Websites Without Getting Buried in Technology, you have another chance: I'll be presenting similar material in a free "DesignCast" webinar organized by HOW Magazine.

Many experienced designers grew up with print and want to focus on their creative skills, rather than on web technologies. At the same time, clients expect increasingly complex sites that require multiple layers of technology to design and deliver.

We've launched a new series of talks for the North Bay web design community, which we'll be hosting at the Webvanta offices in downtown Sebastopol. And we're even providing lunch.

We recently worked with designer and project manager Tyler Wantulok to build a deal-of-the-day site, EponME, initially serving the Bozeman, Montana area. By leveraging three existing hosted systems—Webvanta, Foxycart, and MailChimp—Tyler was able to deliver his clients a very effective, custom deal-of-the-day site for a fraction of what a custom web app would have cost.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you already know that we’re big fans of An Event Apart. The world of the web is moving quickly, and attending a conference like this is a great way to make sure you’re on top of the trends and current with the latest techniques, as well as to meet like-minded folks.

jQuery's small, fast, and powerful core is already a compelling reason to use this JavaScript library. But did you know it is easy to extend too?

If you are collecting leads or orders on your site, you should know where those prospects or orders are coming from. It's the only way to know which of your marketing techniques is working. With a few lines of JavaScript, you can capture source codes from your URLs and save them in cookies for later use.

We've spent our waking hours, and then some, for the past few years helping designers build great sites. Along the way, we've learned a lot from everyone we've worked with. We also find, as you might imagine, a wide range of beliefs and practices that don't serve either the designers or their customers, but linger because we're all living in such a complex, fast-changing world.

If you are collecting leads or orders on your site, you should know where those prospects or orders are coming from. It's the only way to know which of your marketing techniques is working. With a few lines of JavaScript, you can capture source codes from your URLs and save them in cookies for later use.

The year 2010 was, in many ways, a good year in the browser wars. All browser makers improved their HTML5 and CSS3 support and made major strides in JavaScript performance. Even IE participated, if you include the IE9 beta.

Typography on the web has long suffered in comparison to print. The biggest limitation has been the limited number of fonts that a designer can use. It's still messy, but it is now possible to use a much wider range of fonts.

One of our goals with Webvanta is to provide designers with the best in open-source technology, without exposing them to all of its hassles. For our calendar feature, we've chosen Adam Shaw's FullCalendar.

If you weren't able to attend my presentation for AIGA San Francisco on Building Dynamic Websites Without Getting Buried in Technology, you have another chance: I'll be presenting similar material in a free "DesignCast" webinar organized by HOW Magazine.

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to give a 5-minute Webvanta demo as part of the BizTechDay conference in San Francisco. It's a challenge to convey the power of Webvanta in such a short demo. I chose to focus on how Webvanta supports any design, and allows the designer to easily build database-driven pages.

We've recently adjusted our pricing plans to increase the capabilities of our most popular plan, the $29/month Pro plan.

Many designers say they’re the most effective when they spend most of their time on design, not implementation. But your clients want working sites, not paintings (i.e., Photoshop files) of them. There’s a lot of technology involved in translating your design into a working, modern web site.

When someone clicks a link to an external site, should that link open in a new tab or browser window, or should it replace the contents of the current browser window?

Content strategy is one of the hot buzzwords in the web design world today. We caught up with Kristina Halvorson, perhaps the best-known person in the field, after her talk at An Event Apart, and recorded this interview.

In my previous post, I showed how you can track the success of individual marketing efforts with a little jQuery code. Often, however, you don't have any source code in the URL. You can put a source code in the link on all your ads, but when another site links to you of their own volition, there's not going to be a source code.

Creating interesting podcasts for web designers is challenging. There’s been a few that I've enjoyed that have come and gone, such as Boagworld, which promises to be reborn next year with a much more focused format. My favorite web design podcast this year has been the Big Web Show, created by Dan Benjamin and Jeffery Zeldman.

The web is a publishing and marketing medium unlike any that has existed before. I would think this would go without saying, except for the attitudes and behaviors we see all the time, which reveal that many site owners don't really get it.

HTML5 has been receiving an extraordinary amount of attention, thanks in part to active support and promotion by Google, Apple, and Mozilla, among others. Despite its high profile, however, the HTML5 specification isn't even complete, much less officially blessed or broadly supported by browsers, and there are only a few pieces that are of immediate practical value.

We recently worked with designer and project manager Tyler Wantulok to build a deal-of-the-day site, EponME, initially serving the Bozeman, Montana area. By leveraging three existing hosted systems—Webvanta, Foxycart, and MailChimp—Tyler was able to deliver his clients a very effective, custom deal-of-the-day site for a fraction of what a custom web app would have cost.

"Happy New Year" message from Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress: My last message to you this year is an important but unfortunate one: we've fixed a pretty critical vulnerability in WordPress' core HTML sanitation library, and because this library is used lots of places it's important that everyone update as soon as possible.

Membee provides a SaaS service for associations to manage and support their membership. In the past, they provided websites using an in-house CMS, but that system was aging. After evaluating all the options available, Membee chose Webvanta as the CMS to replace their in-house software for all new sites.

Many designers say they’re the most effective when they spend most of their time on design, not implementation. But your clients want working sites, not paintings (i.e., Photoshop files) of them. There’s a lot of technology involved in translating your design into a working, modern web site.

Once you have your site coded, you need to choose how those coded web pages are going to be delivered. The first fork in the road is to choose between static web site and a content management system (CMS).

Many designers say they’re the most effective when they spend most of their time on design, not implementation. But your clients want working sites, not paintings (i.e., Photoshop files) of them. There’s a lot of technology involved in translating your design into a working, modern web site.

Once you have your site coded, you need to choose how those coded web pages are going to be delivered. The first fork in the road is to choose between static web site and a content management system (CMS).

When you're ready to turn your beautiful design into a live, functioning web site, you need to tread carefully. While many different paths will lead to a site that looks more or less the same, the maintainability may vary dramatically, as may the browser compatibility and accessibility. In this article, we explore coding issues.

Information architecture is a big topic. However you are building sites, it's essential to think deeply and clearly about how best to organize a site's content. If the site is a simple brochure site, then there may not be much to think about, but the more content a site has, the more important it is to invest effort in this area.

Campaign Monitor has released what may be the best set of free HTML email templates anywhere.

Choosing an email service provider (ESP) can be a daunting task, given the large number of companies in this market and the subtle variations in the services they offer. Pricing models also vary widely. It's essential to start with a plan for what you expect to do.

Maintaining an email list of customers and prospects is perhaps the most fundamental of Internet marketing techniques. Whether what is being sent is a periodic newsletter, a series of tutorials, or customer updates, maintaining an email list is a fundamental technique.

If you've ever had to create HTML emails, I'm betting you found it to be a messy and confusing process. I know I have.

Jeremy Keith gave a great talk at An Event Apart about design principles. In the talk, he shows how everything should start with goals, which then lead to principles that reflect those goals, and finally result in design patterns to implement them.

If you have paid any attention at all to CSS (and if you haven't, what are you doing here?), the name Eric Meyer is no doubt familiar to you.

jQuery's small, fast, and powerful core is already a compelling reason to use this JavaScript library. But did you know it is easy to extend too?

Should you use graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, or responsive design? Maybe what you need is to be hardboiled. Andy Clarke's latest book lays out the philosophy and techniques.

In the early days of CSS-based design, square corners were a hallmark of designs that focused on simplicity of code, rather than visual aesthetics. Rounded corners remained somewhat painful to use, however, until the emergence of support for creating them using the border-radius property of CSS3. Now it takes only a few lines of simple CSS code to have nicely rounded corners—as long as you can accept that many users will see square corners until they move on to more modern browsers.

Unless you've been hiding under the proverbial rock, it's no surprise that the mobile web has exploded in the past year. It's a huge shift in the Internet landscape, and it changes the rules in a variety of ways. We've put together a webinar to share some of our experiences creating mobile and table websites and apps. Our goal is to help designers create multi-platform solutions, making the best of phones, tablets, and computers.

When you're designing a mobile site you must pare down your information to the essentials. Jacob Nielsen has a good post today on this topic, Defer Secondary Content When Writing for Mobile Users.

In investigating our customer's needs and looking at a variety of design approaches, we've found that responsive design is the answer for some situations, but that a separate set of pages is more appropriate in many cases.

It's been a long time since we've blogged about all the great new sites being built on the Webvanta platform. There's one site we're particularly excited about, not just because of the site itself, but because of the accompanying iPad app and mobile site.

The last of the interviews we did at An Event Apart in Seattle was with Jeffrey Zeldman, the cofounder of the event. Jeffrey has been a prominent figure in the web design world since its earliest days.

Jeremy Keith gave a great talk at An Event Apart about design principles. In the talk, he shows how everything should start with goals, which then lead to principles that reflect those goals, and finally result in design patterns to implement them.

Content strategy is one of the hot buzzwords in the web design world today. We caught up with Kristina Halvorson, perhaps the best-known person in the field, after her talk at An Event Apart, and recorded this interview.

If you have paid any attention at all to CSS (and if you haven't, what are you doing here?), the name Eric Meyer is no doubt familiar to you.

Jason Santa Maria spoke with Webvanta at An Event Apart Seattle about web typography, web fonts, Typekit, and more.