NEW WEB APPLICATION SET TO IMPRESS FOR FURTHER INVESTMENT
The creators of a new free application that allows users to build a website in less than 30 minutes regardless of their technical capability are seeking to attract investor-led finance for their business.
Sunderland-based ImpressPages received first stage funding from The Difference Engine - an acceleration programme for early stage digital businesses – and is now seeking further investment to develop the software further, including a fully hosted version.
ImpressPages offers designers or administrators of sites, who may not have any web development knowledge at all, the ability to create and manage professional looking websites.
The site at www.impresspages.org is now receiving more than 1200 unique visitors every day without any online marketing and, because it’s open source and free to access, a rapidly growing community of users are building daily add-ons to the site, which has seen it translated into ten languages, five of them in the last 8 weeks.
“We are delighted with the success we’ve had already – we knew ImpressPages was an excellent concept and of course we had high hopes for it - but it would be fair to say it is exceeding our expectations,” said Audrius Jankauskas, one of the creators.
“We know as a rule website administrators are not IT professionals and almost all open source Content Management Systems are developed to fulfill the needs of experienced IT people.
“We decided to focus our efforts on the development of a user friendly solution in order to make the creation and management of websites as simple as possible. Very quickly we realised the only way to do it was to automate the process.
“The challenge was to find a proper balance of functions performed by both the developer and the user, whilst keeping flexibility at the heart of everything.”
ImpressPages allows users to free their imagination with videos, texts, photos and forms, which by dragging and dropping all fit together without the need for additional layouts or pages.
Users can copy any content from anywhere and it will automatically adapt to the website style. Editing in place saves time and effort so users can walk through the website as a usual visitor, click on an area to edit and do it directly at that point without any need for additional interfaces or pop-ups.
The Difference Engine is a programme that is also supported by One North East, Sunderland Council and Sunderland Software City.
Following the overwhelming response from designers and website owners in general, ImpressPages has now joined forces with Codeworks Connect to work more closely with its users.
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For more information, to arrange an interview or pictures, please contact Angela Leighton Walton or Libbi Cook at Say Something on 01740 621485 or 07799332860 or email or angela@saysomethingpr.com or libbi@saysomethingpr.com