Illness

Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. After surgery he returned to Apple, but had to take another leave of absence in 2009, ultimately undergoing a liver transplant. He took his final leave of absence in January 2011.

In August, he formally resigned as CEO. "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come," Jobs said in a letter addressed "to the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community."

"I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role," Jobs wrote. "I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you."

Jobs’s Legacy

It would be a mistake to characterize Jobs’s time at Apple simply by the products the company released. Those products came about because of principles held by Jobs that he made sure were shared by others at Apple, especially as he refashioned the company following his 1997 return to Cupertino.

The products mentioned throughout this story might not have come to pass were it not for Apple’s constant need to innovate. That’s an attitude driven by Jobs, during flush times as well as well as when the tech business was less than booming. It’s worth noting that some of Apple’s biggest product releases during Jobs’s tenure—the iPod and the iPad, most notably—were developed during recessions when consumers theoretically were less inclined to spend money on pricey electronics.

“The way we’re going to survive is to innovate our way out of this,” Jobs told Time Magazine in early 2002, a strategy the company returned to when the economy went south again in 2008. In both instances, Apple under Jobs upped its research-and-development spending, helping the company produce a strong product lineup that could weather tough times.

It goes without saying that under Jobs, Apple became synonymous with great design. From the early days of the Macintosh, when Jobs agitated for rectangles with rounded corners, no aspect of the design process escaped the company’s attention.

But Jobs was about more than design just for the sake of looking good—the design decisions Apple makes also take usability into account. That 2002 Time Magazine article recounts the creation of the first flat-panel iMac and how Jobs scrapped an early version of the desktop because its design failed to impress. Time’s Josh Quittner recounted the subsequent meeting between Jobs and Apple executive Jonathan Ive:

That’s an approach to creating products that sticks with other Apple employees, even after they leave the company. “You almost imagine that Steve is in your office,” Flipboard founder and ex-Apple engineer Evan Doll told the San Francisco Chronicle. “You say to yourself, what would he say about this? When you’re kicking around an idea for a product, or for a feature, you’ll even say it in discussion—’Steve Jobs would love this!’ or, more often, ‘Steve Jobs would say this isn’t good enough.’ He’s like the conscience sitting on your shoulder.”

Beyond the Mac

Of course, the assorted transitions during Jobs’s reign as CEO weren’t confined to the Mac. Perhaps the greatest transition Jobs initiated was moving Apple away from being just a software and computer maker and into the lucrative world of consumer electronics. The shift became official in 2007 when Apple dropped the word “Computer” from its name, simply calling itself Apple Inc.

The shift began with the iPod. When Apple unveiled its music player in the fall of 2001, the market for MP3 players was in its early stages. Devices at the time relied on small amounts of flash memory that could hold only a handful of songs. In short, it was a field that was ripe for innovation—and innovate Apple did with the iPod. The device’s 5GB capacity gave it the storage space to, in Apple’s words, “put 1000 songs in your pocket.” And while not the first hard-drive-based digital music player on the market—Creative’s Nomad series beat it to the punch—the iPod had something going for it that no other company could match: software integration. Though iTunes debuted earlier in 2001, it was with the iPod’s fall introduction that the pieces clicked into place and Apple’s ecosystem started to take shape.

Still, at the time, the iPod met with heavy skepticism. Why was Apple, a computer company, making a portable music player? “We love music,” Jobs said during the iPod’s introduction. “And it’s always good to do something you love.”

It proved to be lucrative for Apple, too. The company has sold hundreds of millions of iPods in the last decade, and though sales growth slowed and then declined in recent years, Apple continues to enjoy a 70 percent share of the MP3 player market. Part of the reason for the device’s success? Apple’s repeated willingness to reinvent the iPod line. Take 2005’s decision to kill off the popular iPod mini and replace it with the smaller, flash0based iPod nano. That kind of thinking, utterly foreign to most companies, was second nature to Steve Jobs: Why not kill a product at the height of its popularity if you’re going to replace it with something even better?

Steve Jobs seemed to anticipate the demand for the iPod from the get-go: “Music’s a part of everyone’s life,” Jobs said at the 2001 launch event. “Music’s been around forever. This is not a speculative market. And because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world.”

As it did with the iPod, Apple didn’t create a new product category with 2007’s iPhone introduction. Smartphones existed before Apple came out with its effort, with existing devices aimed largely at business customers who wanted to check their email when they were out and about. Apple instead set its sights on the broader consumer market. It would appeal to the end user by informing its device with the same sensibilities it had used in the Mac: good design, ease of use, and a harmonious marriage between software and hardware.

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Jobs said at the 2007 Macworld Expo keynote when he pulled the first iPhone out of his pants pocket. “One is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world.”

That may sound like the kind of “reality distortion field”-style hype that Jobs became famous for—and to some extent, it is. But it also happens to be true. Look no further than how other smartphone makers responded—with devices that mirrored the iPhone’s touch-screen controls, powerful Web browser, and array of third-party mobile apps. Where once every smartphone had to have a physical keyboard, many now rely upon just a touchscreen; that’s a direct result of the iPhone’s influence.

Jobs closes out his tenure as Apple’s CEO by leading the company into what’s being billed as the “post-PC” era—a period in which mobile devices no longer need sync up with computers. It was with that vision in mind that Apple rolled out the iPad, which brings PC-style computing into a handheld device. Launched less than two years ago, the iPad has already carved out a new market for tablet computing, with other companies once again trying to keep pace with Apple. It also joins the original Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone among the revolutionary products Jobs helped develop during his Apple career.

Jobs Returns

In a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs said that his firing from Apple in the mid-1980s “was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.” That may have been true for Jobs, who used his time away from Cupertino to not only found Next but also buy a fledgling animation studio that would become Pixar, but Apple racked up more than its share of stumbles. Under several post-Jobs CEOs, Apple tried repeatedly—and failed repeatedly—to release an updated successor to the aging Macintosh operating system. Taligent was the future. Then Copland—”Mac OS 8”—was hyped as the new direction for the OS, only to be abandoned and replaced with an incremental update to the original Mac OS.

In 1996, Apple decided to buy one of two companies that owned modern operating systems that could be the basis for a next-generation Mac operating system. Both were run by former Apple executives. One was Be, run by Jean-Louis Gasseé, which had an intriguing Unix-based OS that could already run on existing Mac hardware. The other was Next, still run by Steve Jobs.

In late 1996, Apple CEO Gil Amelio announced that the company would acquire Next for $400 million. That deal brought Steve Jobs back to Apple, initially as an advisor to Amelio. At the time, Apple declared “the advanced technical underpinnings and rapid development environment of [what became Mac OS X] will allow developers to create new applications that leapfrog those of other ‘modern’ operating systems, such as Windows NT.”

Apple was right—Next’s operating system became the basis for Mac OS X—but it’s unlikely that Amelio predicted precisely how the acquisition would play out. In July of 1997, Apple’s board of directors voted to remove Amelio from his post, naming Jobs the company’s interim CEO.

That move kicked off an era of increasing—and, to date, unceasing—success for Apple and Jobs. In Jobs’s August 1997 Macworld Expo keynote, Apple announced that it was ending the licensing program that allowed other companies to sell Mac-compatible computers and that Microsoft had invested $150 million in the company. Both controversial moves paid off.

A year later, Steve Jobs unveiled the product that perhaps singularly kicked off Apple’s rebound: the original iMac. Jobs had asked designer Jonathan Ive—whom he’d eventually promote to the role of senior vice president of industrial design—to create a colorful, easy-to-set-up, all-in-one computer. The result was a new Mac with a unique look that startled the industry. Its bold color, lack of a floppy drive, and embrace of the new USB connectivity standard were all considered shockers at the time; consumers, however, were delighted. Apple sold 800,000 iMacs in fewer than five months. The floppy faded into history and USB became a roaring success. The iMac, and the Jobs/Ive partnership, cemented Apple’s stance that its insanely great products needed to look the part.

In March 2001, Apple released the first iteration of Mac OS X after a public beta that began in late 2000. The operating system was based on NextStep, the Unix-based OS devised by Jobs’s team at Next. Though it was named as a simple sequel to OS 9, OS X had an entirely new codebase and marked a dramatic new beginning. Jobs had overseen a massive effort at Apple to create native, Unix-based ports of the original Macintosh APIs—programming hooks upon which Mac developers relied, in a system called Carbon. That meant that developers could, with some exceptions, make their software compatible with OS X merely by recompiling it, without needing to rewrite the software from scratch. And applications that weren’t updated for OS X could take advantage of the integrated Classic environment to run OS 9 apps within OS X—making the transition from OS 9 to OS X significantly less painful than many people expected it to be. OS X was a towering achievement for Jobs and Apple, and a welcome respite from the years of promised but unrealized OS upgrades from Cupertino.

Jobs oversaw other massive software undertakings around this time, too. In 1998, the company’s QuickTime authoring standard was being threatened in the digital video editing space by Microsoft’s Advanced Authoring Format; Avid and Adobe had both moved away from the format, and only Macromedia’s KeyGrip software—which had recently been rebranded “Final Cut”—still incorporated it. But Final Cut had been ignored and delayed by the Macromedia higher-ups in favor of development on its Flash software, and its future was thus largely uncertain.

Something had to be done to combat these issues. That solution, as overseen by Jobs, was to buy Final Cut. The company used it to accelerate development on the QuickTime standard, releasing the first Apple-branded version, Final Cut Pro, at 1999’s National Association of Broacasters show. Final Cut Pro 1.0 was designed to provide editors interested in the non-linear space a simpler, low-cost way to get into the business—and to ensure that QuickTime would not go the way of some of Apple’s lost software technologies.

Jobs was refining Apple’s message: The company made the computer you used to create, to explore, to “think different.” And as a direct result of the company’s investment into high-end non-linear editing software, Apple could explore a new area—consumer-level editing.

Similarly, one of the most significant consumer-level Apple products to emerge at this time wasn’t hardware, but software: iLife. The company was ahead of the rest of the industry in realizing that digital media—music, videos, and photos—would soon become central to people’s lives. In 1999, Apple released iMovie (and shipped it with a new iMac DV, for Digital Video), a program designed to let even the most-novice of computer users download video from their video camera and easily turn it into high-quality movies, complete with transitions, titles, and effects.

That was followed, in 2001, by iTunes (which debuted early in the year but became much more significant with the fall debut of the iPod) and iDVD, the latter of which let home-video takers create standard DVDs of their movies, including menus, themes, chapters, and slideshows. And 2002 brought the debut of iPhoto, which similarly made it easy to download and organize photos from digital cameras. By 2003, Apple had improved these programs’ integration with each other and rolled them into a single package, iLife, that shipped with every Mac.

The impact of iLife is often overlooked: It meant that at a time when digital media was ascendant, and Apple was trying to differentiate its hardware from the competition, every Mac included a suite of great, easy-to-use software that let people create and manage that media—something that wasn’t true of any other computer on the market at the time.

“We don’t think the PC is dying at all,” Jobs said during his 2001 Macworld Expo keynote where he discussed Apple’s digital hub strategy. “It’s evolving.”

Apple’s retail strategy evolved as well. In 2001, the company opened up its first retail stores, at a time when other PC makers—most notably Gateway—were stumbling with brick-and-mortar outlets. A decade later, Apple now operates more than 300 stores around the globe. The stores first turned a profit in 2004; last year, they recorded $9 billion in retail sales with $2.4 billion in retail profit. More significant, as Apple likes to point out in its quarterly earnings report, 50 percent of the people buying computers at the Apple Store are first-time Mac customers.

“People just don’t want to buy personal computers any more,” Jobs said in a 2001 video introducing the stores and their philosophy. “They want to know what they can do with them. And we’re going to show to them exactly that.”

Four years after the introduction of OS X, Jobs and Apple instituted another transition—this one away from the PowerPC architecture to chips built by Intel. It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. “As we look ahead… we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come,” Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. “[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map.”

The transition went much faster—and much smoother—than anyone, including Apple, had anticipated, thanks in large part to Rosetta. The dynamic translator let applications designed for PowerPC systems run on Intel-based Macs, giving developers time to revamp their products for Apple’s Intel-based future. In fact, PowerPC apps only became obsolete this summer when Apple retired Rosetta with the introduction of Mac OS X Lion.

Visionary, Leader & A Genius who revolutionized the way we communicate today.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died Wednesday after battling cancer and related conditions for seven years. He was 56. Jobs, who reigned as Apple CEO for 14 years, resigned his post in August 2011 and was replaced by Tim Cook, who previously was the company’s Chief Operating Officer. Jobs, in turn, was elected as chairman of Apple’s board of directors.

Both as the founder of the first successful personal-computer company and as the man who transformed a nearly-bankrupt Apple into one of the most successful companies on the planet, Jobs established himself as an American icon of business and technology.

Apple: The Early Years

If Steve Jobs had never returned to Apple after 1985, he’d still be remembered for the Macintosh.

Jobs didn’t create the Mac project—it was started by Jef Raskin in 1979—but he took it over in 1981 and brought it to fruition. Jobs didn’t write the code or design the circuit boards, but he was the one who provided the vision that made it all happen. As original Mac team member Andy Hertzfeld wrote, “Steve already gets a lot of credit for being the driving force behind the Macintosh, but in my opinion, it’s very well deserved … the Macintosh never would have happened without him.”

Apple’s introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 introduced the graphical user interface to mainstream desktop computing. The Mac ran on a 32-bit processor (compared to 16-bit processors for other PCs at the time) and had 128K of memory. It was an immediate success: more than 400,000 Macintosh computers were sold in the first year.

The Mac’s impact wasn’t just felt on people who bought it in the ’80s, though: in hindsight, it quite literally redefined what a computer was. Microsoft introduced its Windows program as a reaction to it; by 1995 Windows had duplicated Apple’s graphical interface. Essentially every personal computer in existence now follows most of the paradigms introduced by the original Mac more than a quarter-century ago.

The Mac capped off a series of accomplishments for Jobs in the early days of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976 with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. The company famously started in Jobs’s garage, where the company assembled its first computer, the Apple I. Its first mass-produced product was the Apple II, which was released in 1977. Designed by Wozniak, the Apple II featured a rugged plastic case, an integrated keyboard and power supply, support for color displays, and a 5.25-inch floppy drive. The Apple II was a wild success, ushering in the personal computer era, and carried Apple through the mid-1980s.

In the early ’80s Apple tried to build on its success with an Apple III targeted at business users, but it was a resounding failure. The story goes that Steve Jobs wanted the computer to run silently—a good example of Jobs’s attention to product detail—so he ordered that it be built without an internal fan. Unfortunately, customers found that the Apple III overheated frequently.

At the end of 1980, Apple went public; its IPO created hundreds of millionaires at the company. In exchange for $1 million of pre-IPO stock, Xerox gave Apple access to its PARC facilities, where Jobs and others saw the progress Xerox was making with the graphical user interface (GUI). That visit led to the Apple Lisa—a Mac-like computer that sold for nearly $10,000, and was never a success—and then the Mac.

Jobs was also a driving force behind the famous “1984” television commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, that debuted during the Super Bowl in January 1984. Jobs and his personally-recruited CEO John Sculley thought the iconic ad was excellent, and purchased 90 seconds of Super Bowl commercial time for the spot. Apple’s board of directors was less convinced of the advertisement’s greatness, and Apple’s advertising agency Chiat/Day resold 30 of those seconds to another advertiser. The ad ran, and the Macintosh went on sale two days later.

Eventually, the Macintosh’s increasingly sluggish sales performance strained the relationship between Jobs and Sculley. Sculley favored introducing more IBM compatibility; Jobs was opposed. Jobs and Sculley each went before Apple’s board and lobbied for the other’s removal. Eventually, on May 31, 1985, Apple announced that—following its first-ever quarterly loss and a round of layoffs—Steve Jobs was leaving the company he’d co-founded. He left with a net worth of $150 million and started his next venture, Next.

Selecting a content management system on which to run a business website is an important decision. Businesses have needs that are more targeted than individuals, and many of the hosted options available don’t quite fit the bill. Fortunately, there is a range of hosted content management systems that are packed with powerful features. Even better, these hosed platforms tend to be extremely easy to use and quick to develop on.

Before selecting a hosted platform, carefully asses your client’s needs. From there, you can narrow the field until you find a platform that suits the client perfectly. Given the broad range of options available, I have selected five top-tier options to review here.

Hosted CMS’ tend to be targeted to audiences that are keenly interested in simplicity. By contrast, most business-oriented hosted platforms offer a wide range of features. They essentially attempt to cover all of the basic features that a typical website owner might want. Because of this, you will find that many hosted platforms offer tremendous value and savings for your clients.

The hosted platforms covered below represent some of the most powerful content management systems available today. It is truly mind boggling how easy it can be to build a robust and beautiful website. Let’s dig in and see what these platforms have in store for us.

1. Vae

Vae  (formerly Verb) is an all-in-one CMS, e-commerce and email marketing platform. Vae takes a slightly different approach to building pages and content. A typical CMS makes use of templates, modules or blocks. Vae, on the other hand, allows you to build pages as standard HTML and CSS files, and simply add in special Vae tags known as VerML. This special mark-up allows you to define dynamic content regions, repeated elements and custom defined content in the CMS.

At the heart of the CMS is a robust system for defining the properties of the content that you will be managing. You are free to add as many fields as you need to define a set of content. So, instead of having modules that define certain types of functionality, you are free to build components that match your needs.

In addition to its fresh take on content management, Vae offers a full range of e-commerce features. This includes standard shopping-cart functionality, analytics, real-time shipping calculation and many other standard e-commerce features.

Finally, the platform has a built-in email marketing system that enables users to market to their customers. Even better, this email marketing engine integrates with the e-commerce features to enable powerful targeting. This full-circle integration is the sort of thing that draws people into hosted platforms.

Basic features

• FTP access
• Built-in Subversion repository
• Full server access for third-party integration (e.g. WordPress)
• Image management and editing
• Video encoding tools
• Content definition system for dynamic content
• HTML and CSS standards-compliant
• AJAX support
• Full e-commerce support throughout
• CRM and customer tracking
• Email marketing and list-management tools
• Analytics

Stand-out features

A hosted and hosting platform
Unlike most hosted platforms, Vae plans come with full access to what you would expect from a typical web hosting company. You can FTP to its servers, run custom PHP scripts and access MySQL databases. This means you can actually install third-party apps like WordPress and vBulletin. Once one of those systems is installed, you can embed VerbML tags in it, in effect layering Vae content on top of the system. This means you get the stability and protection of a hosted platform and the freedom to embed other open-source systems. This is an industry-changing feature that is tough to wrap your head around at first.

Local preview server
One of the more frustrating holes in hosted platforms is that you cannot run development environments without setting up multiple accounts. Vae offers a tool that actually allows you to run local versions of your website and test your code prior to loading it to the server.

Version control via Subversion
Hardcore developers are usually frustrated by the lack of version control in hosted CMS’. Sure, you can go online and revert pages to previous versions, but Subversion is a more powerful option that developers have become accustomed to using. With Vae, every website comes fully equipped with a hosted Subversion repository. The repository can be used to manage deployments and rollbacks, making Vae a hosted platform that easily supports batch updates to a website.

Pricing
Hosting on Vae can be rather pricey, depending on the scale of your needs. Pricing ranges from $19.95 to $249.95 per month.

Sample websites

2. Business Catalyst

Business Catalyst is a hosted CMS by Adobe targeted at business owners. This all-in-one system aims to combine all of the critical business tools that a small business would need online, including blogging, e-commerce, CRM, email marketing and analytics. While this is not unusual for a CMS, the focus on business owners is.

This business owner-oriented approach is evident from the moment you log in. We are first greeted with a data-driven dashboard-style view of our website. This focus on results will appeal to business owners and help them feel informed about their website’s performance.

From a developer’s standpoint, one interesting thing that Business Catalyst has going for it is Dreamweaver integration. Given that the platform is owned by Adobe, it is no surprise that this is a critical selling point. The integration allows developers to work in a familiar environment, and it facilitates the meshing of CMS-based content with templates and pages.

Another aspect of Business Catalyst that will appeal to business owners is its powerful reporting tools. You can view pre-built reports, as well as define and save custom reports. The reports merge data that is collected throughout the website and that plug into the customer management system. You can not only view report data, but also perform useful functions such as adding customers from a report to a particular email marketing campaign.

Basic features

This business-oriented platform is packed with features:

• Standard content management
• Blogging
• Comments on anything
• Forums
• RSS feeds
• Secure zones and paid memberships
• Re-usable content holders
• Dreamweaver integration
• E-commerce integration with built-in SSL
• Full CRM integration
• Form builder
• Email marketing and list management
• Web apps for repeatable content sets
• Analytics and reporting
• Template-based website building
• Email and DNS hosting
• Custom workflows

Stand-out features

Web apps
While easy to overlook, web apps are a killer feature of Business Catalyst. The simple tool allows you to define a set of data with custom fields. You can then skin the output of this in the list and detail views. This makes it dead simple to integrate slick jQuery modules, and it allows clients to easily manage them. For example, in a few minutes you can set up a Nivo Slider that customers can populate, zero coding required. Basically, any repeating set of HTML can be converted into a client-manageable list.

Secure zones
Secure zones allow you to quickly (i.e. in less than 15 minutes) build secure sections of a website for sharing with users. You can instantly build registration forms, log-in pages and password-resetting systems. This feature set can be leveraged in countless ways and can turn an otherwise complex task into a simple matter. Even better, you can use the e-commerce components to sell access to sections of the website on a one-time or recurring basis.

Customer Management
One rather distinct feature is the system’s ability to show a summary of an individual user’s activity. In one place, a business owner can view nearly everything a user has done on the website; things like product purchase history, email list membership and website activity. Imagine going to a single place to see that a user has clicked on your email campaign, registered an account and purchased a product. You can’t readily get this kind of integration in solutions built on separate systems. It is one of the core features targeted at business owners who want to make life simpler.

Pricing
Hosting plans with Business Catalyst range from $9 to $39 per month. Available features are based on the plan you purchase. If you would like to be a reseller, Adobe has partner programs ranging from free to $1,995. Again, the more you pay, the more features are available to you.

Sample websites

3. Squarespace

Square Space is a CMS focused on satisfying those who want an integrated blog, content and portfolio website. While this is rather common, Squarespace includes some powerful tools that put it in a category all its own. Focusing on in-context design and editing, this platform offers a design- and build-as-you-go approach that makes you reconsider how you build websites. Essentially, there is no admin panel in this CMS. Once logged in, you browse the website and perform all of the editing on the website in real time.

This real-time editing has four modes: content editing, structure editing, style editing and preview. This function-oriented approach means you can update the content of a page in real time and also tweak the style as you go. Want to make a heading a bit larger? Simply go into style editing mode and quickly make the change using the point-and-click interface. Need to add a block of content? Turn on structure editing mode and add widgets to the page in real time.

You can build pages from both modules and pre-built pages, based on functionality. The pre-built functionality is fantastic for building websites very quickly. It is also empowering, allowing owners to easily add the kind of complex functionality that would normally require the help of a developer.

Basic features

Squarespace offers some enticing and unique functionality:

• Managed content
• Blogging
• Social media integration
• iPhone- iPad-based management
• Blog importing tools
• Analytics
• Large selection of beautiful templates
• Photo galleries
• In-context editing
• Form building and data collection
• 20+ content type modules
• Real-time designing

Unique features

Packaged functionality
The functionality-oriented approach of Squarespace is incredible for building complex features that would cost far more to build separately. Something as simple as embedding a widget that allow users to instant message you is the sort of thing that amazes clients and is usually very painful to pull off. Adding a Google map with custom markers is also very easy.

Free templates
The built-in templates offer a variety of starting points for your website and are very easy to customize with the point-and-click interface. Sure, you can achieve whatever you want through CSS, but by doing all of the editing in the GUI, you ensure that clients are able to work with the website over the long haul. The client’s ability to maintain the website will save them money and keep you out of the minor-update business.

Dynamic layouts
One rather amazing feature is that you can select overall structures on the fly. Prefer a three-column layout? Simply select it from the appearance editor. Being able to dynamically control the formatting of the page will get you to the finish line much faster. Such needs typically force you to work with the raw code that powers a template—not always the case with Squarespace.

Pricing
Squarespace hosting fees range from $10 to $40 per month. The three price points come with different feature sets.

Sample websites

4. Webvanta

Webvanta offers a unique approach to starting a website. You are prompted to select from a list of “smart themes.” These templates are bare-bone designs but come with common features depending on the type of template. They’re like a giant shortcut. Fortunately, they are trimmed down enough that re-skinning is not a problem.

The Basic smart theme comes configured with Typekit fonts, the Blueprint CSS framework, jQuery, Superfish drop-down menus, as well as a blog, photo gallery, video player, calendar and contact form. It is set up to handle commonly needed functionality without pre-determining the look and feel. The set-up requires a bit of getting used to, because someone else has configured it. Once you’re acclimatized, though, it is the sort of thing that can be massively efficient.

Webvanta relies on the standard template formula. Templates are built as separate components, with special tags to define content regions. Various modules can be bolted on to these templates, and of course the templates are then associated with pages as you create them. While not a revolutionary approach, it makes it remarkably simple to jump around and build the required components.

While the template pattern is conventional, the system has been extended to allow templates to be built out of components. You’ll find an easy management system for menus, templates, snippets, CSS files, JavaScript files and XML feeds. All of the extra bits needed to make a template are organized in such a way that digging through them is remarkably easy. It’s the sort of thing that is hard to describe but easy to love when you see it in action.

Basic features

• Standard content
• Blogging
• “Information portal” data model
• Form builder
• Photo galleries
• E-commerce
• Event calendars
• RSS feeds
• Search
• Custom database
• Reusable templates and snippets
• Smart themes (i.e. feature sets)

Unique features

Custom databases
One look at Webvanta’s custom database features will immediately get your imagination going. The system lets you easily define repeating sets of data to output to the page. Even better, the admin pages for managing this data are easy to use. The system basically transforms any repeating list of code into a client-friendly low-tech system that the maintainer can work with. So, instead of the user picking through the HTML, trying to replicate something, they use a clear form. Integrate this feature into your websites and clients will love you for it.

Built-in support for page-specific CSS and JavaScript
I don’t even know how to convey how awesome this feature is. Webvanta allows you to attach custom CSS and JavaScript to individual pages right inside the GUI. This might not seem like a big deal; in fact, you might think it’s a bad idea. But when you consider how much flexibility this allows, it’s fantastic. It avoids two critical pitfalls of many systems. First, it reduces the number of templates required by a website. Secondly, it provides an alternative to inline styles that is equally easy to implement. The ability to attach custom styles and JavaScript to individual pages can reduce site-wide confusion. Webvanta also allows you to install third-party jQuery components insanely easily.

Powerhouse snippets
Reusable components are a fundamental building block of template systems. Webvanta offers such functionality with a bonus. Its snippet engine allows you to embed custom Webvanta tags (the same ones used throughout the website), thus allowing complex functionality to be easily bolted onto any template or page as needed (such as a customized list of recent blog posts). The power of this becomes apparent once you realize that the basic building blocks of the system are fully accessible. No magic tags will render code uneditable.

Pricing
Webvanta offers a range of price points, from free forever to $99 a month. With five price points to choose from, you should be able to find a price and feature combination that works for you.

Sample websites

5. Light CMS

Light CMS is a content management system targeted at web designers. Its focus is on design flexibility, ease of implementation, and simple content management for maintainers. The focus on designers seems to have shaped how the system was built. Not only is it super-easy to get started with, but it is flexible enough to handle standard HTML and CSS, which allows you to easily use your front-end skills on your first Light CMS website.

The content tools are where Light really shines. In most systems, users have to build and define modules and then figure out how to get them onto pages. Light CMS turns this upside down by allowing users to define and insert content directly onto pages. This minimizes the unpredictability of bolting modules onto pages. You get to see where a module will appear and how it will look as you define it and populate it with content. Even better, you can drag and drop content blocks to rearrange them on the page.

Because Light CMS was built to appeal to designers, it offers total control over the system and its output. No hidden elements are locked away in controls that cannot be modified. Even better, the CMS comes loaded with more than 80 templates, all gorgeous, fully integrated and ready to go.

Finally, Light CMS comes with a fantastic set of reseller tools that enable developers to build a revenue stream off of websites that they sell. Of course, if you’re going to be padding the price of the CMS, then you’ll have to add some value to make it worth it for your customers (a fantastic example would be personalized one-on-one support).

Basic features

Light CMS is packed with features:

• FTP access
• SSL security
• Free templates
• HTML and CSS standards support
• In-place editing tools for drag-and-drop building
• Photo gallery modules
• Integrated form builder
• Blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds
• Calendars and events
• SEO-friendly complete with XML site maps and custom robots.txt files
• Basic e-commerce features
• Admin user management with granular permission control

Stand-out features

An approachable platform
Light CMS walks a fine line between simplicity and power, a difficult position to maintain. If the system is too simple, you lose the ability to serve clients’ needs. If it is too complex, it will be difficult to grasp. The creators have succeeded in making this system dead simple and extremely easy to grasp. Most CMS’ are a bit intimidating as you dig around to figure out where to do things. But as soon as you log into your first Light website, you immediately can tell where to add, edit and delete content. That is a remarkable feat and makes this a fabulously appealing system.

Unique module approach
Having worked with many CMS’, I can confidently say that the in-context model of creating modules is rather unique. This is probably the defining aspect of this CMS; it makes it fun to explore the system and see what’s possible. It drastically minimizes the admin interface and allows you to stay on the page during the entire process of editing content.

Free templates ready to go
This platform comes packed with more than 80 templates that are ready to go. These fully integrated templates can be instantly activated, thus setting the stage for a business model built on leveraging templates to serve low-budget clients. Does a client of yours have only $3,000 to spend? Such a budget might normally prohibit you from working with them. But with these beautiful pre-built websites, you can help them. Learn to re-skin these templates and you will be able to crank out websites with amazing speed and efficiency.

Pricing
You can start a basic website for free, and go right up to $99 per month. Amazingly, all features are included at every price point. But the bigger your plan, the more content you can add.

Sample websites

Conclusion

As you can see, all of these systems have distinct features that make them fantastic options under different circumstances. The purpose here is not to say that one is better than another.

Each person has to find the tool that will dramatically improve the way they work. Locking ourselves and our clients into a single platform can be tempting, but we should keep our options in mind so that we can recommend the ideal platform.

Disclaimer: Web Pyramids and the author were not way compensated to review these particular products and this review is based on the author’s opinion only.

Facebook email is buzzing the internet , people are searching to know how they can get a @facebook.com email id . Currently facebook email id is not open to everyone . To get @facebook.com  you have to request an invite and this is how you can do it .

Login to your facebook account  and go to this link  facebook.com/about/messages/ and click on the “Request an Invitation ” button .

After you have clicked you will see that the button will change to ” You will receive and invite soon  “  . That’s all you are done  if you are lucky you will get the yourname@facebook.com email id .

Note that Your email address will match your public username, for example:

Profile: facebook.com/username
Email: username@facebook.com

If you don’t have a username you can go here facebook.com/username/ to get  .

In case if you don’t receive  any notification from facebook in a week you can visit facebook.com/about/messages/ to check your status

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