Corporate use of Snappages

[srenwick]

I've been showing a mock-up I made in snappages to show my company management how our corporate website could look if it were redesigned. As it stands, there are a few things about snappages that would prevent us actually using it as our corporate website. The most likely scenario I can see is that we would pay to use snappages but then just use it as a design brief to get something similar make by a designer.

I thought I would just list the main points that I think prevent us using snappages, just in case I am wrong, so that I can be corrected, otherwise it may act as feedback to the snappages owner that might help. Or I'll be ignored!:p

Note - we would probably be prepared to pay considerably more than the standard $50 if our concerns could be addressed. I know it's not your business model, but worth mentioning anyway.

First the server speed. Snappage websites seem to be very slow to load. I know that the menu is based on Flash, but is it the servers causing the slow speed or the Flash menus.

Which leads me to - having the website running on your own server. That would be ideal for us, but I know you don't currently support it. Is it possible? Do you plan to allow it in the future. Could we run the CMS from your server but have the hosting on ours? Maybe dumb questions...

What is the situation with snappages servers? How many do you have? For instance Weebly say on their website "Our hosting infrastructure is backed by an army of servers that provide reliable stability for your websites". Can you guarantee this? As you can probably imagine, having reliable service would be very important for us.

URLs - I notice when I play with my mockup that the URLs are based on the page title. That's not always ideal. If possible I would like to be able to specify the URLs for certain pages. This is because I would be migrating the website and want to try and keep the URLs (and hence in-bound links and Google PR) but have different page titles. Also if the page title has a space in it then the URL has a space, which seems bad to me in general.

Secondary navigation. Is there any secondary navigation available other than in the top navigation bar. The secondary navigation seems to be only apparent as a drop-down from the primary navigation. I would expect that if I clicked on the primary navigation, then there would by default be secondary navigation on the next page. Would I have to create this manually if I wanted it? If so, that would be problematic.

Single person company: Sorry to say, but corporates don't like investing money in single-person companies. What if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? Would our service disappear? What assurances do you offer?

Hope my questions aren't too dumb. Chances are we'll pay the $50 anyway at least to make the mock-up, but I'm sure you'd prefer it if we were actually using your service for our actual website.

[Steve]

I'll try to answer these as best I can. There is a lot here so I apologize if I miss something.

The speed issues are mainly due to the flash headers and this issue will be fixed with the next update we do on the site.

The servers all hosted by rackspace so they are extremely reliable.

Currently there are no plans to allow you to host he sites on your own server as that's not how are system is designed.

The page title vs. url issue is a valid concern and will probably be addressed in future updates. As far as the spacing issue is concerned, you should also be able to use a "-" instead of the space and it will still work.

There is currently no other secondary navigation like you mention but others have asked for a way to create content that would automatically appear on multiple pages so perhaps if we implement this it would solve your problem.

I can see what the concerns would be with the single person company scenario. The good news is that there are now two of us and we will be adding more in the future. I'm confident that we are taking all the sort of steps to ensure that SnapPages could continue without me. Also I can assure that I will take all precautions necessary when crossing the street to help ensure I don't get hit by a bus.

So hopefully that answered everything. They might not be the answers you wanted but they are answers. Let me know if there is anything else.

[srenwick]

Excellent reply. Thanks very much for getting back to me.

You mention using hyphens to avoid getting spaces in URLs, but wouldn't that then mean that the page title would also have the hyphen?

Another point I should make is that our current site does not use *.html extensions on its individual pages. If I were to migrate the site, I would want to make certain URLs exactly the same as the previous site version, so that would have to be taken in to account.

Can you tell me when the next update is that should resolve the speed issue?

Keep looking out for those buses! ;)