iWeek

Morphogine, an Application Service Provider, has launched a service called WebPresence, which aims to fully automate and simplify the process of creating, marketing and maintaining a Website and even an online shop.

The move toward the Internet as a channel of marketing and trading has been slow to be adopted in South Africa – high bandwidth costs and low web development standards being prohibiting factors. WebPresence was developed to bridge this gap in the South African Internet market.

Sean Stewart, Technical Director of Morphogine, says that by using WebPresence, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) won’t need to invest large sums of capital in the development of a website that ends up being costly to maintain – one or several staff members can update the website.

WebPresence is also ideal for personal websites done at home as well as school websites – teachers and students can now update the school website whenever they like.

"One of the greatest advantages of WebPresence is that it includes all the systems required to create and manage a successful website such as content management (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Everything has been integrated into one easy-to-use solution and it can be run by anyone - no programming knowledge is required," he says.

"One of WebPresence's most powerful features is that it supports skins - a skin changes the way a website looks - businesses can now change the skin of their website at any time which eliminates the need to have their website redesigned several months down the line - which always ends up being a costly and time consuming process," he adds. All of the information on the website is automatically restyled in seconds to match the new skin.

"Using this solution, a business's website will never be out-of-date as WebPresence is an evolving service - we add new functionality daily and as the service grows, so will the websites of businesses who use it."

"WebPresence is very easy to use and includes photo editing functionality, what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) word processor functionality as well as several wizards which let businesses and users customise the various elements of the website – a business can literally have a fully functional website up and running in one day..

"WebPresence is an all-in-one solution and includes the website management software, e-mail, website hosting, a free domain name, free support, free website skins and free software updates. Several add-ons are also available, an e-commerce add-on converts the website into an online shop with a secure shopping basket, wish list, credit card processing as well as transaction, invoicing and reporting tools. SMS add-ons add SMS messaging functionality to the CRM systems", he concludes.

WebPresence is available in three editions - Business, School and Home - and can be installed on either one PC, or several PCs if several people will manage the website, or it can be run from within a web browser.