Matterform Media is marking its 12th year on the Web with a brand new Web site design. The new Web site, visible now at www.matterform.com, is designed to provide better customer service to the users of Matterform’s consumer software for Macintosh.
Matterform Media launched its first Web site in 1994. The 1994 site was one of the first e-commerce Web sites in the world and went online at a time when there were fewer than 500 Web sites on the internet.
To mark the occasion, Matterform has also published a retrospective of past designs, including the 1994 design. The retrospective is online at link.matterform.com/1994.
The new site is powered by Matterform’s new content-management technology, code-named “Voltaire.” Voltaire is a database-driven system for publishing Web pages with many exciting features:
- Clean URLs, requiring no “search codes” like “?” or “&” or “=”.
- Very low overhead, with very fast page rendering.
- Support for multiple CSS-based template files.
- Region inheritance lets you define content that will be shared by all pages in a folder.
- Database and language independence. Current version implemented with PHP and MySQL. Other implementations are planned.
- Extensible with custom plug-ins.
Matterform is also developing a client-side tool for adding and editing content to a Voltaire server. The client-side tool, code named “Candide,” will allow multi-user Web site editing, built-in previews, Web page and Web site versions, and more.
The new Voltaire technology will make it feasible for Matterform to update its site more frequently with new content and add modern features with ease. Future upgrades already planned include a site search and a per-product RSS feed.
Additional information about Voltaire and Candide will be made available later in 2006.