Author Archive
Welcome to our Spanish speaking friends.
We greatly appreciate the kind words for Rombla from several Spanish bloggers including; www.wwwhatsnew.com, www.genbeta.com, www.geeksroom.com, www.infoconocimiento.com, www.albertoaranda.net. The number Spanish speakers in the Rombla community now out numbers English speakers by a wide margin.
My apology for the poor support of accented characters in our initial release. A special thanks to Fernando Checa for engaging with Chris(in English) via Twitter to help us find and correct several important bugs.
We released an update to Rombla yesterday to improve support for accents and fixed many other errors. The overall stability of Rombla is much improved and we have added a few new features for you.
We depend on you to share your experience and your needs to help to us improve Rombla. Please keep the feedback coming… in Spanish or English!
Bienvenidos a nuestros amigos Hispanos
Apreciamos profundamente las palabras amables en referencia a Rombla de varios Bloggers incluyendo a www.wwwhatsnew.com, www.genbeta.com, www.geeksroom.com, www.infoconocimiento.com, www.albertoaranda.net. La cantidad de clientela que habla español sobrepasa los que hablan ingles por un gran margen
Discúlpenos por la falta de apoyo de acentos en nuestra presentación inicial. Nuestro agradecimiento a Fernando Checa por twittear con Chris para ayudarnos a encontrar y corregir varios bugs.
Presentamos una nueva versión de Rombla ayer para mejorar el apoyo de acentos y arreglamos varios otros errores. La estabilidad general de Rombla ha mejorado y hemos implementado varias nuevas adiciones.
Esperamos contar con el apoyo de la comunidad para que compartan sus experiencias y necesidades para ayudarnos a mejorar. Por favor sigan dándonos sus impresiones y sugerencias… sea en español o en ingles!<-->
Rombla update: December 12, 2008
The Rombla team has been hard at work improving Rombla since its introduction last month. We completed an release Yesterday that fix many bugs. The overall stability is much improved and we also added a few new features:
- Improved support for accented characters.
- Fixed video linking problems
- Deep linking support with unique URLs for each site page. This allows other sites to link directly to a page in your site rather than just the home page. This will improve Search engine optimization(SEO) for your site.
- Expanded undo functionality to include design and layout changes.
- Added palette editor. Double click on the palette in the property list box to open the editor.
- Added advanced color selection tool. Click the small color ball at the top of the color picker and you will open the advanced selector to pick from millions of colors.
The team has also made significant progress on two important features that many of you are waiting for.
- Publishing of Rombla sites to external domains. Our testers our now validating FTP transfer of Rombla sites to several large hosting companies. Initially, you will be able to download your site and ftp it to your existing hosted domain. Shortly after, we will add the ability for Rombla to automatically publish to other hosting companies without the need to download and transfer files.
- We have also added the ability for Rombla to auto-generate a background copy of each page content in HTML format to help search engines to index content and dramatically improve your site’s search engine ranking.
These two features are currently being tested and will be included in our next update release before the end of the year.
Rombla at MAX
This was my first MAX event and I was extremely impressed by the sense of community I saw and felt there. I have always respected Adobe as a strong technology company but didn’t realize how close they are to their customers. The openness and genuine dialog demonstrated by the Adobe team was like nothing I have seen before from a large technology company.
The response to Rombla’s introduction at MAX was extremely positive. I had a chance to demo Rombla for several members of the press and most of the Adobe product teams. Hundreds of you who saw the announcement have signed up and taken Rombla for a test drive. Many thanks for registering and for sending us feedback and suggestions. Please help to spread the work about Rombla. We are working hard on the next update that will be out in mid December. Please keep the suggestions coming.
The Rombla registration data suggests that most of the initial interest has come from Web Designers. I am excited to see what you can accomplish with Rombla. Please share some of your designs with the community. After logging in, click the Share button and then select the “Share with community” checkbox so everyone can see your creations.
The most requested feature is the ability to publish your sites to existing domains or new domains other than rombla.com. We are testing this feature now and plan to have it ready for the next update. You will be able to change the publish location for the sites you are currently building on Rombla sub-domains. Also, look for better help/tutorials, lots of bug fixes and several new features in December.
We have received several requests from Flex developers to allow the viewing and export of the site design source code(MXML and CSS) so they can be opened in Flex Builder. This was planned for post beta but we will move it up on the feature list if there is sufficient interest. If anyone else in interested in accessing site source files please let us know.
PIRIA LAUNCHES ROMBLA™
PIRIA LAUNCHES ROMBLA™ TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN WEB DESIGNERS AND CLIENTS
Visual website builder enables designers to create
fully-editable sites that clients can easily update online
San Francisco, Adobe MAX Conference, November 17—Piria, Inc. today announced Rombla™, the powerful online “no programming” site builder that enables designers to create fully-editable websites using simple visual editing tools and then share them with their clients to edit and maintain. By making it easy for clients to keep their sites up to date, designers can focus on higher-margin design work rather than ongoing maintenance, marking a new chapter in web design.
Designers can also share their designs with the Rombla community to showcase their talents and attract new clients. Business owners select a design and customize it themselves or collaborate with a designer using Rombla to make major changes and additions.
The survey Internet Design & Development from The Industry Measure reported that designers are spending the majority of their time on maintenance and updates rather than on new site design. For their part, many clients have been frustrated that they can’t edit their own sites and keep them up to date. Rombla addresses both these limitations.
Through the innovative use of the Adobe® Flex®3 Framework, Rombla gives designers control over every element of every page, including style, layout, and content, without forcing them to write a line of code. And Rombla provides true WYSIWYG editing that’s powerful enough to meet the needs of designers and yet easy enough for their clients to use.
Rombla offers a rich design environment by tightly integrating with online design tools such as Adobe Kuler® color palettes, content sources such as Flickr, YouTube, and Google Maps, and utilities such as PayPal for shopping and payment. For example, within Rombla a designer can find content online and drag and drop it onto any page. In addition, Rombla includes a robust content management system that makes it easy to create forms and view data.
“We created Rombla to give designers and their clients a better way of working together,” said Bob Lang, founder of Piria. “Designers can focus their talent on creating compelling designs and their customers can contribute content and keep their site up to date. This frees designers from their least profitable task and gives clients a cost-effective way to modify their site’s content and optimize its effectiveness.”
Rombla also solves a long-standing limitation with online website building solutions that lock sites to a single hosting provider. Websites built with Rombla can be saved, shared, edited and published to any web domain. This allows designers who offer hosting services to easily deploy Rombla sites to their managed domains.
“With Rombla, designers can separate content from design, which really changes the dynamics of building websites,” said Chris Fortier of Chris Fortier Graphics in Calgary, Alberta. “I can now rapidly build out a site and then work collaboratively with the client to finalize the design and content, which is a process that’s far more efficient than what designers have been doing since we started building client sites more than ten years ago.”
Piria plans to expand Rombla’s site sharing capabilities with the Rombla Marketplace, which will give designers a way to showcase and sell their designs and design services. The Rombla Marketplace will be part of the commercial release in early 2009.
Rombla is available in beta at no cost now at www.rombla.com.
It is the first product from Piria, a privately-held firm founded in 2007 and headquartered near Denver, Colorado. For further information contact Bob Lang, president, at 303 435-7571 or bob@piria.com.
High-resolution screenshots of Rombla are available at www.rombla.com/press.
About Piria
Piria Inc. was founded in late 2007 by veteran software industry executives to create compelling Internet applications that fully exploit the web environment and rival their desktop counterparts. Piria’s first project, Rombla, is a visual web design tool powerful enough for designers and easy enough for small business owners. Rombla’s unique site-sharing capability creates a new way for designers and their clients to collaborate. Piria is based near Denver, Colorado, and has a development office in Montreal.
Media Contact:
Alan Penchansky
The Pen Group Communications
(305) 529-1944
alan@thepengroup.com
What’s in a name?
A little over a year ago, I was on holiday in one of my favorite places: Uruguay, South America. I was sitting in a café on the Rambla, a bustling boulevard along the coast, contemplating starting a new business. I was trying to come up with unique names that would have a URL and trademark available. The internet land grab has made this a frustrating task. It dawned on me that there were interesting words all around me and as Uruguay is just a side road on the web they may still be available.
I was in the beautiful seaside village of Piriapolis, founded by Francisco Piria early in the last century. I wandered over to the local internet café and quickly registered several domains that became our company and product names. So what about Rombla? It is a gringo variation on Rambla. I would like to tell you we changed the name from Rambla to Rombla because people had a hard time pronouncing Rambla. Truth be told, it was a twitter from Rafe Needleman. Back in April at the Web2.0 show, Rafe was kind enough to blog about our Alpha version. We were following his twitter when he mentioned “nice app but pity about the name. It sounds like NAMBLA.” A quick Google search later I decided we had to change the name. Rombla was available and easier to pronounce.. so here we are.
Who is Rombla for?
In short, business owners AND design professionals. When we started the Rombla project we set out to create the best website design tool for small business owners. We wanted to eliminate the technical skills gap that prevented them from building and maintaining their own sites. At Alpha stage, I put on my small business owner’s hat and set out to create sample sites to test Rombla’s capabilities. I had no problem creating content and laying it out but I was quickly frustrated that I could not get the sites to have a clean professional look. I called on a professional designer to help me with the site’s style. As is often the case, necessity quickly became the mother of invention. We were sending the sites back and forth and I could not work on the content while the Designer was working with the site. Piria’s engineering team put together a framework that made it easy for us to share the site. Then the designer started asking for more design control capabilities in Rombla. We added many more design features but made sure that they were easy enough for me to use too. That is how Rombla developed into a tool that improves rather than replaces the relationship between businesses and web designers.
Currently, we are working on ways to improve upon the traditional web design marketplace. We are developing an online community where businesses and designers can meet and work together. The Rombla community will offer social networking features for business owners and designers to collaborate and improve the effectiveness of their sites. We will include a marketplace where designers can promote their services and sell their designs. We are very interested to hear from you and get your input on the community features as well as the business model for the marketplace.
Please join the dialog.
Categories
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Tags
about piria accented characters Adobe MAX Rombla feedback features update color picker community External publish Interview new stuff Piria rombla rambla name rafe needleman rombla rombla launch Rombla rambla piria Search engine friendly Spanish Update your own domainSmall business resources
- Working on some fun stuff stay tuned for more info
- working hard on new things thank you for your patience.
- working on new features stay tuned!
- @kotsego thank you :) we have much more coming soon. We have people in Montreal :)
- @justbecos thank you for the kudos!
