Rombla

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

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