Remote FTP publishing

Announcing the latest new feature in Kourou: remote FTP publishing!

Some customers' pre-existing webspace is very basic, not supporting "advanced" features like PHP, Perl etc that modern websites increasingly need to work efficiently. So we are pleased to announce that Goznet Systems' Kourou content management platform now supports remote FTP publishing.

Basically this means that you can have a fully content-managed Kourou-based website even if your webspace doesn't directly support it. You simply maintain your website at a special private address, and then click Remote publish in the Kourou toolbar to send the updates to your actual website via FTP.

There are a few limitations still. In particular this does mean your website should not rely on any special dynamic functions like searching or contact forms, but even so, this new feature opens the realm of possibilities enabled by Kourou to even the most simple webspace. Features like Google Maps, Flash and so on are all potentially supported, so there is still plenty of scope for highly interactive websites!

Introducing geebiz

Want to get on to the web, but a full-blown website (even with Kourou's easy-to-use content management) is a bit too much to get your head around right now? Well it could be that geebiz is right up your street! It's a new service allowing anyone to create a simple but stylish web-page for their business, including eye-catching banner graphics and the ability to tweak the colours and fonts to your heart's content. Needless to say, as part of Goznet Systems' coordinated product range, your geebiz site can easily be upgraded to full-blown Kourou at any time and at very competitive additional cost.

As a special bonus, because geebiz is still in its beta-testing phase, sign up now and when you're ready to publish, then subject to approval, you can get your web-page up on the web and visible to your future clients absolutely free - and if you can provide any useful feedback to us, that could even be free forever!

Farnham foodbank website updated

We've just updated the successful Farnham foodbank website to closely follow the brand new design guidelines from the charity's parent organisation. In line with current best practice, the Kourou-based site is now optimised for wider displays, with the main content occupying the industry standard 960 pixel width.

Farnham foodbank as an organisation has got off to a great first year, providing emergency food parcels to well over 200 needy people in the area. It's part of a nationwide network of similar foodbanks, under the oversight of the Trussell Trust.

Samantha-Jayne

Not so much action on the Kourou front for a little while, but Goznet Systems has been busy working on other projects. We recently rolled out a significant update to the Tracey Lawson Dressage website to convert it from a Microsoft Publisher project that only really played nicely with Internet Explorer, and have a couple more websites (one Kourou-based, one not) just waiting for client approval. One major Kourou release however was the site for Samantha-Jayne, a new saxophonist operating in the UK midlands and beyond.

One of the distinctive features of the site is the bespoke Flash-based media player as depicted in the screenshot above, which displays a gently-animated slideshow to accompany Samantha-Jayne's example tracks, inspired by the "radio" player on the popular Last.fm music website.

Novelty/complexity model

This isn't quite so obviously Kourou, but it's a little web application for AJP Consulting going live any time now that employs some of the modular elements of it. This is why we call Kourou a content management platform, rather than system - it's a loose collection of technology that can come together in many forms, from individual bits of handy functionality able to be dropped in to independently managed websites, to complete ground-up site designs.

The web application collects a number of responses about a project from the registered user, which are then analysed to determine the novelty and complexity of the project, to recommend further reading, and to generate a reference PDF containing all of the above in a handy print-off-and-keep format.

In this case, the quickform element of Kourou is used in the admin interface, significantly accelerating what could otherwise have been a very laborious and error-prone development process for something not directly visible to the visiting users.

Search rankings

Hey, it's surely at least a little bit exciting to see that this new blog is doing great in the search rankings! At the time of writing, we're #9 on Google worldwide, #1 on Google UK, #5 on Bing and #1 on Ask Jeeves UK. That's when searching for kourou as a term in itself, admittedly (rather than best content management platform for example), but that's still a bit cool, right?

SFM Project Management

Another new site for an existing client, SFM Project Management offers services to self-builders. Text content, titles and so on were all defined by a friend of the client.

As Kourou sites go, it's pretty straightforward, not employing any particularly fancy features or plug-ins, but that reflected in the speed of design and implementation - and therefore the overall cost to the client.