Affordable Web Site Design

Ok, I only left the test theme that I’m working on up here for 3 days, but I got what I needed out of it. I really didn’t want to keep it up for too long as I’m planning a major launch for that thing and don’t want to let the cat entirely out of the bag too early. I’m going to launch that theme, along with a couple plugins I’m working on, and a new site, all together as part of a major promotion. I’ll keep you updated on how everything goes.

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New design, right? Well, I’m testing out this Wordpress theme as I’m going to be releasing it publicly in a week or so and I wanted to play around with it. I’ve designed several other Wordpress themes, this being my second public release, and I’ve found that I can’t quite get a good feeling for what I like and don’t like about a theme until I’ve used it…there’s really no better usability test than actually using it.

Anyway, that’s what’s up with the new design, it’ll only be up for a week or so while I put some finishing touches on it.

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No, that’s not a typo in the title, that’s the name of the relatively new search engine company that is getting whispers all over the web about being a potential real competitor to Google (pronounced “Cool”). Aside from the name of the company gushing with that Web 2.0-style weird naming convention, they claim to have something pretty serious up their sleeves…the ability to index websites at 1/10 the cost of Google.

Based out of Menlo Park, California, and, according to Michael Arrington, they were originally funded with a $5 million dollar chunk of money out of the owner’s pockets. According to the company’s website, they’ve also received one $8 million dollar investment from Tugboat Ventures and another, more recent, $25 million dollar venture capital investment from Madrone Capital Partners (although the wording is unclear, it appears that Madrone isn’t putting up all $25 million, but the largest chunk of that among several other investors).

The company’s staff, again, according to Michael Arrington, is comprised of a husband and wife team, formerly of Google, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. The two were joined by Russell Power, formerly of Xift and IBM, and creator of the Xift search engine and the WebFountain Prototype from IBM. Apparently they’ve got somewhere in the realm of 10-15 employees now at their Menlo Park office.

In case you’re wondering if Cuill is crawling your site, check your stats for “Twiceler,” the name of their experimental crawler. In case anyone’s interested, their site says the it crawls from the following IP addresses:

38.99.13.121    38.99.44.101    64.1.215.166    208.36.144.6
38.99.13.122    38.99.44.102    64.1.215.162    208.36.144.7
38.99.13.123    38.99.44.103    64.1.215.163    208.36.144.8
38.99.13.124    38.99.44.104    64.1.215.164    208.36.144.9
38.99.13.125    38.99.44.105    64.1.215.165    208.36.144.10
38.99.13.126    38.99.44.106

So, the big question is, do they stand a chance against the force that seems to be taking over the digital universe right now? Well, who knows, but Google’s power isn’t all wrapped up in its search engine. The reason Google is so huge is because it’s effectively expanded into lateral markets and they have quite a foothold at this point, so it’s going to be tough for a competitor to take over. It could happen, but certainly not for a while. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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