Weblobe's History
Weblobe has been a personal mission of the vertebrate.co.uk development team for the last five years.
Prior to weblobe's launch, our main business was custom development of some very large and complex websites. While we're very good at that kind of thing, we've always been frustrated by the inherent cost of the kind of specialist service we were offering. While there's any number of ways for big companies to spend big budgets on web sites, high-quality, full-featured an infinitely adaptable sites are generally way beyond the budget of an individual or small company.
No matter how much we wanted to help the little guy, we were subject to the same economic reality as the rest of the planet and have to charge money for our time. So we needed something that would take the grunt-work out of building websites. Something that would allow us to deploy the same quality of site that we've always taken great pride in building, but in fraction of the time and at an even smaller fraction of the cost. And while we were at it, it'd be very cool if these sites included some accessible content management tools that would help the non-technophile Joe Average to edit and control his own site.
So in our 'spare' time we started the long process of trying to figure out how to build weblobe. By the beginning of 2004, the remaining few gaps in our knowledge were getting rapidly filled and a proper plan was starting to develop. In mid-2004 we launched the beta of Hyperlinkomatic, a link management tool that forms one essential part of weblobe's core. By the beginning of 2005 a lot of the technology we'd been waiting for had come of age and weblobe was starting to look more and more like a reality.
Now, in June 2005, weblobe is up and running, and being used to deploy real-world sites. We're still debugging, dreaming up new and funky features, writing the documentation, and setting up the automated sign-up procedure...
Welcome to weblobe. Where, you may well ask, do we go from here..?