Webpuzzle is an open and highly innovative enterprise software platform that enables you to create and manage portals, websites, webpages and intranets. The platform supports numerous proprietary applications (including both CMS and e-commerce), integrates any data source, third-party application or web service needed, and can work in parallel with your existing technology - it’s not a ‘forced substitute’.

All functionality is controlled through the platform’s user interface (UI) which enables you to create, manage and deploy best-in-class content faster and more effectively while reducing your operational costs and environmental footprint.

The UI provides familiar tools which make it easy for the different skills in your business (business architects, web designers, administrators, content creators and editors, SEO experts, your marketing team, etc.) to work in parallel and build, manage, edit, and publish - everything from the most complicated multi-lingual enterprise e-commerce applications and intranets to the simplest websites and blogs - without having to refer to developers.

Traditionally, the process of creating the code needed to turn static web pages into CMS templates, and the form fields which then enable content creators and editors to upload and publish content, is the domain of developers and is both time consuming and expensive.

The Webpuzzle platform enables you to create pixel perfect HTML templates for any design, in whichever way suits your business, without having to use developers. Create templates using your own tools and then import them using the UI. Use the platform UI to create templates from scratch. Or use the UI to clone and edit existing websites. Alternatively, we can produce page templates for you to your requirements.

Webpuzzle’s UI keeps design, templates, and content editing separate, enabling the different skills in your business to collaborate and work in parallel, without compromising each other's work. For example, business architects and web designers can create templates while content creators and editors populate the templates in parallel. 

This makes it easier to build portals, websites, and intranets quickly (or seamlessly integrate new webpages within existing websites in a way that is indistinguishable to users but technologically separate), without compromising the end-product, while reducing iteration and operational costs.

William Reed used the Webpuzzle platform (already being used to publish and manage external content across multiple World's 50 Best and IWC portals) to implement a bespoke intranet which integrates publishing, messaging and security using Microsoft Active Directory. They described the result as follows:

"The transition to the Webpuzzle CMS for our corporate intranet has been a fantastic experience, delivering seamless integration with Microsoft AD services, empowering our design team, and providing lightning-fast performance, and has significantly enhanced internal communications and user engagement - which has gone from 15% to over 70% since launch in late 2022.

One of the standout features has been the flawless integration with Microsoft AD services which enables employees to use their existing computer credentials to login. This not only simplifies access for existing employees but also makes the onboarding process for new hires virtually instantaneous.

Our design team has been thrilled with the degree of control and customisation that Webpuzzle offers. The ability to tweak designs and templates to match our brand and functional requirements has given us a unique and cohesive look that aligns with our corporate identity.

Another major win has been the performance. Webpuzzle's system produces dynamic HTML files that ensure the platform is not just stable, but also incredibly fast. To all intents and purposes pages load instantly and this has undoubtedly contributed to the high levels of user engagement.

Much higher levels of engagement (than with any other intranet system used previously) are matched by higher levels of employee activity and collaboration; users are actively creating community posts and are interacting with each other's posts as well as corporate updates, proving that a well-designed, easy to use intranet can have a direct impact on engagement.

The continuous support and availability for development improvements from Webpuzzle cannot be overstated. Any issues are promptly addressed, and the team is always open to discussing new features or customisations.

The Webpuzzle CMS has redefined what we can expect from a corporate intranet. By offering seamless integration, unparalleled design flexibility, rapid performance, and high engagement, it has provided a successful and dynamic intranet that will only get better."

John Markey Technical Product Owner & Integration Manager, William Reed

Inflexible technology combined with the need to continuously improve the quality of content can create a perfect storm of increased complication and escalating costs. Managing content can be time consuming, some enhancements can’t be made at all and everything adds time and cost - which could be better spent elsewhere.

Webpuzzle's UI, combined with the platform’s ability to integrate any third-party application into your templates (for example if you want to use Microsoft Active Directory to secure an intranet you are building), allows you to control and manage everything - templates, portals, websites, webpages, intranets, content, users, and access - in the most granular way and streamlines every aspect of the publishing process.

You can control users' access (internally and externally), deploy content responsively (in the most search-engine-friendly format), and continually test and refine your offering (for example, you can specify whether whole templates or specific areas of templates should call content dynamically for an A/B test of different propositions or advertising), secure in the knowledge that your website will display exactly as specified by your designers each time you publish.

Webpuzzle makes it easy to extract maximum value from your offering by cloning content - whole websites, templates or webpages can be cloned with one click. This is a powerful tool which, along with the other tools in the UI, enables you to quickly re-purpose content. Enhance the impact and reach of existing businesses by versioning and publishing content to social networks and other websites. Publish content or webpages sequentially, in real-time, in order to dramatise announcements. Clone and re-purpose whole websites to explore business model pivots and new opportunities which might otherwise be unaffordable. 

William Reed used this functionality to scale ‘The World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ business globally (for reference see https://www.theworlds50best.com/) and build their intranet while reducing ongoing technology costs by over 90%.

Currently, access to e-commerce functionality is polarised. Sophisticated applications, integrated with business processes and logistics, require expensive licenses and technology resources. While smaller businesses and individuals must choose between constrained functionality or selling through portals that aggregate traffic, exert control over customer relationships, and take a slice of your margin.

Webpuzzle enables you to create the most sophisticated e-commerce applications for a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise technology. The e-commerce application is integrated with the platform’s UI enabling you to assign every product in your inventory with a unique identity and properties (SKUs, language descriptions, currencies, prices, tax regimes, etc.) and to manage products in the same way as other content.

The platform enables you to scale functionality as your business expands and provides complete control of all aspects of the e-commerce process including who controls products and how they interact with them.

Leveraging your offering for new markets frequently requires making content available in multiple languages. The UI makes the process easy to control by integrating professional translation agency workflows and machine translation engines with CMS, e-commerce, translation, SEO, and publishing.

For professional translation, website content is automatically transmitted to translation agencies where it’s assessed against databases of pre-translated terms (saving you money) and a price for translation generated. Once approved, your content is translated and returned to Webpuzzle where it’s automatically re-assembled as a separate language version of your website. The machine translation process (using a translation engine like Google) is quicker, with new language versions of your website available in minutes.

Webpuzzle’s ability to automate translation - whether you commission professional translators or use machine translation - enables you to quickly deploy the multi-lingual websites needed and the UI makes it easy to manage different language versions of your website in the same way you manage the rest of your content.

SEO is mission-critical for initial and subsequent iterations of websites. However, vested interests and confusion about what’s involved often result in SEO being treated separately from the digital publishing process - with dire consequences for effectiveness and expenditure.

Webpuzzle treats SEO as integral to the publishing process and the UI provides simple tools which enable non-technical users (content creators, editors, and SEO specialists) to directly ‘tag’ all content including copy, images, movies, products, etc. This ensures that search engines always know exactly what they are looking at and can index content properly.

The UI further enhances SEO by making it easy for non-technical users to manage content dynamically. It's easy to add new content and edit and archive existing content (which may need to remain accessible). This enables you to deploy the kind of fresh content which will encourage search engines to continually re-visit your site and index accordingly.

When it comes to publishing the platform UI (recognising the diverse nature of search engines) enables you to optimise for international and local search engines by publishing different language versions of your website using local domain names - while allowing you to host and manage your websites centrally.

Much of your content - particularly large assets like images and movies - is resource hungry and, if not properly optimised, will dramatically increase the server capacity you need and compromise the speed with which content is served to users.

However, optimising content properly is easier said than done. Content creators and editors using traditional CMS need to either revert to their technology team (those with the skills and tools needed to optimise images and movies), optimise assets themselves (with varying degrees of success), or pass over this task. In practice, assets are often not properly optimised with all that implies for slow delivery of content, compromised UX, increased expense, and carbon footprint.

Webpuzzle solves this problem by automatically optimising your images – both as they are loaded by content creators and editors using the UI and when they are published – in order to ensure that your webpages are always the smallest possible size with the resolution needed. This reduces the work involved in preparing assets for publication, the capacity needed to support your content, and related costs while ensuring that whatever you publish is lightweight, the quality you need and environmentally friendly.

Webpuzzle’s UI automates the act of publication and treats it as a key gating event - allowing you to specify who is responsible for publishing, what they can publish and how often - making it easy to continually deploy new content.

Traditional CMS systems compile and serve webpages each time a user requests a page. The user's browser sends a request to the host's web server. The web server forwards the request to the application server. The application server collects content from database servers and dynamically composes and returns the page to the web server which, in turn, serves the page to the user. This process is extremely inefficient. It requires significant server processing for every single page view and slows the delivery of content to users - which users find frustrating, adversely impacting both the UX and your reputation.

Webpuzzle’s publishing system ensures that your content is served in the fastest way possible by automatically publishing all static components and media assets once (rather than repeatedly each time a page is called by a user). Webpage components (headline, lead, copy, etc.) are published as static HTML files to web servers (yours or Webpuzzle’s) while media assets and script files, e.g. images, movies, JavaScript files, etc., are automatically uploaded to Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers - for those enterprises that need to serve global content locally.

This means that when a user calls a page it has already been compiled and can be served instantly from web servers while all assets can be downloaded directly from the local CDN node. Only dynamic page components (live feeds, A/B advertising tests, etc.) need to be called from database servers.

This is the fastest way to serve content to users.

Combined with the ability to dynamically manage all content (including product inventories) through the UI, automated publishing of static HTML to web servers and uploading media assets to CDN (for global businesses) dramatically reduces processing time and enables webpages to be compiled once (rather than each time a user requests a page) and instantly served to users. This greatly improves both the UX and SEO (site speed is a key metric for search engines), increases site stability and reduces the capacity you need to serve large volumes of users and related costs. 

The need to compile webpages each time a user visits a page, combined with unpredicted spikes in traffic, can force publishers using traditional CMS to maintain larger, more resource-hungry and expensive networks than they need or risk periodic system crashes, with all that implies for environmental impact, UX and reputation.

For example, a single webpage within a high traffic website is likely to be responsible for emissions of between 20Kg and 100Kg of carbon per annum. This is roughly equivalent to sufficient electricity to drive an electric car between 350 - 1,700 miles (reference: https://www.websitecarbon.com).

Webpuzzle’s ability to synchronise the publishing of static HTML page files and upload of media assets dramatically reduces the amount of processing needed to compile a webpage called by a user. Page components are published once and served instantly from webservers and CDN nodes instead of being processed repeatedly as happens with traditional systems. This enables websites to handle massive volumes of concurrent users with many fewer servers - reducing operational costs and the environmental impact of deploying your offering.

Unsurprisingly, state-of-the-art platforms are starting to publish this way. However, Webpuzzle is the only platform to automate this functionality for publishers as part of an integrated, publicly available, digital publishing system.

Webpuzzle enables you to integrate any third-party application (including advertising servers like Google Ad Manager and Adobe Experience Cloud and security programmes like Microsoft Active Directory) with the portals, websites, webpages, and intranets you create, ensuring that you’re not painted into technological corners and allowing you to employ the optimal mix of best-of-breed applications you need.

Uniquely, Webpuzzle’s UI can be configured to suit your workflows - whether that’s the shape of your existing business or how you'd like to structure things - enabling you to create a bespoke version of the platform which suits how you want to work. If your requirements change the UI can be ‘flexed’ accordingly, including commissioning or integrating additional functionality. 
 
This accelerates the process of developing the functional package you need - whether bringing new businesses to market, scaling up existing operations or pivoting to address new opportunities - and is much more cost-effective than using traditional technologies.

Webpuzzle provides the kind of functional capability and service support you’d expect from enterprise software - and can’t get from open-source software - combined with unique usability which enables you to directly control the technology and collaborate without having to constantly refer to developers or the IT department. Any support required can be configured exactly how you want and is charged accordingly ensuring that you pay only for what you need.

Host your websites wherever you want - on your servers or Webpuzzle’s - in the knowledge that your application will be as powerful, lightweight, responsive, optimised and secure as you need it to be.

Webpuzzle expands and contracts in line with your changing requirements by using scripts to quickly build and add new servers to existing load balancers and clusters within a data centre. When the load increases, servers are added rapidly. When the load diminishes, servers can be powered down, lowering the hosting cost and environmental impact.

For smaller businesses and individuals struggling to operate effectively online using either intermediary aggregators (which exert control over your relationships with customers and take a cut of your sales), or constrained technology which can’t be scaled as your business grows, we’ve launched Webpuzzle Studio, a new platform which provides everything you need to quickly and cost-effectively build and publish webpages, blogs and e-commerce websites which you can control and seamlessly scale over time.

For details: webpuzzlestudio.com

Alex is one of Webpuzzle’s founding partners and is the architect and technical lead responsible for the platform, applications and user interface. Previously, Alex worked on enterprise applications for OLM, SONY Europe, 3Com and Lloyds Banking Group. He was the first Head of Development at Primelocation where he worked closely with Simon Simpson on the development and launch of Primelocation.com.

Simon is one of Webpuzzle’s founding partners and has worked closely with Alex Husic to bring the Webpuzzle platform to life. Previously, Simon was a founding partner of Bespoke Communications, the business responsible for developing, launching and managing Lombard Direct, several other direct businesses, and Primelocation.com. Simon was personally responsible for designing the Primelocation logotype, identity and website along with the TV and press advertising, literature and Primelocation magazine.

MA New College, Oxford, FRSA

Mark’s first career was as a strategy consultant, and he worked at McKinsey & Company. From 1996 onwards, his second career has been as an investment banker, where he has held numerous senior roles including, inter alia, general partner at Greenhill & Co, Managing Director and Global Co-Head of the Energy and Natural Resources Group at HSBC, Managing Director, JP Morgan, and Senior Managing Director, Europe at Guggenheim Partners. With over 30 years’ experience in the energy and resources sector, Mark has advised on M&A transactions with a combined value in excess of $500 billion.

LLB UCL and BCL New College, Oxford

John is a recognised pioneer in the provision of web design and technology services and has been at the forefront of digital development for the past decade. Previously John was one of the founders of Head London where he was involved with numerous digital projects including Microsoft’s inaugural use of Enterprise Web 2.0 technology in the UK (in partnerhip with the NHS), broadening the definition of accessibility compliance in consultation with the RNIB and the award winning ‘WebCameron’ platform.

MA Edinburgh University

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