General Information

You may have additional questions about our Web Products. So, we have added more detailed information below. Please see our FAQ Page, as well, for more details.

What kind of Software Products do you sell?

We sell Website Software, which installs on a web server and allows you to manage data inside a website. Each of our software products consists of a set of web site pages contained in a single folder. When dropped on a website server, together they create a Website Application.

General Product Information

The "Island" line of products are carefully designed to allow our customers the most efficient and lite-weight web solutions possible. WIth a fundamental belief in the power of the web, we have carefully crafted our current line of web applications for clean display of media and data using traditional web browsers. Our web applications remain very simple and efficient engines for managing online data. They are backed by a robust XML Database architecture, and so designed to sustain a good amount of online data. Our products are also design around Web Standards, and are validated carefully against their XHTML doctypes. The design structure is also based on CSS, and has been specially designed to handle a full range of cross-browser issues, supporting a wide range of browsers, old and new. The XHTML structure supports a very clean skinning system, which combined with the styled skins, allow the products to remain fulling customizable as far as look-and-feel. In fact, all our code remains customizable.

Our current line of products are based on traditional web scripting technologies, and carefully designed for easy installation and error-free server-side functioning. Because our products require a reliable and robust web server environment to run, we have chosen to build our products on Microsoft technologies and servers, including Windows IIs servers. For this reason, our products are dependent on the site owner having their website running on an Windows server. IIs and the Microsoft server family support a secure scripting and .NET platform that handles our web product designs and support greater website stability in the final end-product. The site pages themselves are based on ASP (3.0 Classic), or VBScripting technology, and are carefully designed with error checking, security, session management and class object instantiation in mind. The product also includes several ASP.NET pages written in C#, which handle special requirements in the site, such as thumbnail and photo rotation capabilities.

The Architecture

Our website architecture is very simple, and we like it that way! Our product architecture is what we call "folder-based". This simply means that its organization is built around the folder concept, not complex, third-party, libray-based architectures that are hacked together overseas, like so many open-source products and proprietary applications out there today. If you have ever tried to install or manage these global, open-source websites, you know that there is bad and there is good programming in every page. That's because too many unmanaged developers have inserted their ideas into the architectures, and ruined the organizational design of the total application. Why waste your time trying to deal with these endless bugs, open source forums and database eccentricities, when you can run our products out of the box with little or no understanding of how the product was built. In this way, we save you tons of time, as we design things simpler and more usable for our end-users! In addition, our database is folder-based, and built on simple XML technologies. And, our web design is based on Web Standards using only a handful of CSS files. This design system is very efficient in delivering the look-and-feel using a small set of code and images. These three pieces give our website architecture a very small foot-print on the server, yet a very pleasurable end-user experience!

Overall, our folder-based architecture makes our products much easier to use for the average website user. Installation is now as easy as dragging a folder onto the server, rather than running long error-prone installation applications, or long sql scripts. We pride ourselves on simplicity! This simple architecture also makes our products much easier to manage, customize, and even update. Every script that makes up our product can be quickly located in folders with intuitive names, like "Modules, and "Skins", etc. For example, all multimedia uploaded by you or the system go in a "Storage" folder. If you decide to configure anything, the brains to our product are simply found in a "Systems" folder. Need to change the look-and-feel of the website to match your website design? Try using the "Skins" folder, where a library of different skins are stored. Or simply use our Settings Module to change the homepage and skins for your site. Do you need even more custom interface changes? No problem. Try changing some style sheet code in one of the skins folders. Or, copy one of the skin folders, paste it back in with a new name, and customize the CSS inside using a text editor. WOW! You just created your own skin in a matter of minutes and completely changed the design of your product! Its all there should you decide to go in and customize the product.

And all our products use the same exact architecture, so can be updated the same way. Even adding new skins and modules is as simple as dragging a folder (Modules and Skins) into the product itself. The website is even intelligent, and instantly know you added something and updates itself with the changes you make to folders in the system. You might even say our architecture allows for a level of "self-configuration". No, we havent created "The Matrix", so do not get scared. We just sat down and decided to design our architecture around you, our users...and built it so that it makes things as easy as possible for you!

The Code

At this time, all of our web software products are written in several langauges, which includes ASP (VBScript) and ASP.NET (C#). These Microsoft languages and frameworks allow our software to perform very well on Windows-based servers. These technologies also allow our software to access our Universal XML Database system, using additional Microsoft technologies built into the server. Our portable and fast folder-based database technologies gives our products an additional speed and flexible architecture that allows each product to perform well on web servers.

In addition, our complete software user interface and design (UI) is based on Web Standards and recommendations set by the www.W3C.org web standards group. We firmly believe in the work done by this group and its supporters world-wide in standardizing the web. We make sure we follow the specifications as best we can when designing our web products. This means our website interfaces rely on the best of CSS (Cascading style sheets) and XHTML technologies, which adds value to all our web products. It gives them increased rendering speed, search engine indexing, management, cross-browser conformance, and customization advantages other similar open source website products do not fully offer you. What you get, in the end, is a small yet powerful folder-based website product you can quickly add into your existing website with minimal setup and hassle.

Installation

Installation is easy as well! To install our software, you simply upload this folder of web application scripts to your server and it creates a small web application on your website and server. After uploading it to your website, you can access the software using a browser, and by typing your url to your website and the path to your product's root or "Islands" folder. No database setup, additional plugins, or services required. Its that simple! For more detailed installation information, please visit our Installation page under Support.

Design

When you open one of our web products into your browser, you will see the interface is very simple. Most of the navigation elements are simple dropdown elements. The layout is designed for maximum display of content, like thumbnails of photos. Our web products also contains several functional "parts". The application is actually a shell for these special parts, which do all the work in the software. The most important ones are called "Modules", which allow you to access various functions and features inside ImageIsland. These Modules are what you use to manage your data inside the software. The software also consists of "Skins". Skins are nothing but folders of organized CSS style sheet pages and images which maintain overall look-and-feel for the product. Like Modules, skins are modular, and can be updated or added by simply dragging and dropping a new skins folder inside the "Skins" directory.

Modules

Modules, in all our web products, allow you to do specific things, like manage photos, create web pages of media, secure your site, or configure your product. Modules are nothing but folders of code that sit inside the Modules folder in the software product. The whole web product is built on this simple architecture, so updating and adding functionality to your web application is as simple as dragging a folder into your Modules folder!

One example of a module in one of our current products (ImageIsland) is the ImageManager Module, which allows you to upload JPEG's, GIF's, PNG's, and BMP's to your module and see them live online after upload. On upload, ImageIsland will create high quality thumbnails of your uploaded photos for you automatically! Your photographs can then be named, rotated and rescaled. The ImageWebPages Module allows you to create simple web pages and assign photos stored in your manager module to these pages, which then allows others online to view then in your website. Each Web Page you create even comes with handy email feature so you can send friends and family a link to your view page.

The Security Module in our products allows you to create users and logins and secure your ImageIsland modules so no one but users you create can login and access their photos. Finally, a Settings Module is helpful in showing and hiding parts of the interface, and setting a default skin for the product.

Please visit our Modules page for a listing of all our Standard Modules that come with our products.

Skins

Our web products also comes with several free Skins as well, so you can customize the look-and-feel of your website installation. The importance of skins in our software is that they are all controlled by CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, so are fully customizeable by you, if you like.

Please visit our Skins page for a listing of all our Standard Skins that come with our products.

Versioning

As we enhance our products, we add new product "versions". These are simply upgrades of the current products we sell. We do support older versions of our software, but at this time, do not sell our older products, nor offer upgrades to users with older versions. This allows us to provide our customer an improving product line over time. Users who have older copies of our software must buy new versions in order to get the new features. To help our current customers upgrade, we sometimes email coupons or discounts. We also offer a photo module to help migrate user photos to the new systems, though these modules do add a small cost to a user's purchase of the newer version. As we add new products and newer versions we continually build a more stable and powerful product, often with more features. So, as you upgrade from an older product to a newer one, please keep that in mind.

Listed below are a few of the older products we have sold (the version number is on the homepage of the product):

ImageIsland 1.1
ImageIsland 1.0
*ImageIsle 1.0 (Freeware)

*Note: ImageIsle 1.0 is our freeware version and is still available for download, though we do not provide updates or upgrades to this product.

How are our Island Products different than other Software Programs you see online?

Our Products are NOT Desktop Applications...

Our Products are VERY different from most web software you may find for sale or download online. Unlike many of the more popular products, our web products are NOT DESKTOP SOFTWARE applications that recreate html you must post online! 90% of the products that claim to be web photo software applications are nothing more that desktop applications that generate HTML pages you FTP to your website! Yuck!!! Why would you want to buy something you are forced to install on your home computer? Why would you want to regenerate HTML photo galleries everytime you add new photos? With these solutions, you can't upload new items unless you are at home and have a copy of this software available on that one computer. If you change computers, you are out of luck getting your valuable photos to your website, and what's worse, have to pay for another copy for that computer, if you do decide to purchase it for that computer. Plus, you are stuck with generated html pages with your photos "stuck" in them, versus a system that dynamically adds and displays photos in web pages based on what you change on the website live via an administration area. No FTP access required! That is what makes our products superior to the majority of web photo applications out there! Our products are pure web-based solutions! Know the difference before you buy!

ImageIsland is NOT another Photo Sharing Website...

ImageIsland© is VERY different than all those photo subscription sites. Everyday, a new set of these sites appear on the web, offering free photo, music or video uploads to their domains. Most of these are free so why would they be so bad? First of all, many of these "sharing sites" force you to use their web domains to login and upload photos. Your photos remain housed under their domain, rather than your own, making it difficult to control and manage your media outside of their proprietary web applications and systems. Thats no good. Most of these sites require you manage another login. How many logins do we all manage these days in order to get to our personal blogs, finances, digital photos, and emails? Think about it. Most of these sites require you read or sort through other user's photos, further distracting your loved ones from your personal image galleries. Many also bombard you with search engine links, advertising, and endless print ads. Most of these sites drive valuable traffic away from your website because users and search engines go off to these "photo portals" when following links to your images. Its free advertising revenue for them at your expense! Ughh!!!! Thats no good. So, more and more, these sort of "photo portals" are popping up by the dozens everyday and trying to entice you to go to their site and upload and manage your photos on their sites. Weigh the costs!
ImageIsland empowers YOU AND YOUR WEB SITE, free of these domains, and ads and photo communities. You simply manage your photos from within your website using ImageIsland. No subscrition or additional login required. No need to send your visitors surfing to other url's. Plus, aren't you tired of sharing photos in those crazy photo communities? Why would you want your users looking at other user photos? You want to show your photos to your visitors free of distractions, right? That's what makes ImageIsland special....no more photos linked to foreign domains, no more print ads in your face, no more search engine ads, no more logins, and no more photo communities in your face. With ImageIsland, your users go to YOUR website....not some other photo site.

Our Web Products are NOT another one of those Big Web Portals asking you to join...

Our Web Products are VERY different than those Big Portals or hosting software providers, that give you free file sharing services. Yes, you know who you are! These sites entice you to store all your email and blogs and photos using their tools, but then surround you with their search engine "ad words", or bombard you with advertisements. Many ISP's or web hosting companies may provide some way to upload photos, but then, what happens if you move your site? Where are your photos? Can the software that manages them and the databases be moved? We think not! Unlike hosting portals and search providers, ImageIsland software is portable and you can move it from server to server as your hosting changes. Even the data is portable!!! Our software empowers you to free yourself from the enslavement to these portals. You dont have to follow the pack. You can manage multimedia files inside your own domain and site and free yourself forever from these portal photo solutions with web solutions from GiantIsland.com!

This a summary of our web products and how they work. For more detailed information, please review our Customization page, our Support pages, and "Live Demo" sections inside each product area, to see more about what our software can offer you.