BloomByte

BloomByte, a creation of Bloom Consulting + Publishing, is the next generation in Web site (website) design and management. We’ve designed our tools and services around the specific needs of our nonprofit and corporate clients since 2003. Let’s go on a tour of where website design has been, and then you’ll see why BloomByte is different.

Website architecture involves technical, aesthetic and functional criteria. Basically, you want your website to (1) show off text and pictures about your product or cause (2) look great (3) do fancy things that impress the reader and (4) have a back end system that you can log into and make changes. Before BloomByte, you had to choose two of these, maybe three if you had a talented staff member or volunteer, but never all four. BloomByte uses Open Source technology to bring you all four and much more at reasonable prices. How? Open Source is free code available to any bright programmers who know how to use it. You don’t have to know what Open Source is or how it works, but in case you want to learn, click here to visit www.opensource.org. We love the Open Source Inititaive because it reflects Bloom’s corporate identity as a community impact firm. It’s helped us move to the next stage of our growth as a publishing company while still serving our core customer base of local nonprofits and small businesses.

In the traditional (pre-computer) view of "publishing," information of any sort was compiled into a single finished form, such as "a book" or "a catalog." So, the end product of the publishing process was some kind of publication, which contained its content but was the only expression of that content. The process of "publishing" consisted of both preparing the content and compiling it into a single, particular format such as "a book."

BloomByte gives you everything you want plus the essential ability to “publish” different ideas every day on your website through content management systems built into your site. With a content management system, the act of "writing content" is separated from the act of "compiling it" into any particular form or format. Once a particular piece of material has been written, BloomByte does the work of compiling it into its final deliverable form or forms.

Here’s the key difference: If you want to translate your printed Annual Report into Japanese, you need someone who reads and writes both English and Japanese to tell the designer what to design and then it must be reprinted. In the past, creating any sort of website also meant hiring a kind of translator. It meant hiring a designer to make your site “pretty” and a programmer who could “translate” the pictures and text into the language of the Internet. Not Japanese, of course, but HTML, which is about as hard to learn as Japanese but just as beautiful!

To bring the explanation full circle, consider the BloomByte system as a valuable staff member who designs, programs and publishes your ideas as often as you like. As long as you can use Microsoft Word, you can speak its language. Here’s what the user interface looks like: