The maintenance of Web content is one of the primary concerns colleges and universities face. It’s a thorny problem: administrators want to make changes to their Web pages, Web teams are overloaded with change requests, and in decentralized higher ed environments, you can’t count on everyone to have the same skillset.
At White Whale Web Services, we believe content management solutions should start small, with a focus on offering the right tool for the job. A CMS shouldn’t tell you how to build or organize your Web site; it should emphasize ease of use for unskilled users, and flexibility and open architecture for Web and IT staff. And it shouldn't be the only way to edit your Web site— you're likely to have users with considerable expertise in other perfectly acceptable authoring environments, and those folks shouldn't have to learn a new system if it's not necessary.
In our years building and developing Web sites and data applications, we’ve come into contact with most commercial CMS systems, and we’ve learned that few if any commercial systems meet these criteria; most are overbuilt, constructed on closed, proprietary foundations, and stuffed with features that most users will never take advantage of. And open-source solutions often take months to adopt, train, customize and roll out.
Introducing LiveWhale
Because the management of content using a standardized tool is a very real need for many of our clients— and because no CMS that we’ve seen can meet our needs of simplicity, flexibility, easy adoptability, and standards compliance—we’ve built a CMS tool ourselves, with static page content editing integrated into a general set of dynamic content management applications. Our CMS is called LiveWhale.
LiveWhale is a modern, friendly content management system and an open-source development platform. It’s modular: only use what you need, only pay for what you use. It's easy to roll out, full-featured, infinitely customizable.
If you don’t want to think about the technology behind it, you’ll never see it; it’s ready to use out of the box. If you’re in an IT or Web department, and you like to tinker, you can do just about anything with it.
Create your own feature set (or just use ours)
White Whale has worked with colleges and universities for almost a decade. This has given us a lot of insight into how institutions of higher education develop, create and manage content.
But we don't presume to know every school's specific needs, and in building LiveWhale, we've tried to leave room for freedom of expression. You can precisely customize the format of any dynamic content generated by LiveWhale, and the open-source presentation layer it's built on can be used alongside LiveWhale's modules to present content from other sources as well.
LiveWhale comes with modules for editing static pages, managing news items, events and calendaring, photo galleries, and download/resource management. And more modules are in development. The basic feature set gives content managers a comprehensive toolbox, and LiveWhale's code can be modified and extended for even more functionality.
A CMS made by and for human beings
LiveWhale is a product of White Whale Web Services, a small California-based company that works collaboratively with great colleges and universities around the country. We aren't some big anonymous "solutions provider."
Our roots are in customized, personal design and application development. We created LiveWhale to make it easier for our clients to maintain their Web sites with as little outside help as possible; our commitment to making our individual clients and customers' lives easier is our primary concern.
Free upgrades and e-mail technical support
Why would a CMS provider charge for an upgrade? Having all our clients on the same platform saves time and minimizes frustration for us as well as our customers— it means the improvements we make to our codebase can be shared with all our clients, and we don't have to spend time providing support for outdated versions. That's why upgrades to LiveWhale are always free.
The same goes for tech support. If you're having a hard time using our system, that's our problem as much as it is yours. And we want to hear about it, so we can make our tools better in the future. So every LiveWhale account comes with unlimited e-mail tech support. And phone support is available for an additional fee.
Transparent and straightforward pricing
It's hard to find out how much a commercial CMS costs. Companies won't tell you over the phone or via e-mail (believe us, we've tried). And many of our clients report that hidden fees for support, licensing, or upgrades can lead to CMS implementations that exceed their sticker price. In developing LiveWhale, it has been important to us to make the pricing as open and transparent as possible, with round numbers, easy math, and no hidden costs.
Pricing is on either a yearly or flat-fee basis. The less expensive LiveWhale modules cost $2,000 per year, including upgrades and unlimited e-mail tech support; a permanent flat fee license for all five current modules costs $85,500. More details about LiveWhale's pricing are found in our white paper, available below.
Learn more about LiveWhale
To receive a more detailed datasheet about LiveWhale's features, system requirements and pricing, please fill out the form below and we'll email you more information.
Please note: Because LiveWhale is intended for higher education environments, we are currently only accepting information requests from .edu e-mail addresses.