Earlier this week we announced that we'd be accepting additional sponsors, beyond Plain Black, to reduce the cost of WUC tickets. We've got our first sponsor: SwiftySite.com

SwiftySite.com is a company building out an easy to use web hosting solution on top of WebGUI. They've worked tirelessly for over a year to build out a sleek and easy to use interface on top of WebGUI that makes it possible for anybody to build out a pretty and functional site in short order.

Where WebGUI's focus has been to put maximum power and flexibility into the hands of ordinary business user's with about 2 hours of training, SwiftySite's goal was to make it so anybody could harness some of the power of WebGUI, without any training what-so-ever. To do this they've had to hide a lot of WebGUI's functionality, but as users needs become more advanced, they can switch back to WebGUI's full editing interface.

When a user first starts out with SwiftySite they're using the Swifty interface. It gives them an easy way to choose a style and colors from a predefined list that SwiftySite.com provides, and then allows the user to place assets with predefined templates the automatically integrate with the style they chose before.

The user is limited to only a handful of the total assets that WebGUI ships with, and almost none of it's admin console components. However, this sliming down of the interface is a huge boon to usability. They make use of WebGUI's version control system, but set it to have only one version tag for the entire site for all users. This keeps it simple so users can make changes without the worry of editing a live site, but don't have to worry about attaching themselves to the right version tag.

Several staff from SwiftySite.com will be in attendance at the WUC this year if you'd like to see a demo of the system. Right now all their documentation and sales efforts are focused in Dutch. But they are looking for hosting partners worldwide to offer SwiftySite to new markets in other languages. Contact Chris Vermeulen if this sounds like an interesting business opportunity to you.

With SwiftySite.com's generous sponsorship, we'll be able to further reduce the cost of WUC tickets this year to $300 per ticket. In addition to the sponsorship Plain Black has put forth, that means the tickets are a full $200 less than last year.