David: It seems that the user has some degree of limited control. What can the user change and what needs to remain constant?

Andy: Our research with photo buyers tells us that photo buyers want to see big, clean images that load quickly. In addition they don't want to be distracted by lots of ancillary elements but they do want to easily navigate a photographer's site. Our sites have been designed to accommodate the photo buyer by focusing on the photographer's images with intuitive navigation.

Other than the images and the navigation, everything on our sites can be customized by the designer. During our design process, each customer interacts with our design team to identify their specific needs. This includes logo usage, font choice, colors as well as placement of the menu items as well as graphical treatment for the home page and, in certain packages, the contact and bio pages as well. We can also include additional design time for a minimal fee to build custom Flash intro animations or interactive informational pages for our clients.

In addition to the custom design work that we will do for our clients, the photographer also retains control of all the naming of their menu items, the animation style of these items, the transition effect between photos and they have the ability to change and upload different graphics for all their pages at any time.

The best way to think of this is that we design a custom frame for the photographer's work and then they retain control of how they name elements within this frame as well as all the items they put into the frame.

David: Do you host all the Web sites you build or do the photographers host the sites on their own servers?

Andy: Yes, all liveBooks sites are hosted by liveBooks. This is a seamless process in that people visiting my Web address just end up there by typing in my URL (for example www.andypatrick.com).

We host our clients' sites to ensure maximum uptime and consistent throughput when people are viewing their sites. We have our own server farm in a tier-one data center. The system has been built to deliver optimized performance, provide scalable throughput, generate daily backups of data and provide redundancy to ensure uptime.

Our clients' sites are delivered over a load-balanced network that self-adjusts based on overall system performance. It is connected to an Internet backbone via Gigabit connectivity and can deliver as much as 100 Megabits per second of dedicated throughput for our customers.

This costs our clients $90 a year or $7.50 a month and includes 500MB of disk space and 5 email addresses. This is the only recurring fee our "professional" clients have and our edu hosting is included in the monthly subscription fee.

David: What's all this built in? If you're running a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server, can you tell us some details about your server applications? What you built and your development environment?

Andy: As a company we do not usually talk in detail about how we are developing our client and server technology. We tend to use the latest tools that can help us to deliver what photographers need in the easiest to use way, as quickly as we can.

Product availability and resources For more information on liveBooks, visit http://www.livebooks.com.

Chuck Lee is president of PartSense, Inc., a contract service that specializes in helping the engineering community leverage the power of advanced 3D modeling and drafting software while providing cost-effective and well-engineered electro/mechanical design solutions.