WebProNews

In a time where having a website seems to mean running a blog, Zude offers a sophisticated, straight ahead way to build a site through the easiest drag and drop process imaginable. When Zude CEO Jim McNeil and the people building the service set to work, they had an eye on the enterprise market. People with a lot of information on their desktops and a need to easily share it within a corporate network looked like an obvious target.

But the real strength of Zude the website builder shines as demonstrated by a Kentucky grandmother, an enthusiastic Zude user. McNeil said content on the web and on the desktop don't easily mesh, yet the Zude approach makes a Facebook profile as easy to embed and share on Zude as a Word document on the C: drive.

Cross-domain drag and drop has been a hallmark feature of Zude. It's dead simple to move elements around on a page. When using it, one has to think, yes, this is how I expect something like this to work.

The underlying technology, Open5G, probably serves as the best case study for understanding what Web 2.0 actually means, once one separates the dogmatists from the dogma. Open5G offers an application server, a database engine, and the Open5 language, available under an open source license.

This technology treats objects dragged onto a Zude page as being within a container. The individual can edit the behavior of that container to act in different ways, based on what the person viewing it does with the object, like clicking or doing a mouseover of it.

McNeil told WebProNews the beauty of Zude comes to people as they use it. People start with a rudimentary approach, and the more they use it, the more they do so and progress to add content with greater depth.

"Zude is a way for you to pull together what's relevant to you," he said. And that's just how it works.