Stardraw.com Launches New Website

Software providers Stardraw.com are pleased to announce the launch of their brand new website which went live at the beginning of November. In addition to new styling, www.stardraw.com now boasts a re-worked navigational structure to make it easier for Stardraw's increasingly diverse customer base to find the information they are looking for. There are also significant back-end enhancements which allow more robust and flexible operation of the site as a whole, and offer new capabilities and scalability to the many new web services that are part of Stardraw.com's ongoing strategy.

CEO David Snipp outlines the key back-end improvements; “Stardraw.com is a highly complex site that delivers huge amounts of information to thousands of people every day, so efficiency and reliability are top priorities for us. To this end we have made a significant investment in new hardware to run the site and established new racks of dedicated servers in both Seattle, USA and London, UK offering replicated services. For the end user this means 24/7 uptime and optimized global access times. We have also implemented SQL Server 2000 databases across multiple dedicated machines to support Stardraw applications. This has huge strategic implications, but for right now it means faster data access, scalability (SQL Server 2000 can handle millions of transactions per second), faster data transmission over increased bandwidth and improved fault tolerance. We've also improved the LiveUpdate process whereby users of our shrink-wrapped applications install all new monthly program updates. In this enhancement new compression techniques mean faster download and installation. We've also enhanced fault-tolerance offering improved error handling and also greater portability with improved platform support and browser independence.”

Structurally the site has been restyled for ease of navigation and to better reflect Stardraw.com's commercial activities. For instance, much greater emphasis is now placed on the products and services available to Corporate/OEM clients via the Stardraw.net platform. “We were extremely ambitious when we set out our goals for the new site; this is not just a cosmetic makeover, but a full re-working of all aspects that go to make up a website, from the front-end, through site architecture, to back–end delivery mechanisms and the hardware that makes it all possible. It has taken a great deal of effort getting to the point where we could go live, but the implications for where it can take us in the future are enormous,” comments Snipp. “We can look forward to some exciting times ahead.”
For further information on Stardraw.com and a look at the new site, please visit www.stardraw.com


According to Stardraw CEO David Snipp, these are significant developments for a number of reasons. “With the recent implementation of SQL Server 2000 across our servers we have enormously powerful database functionality that has enabled us to deliver database-driven solutions to our customers far more quickly and easily than was previously possible. We now have a central repository in database format of all of the data within Stardraw which we can distribute to customers' local machines according to parameters defined by them. The strategic implications of such technology are enormous.”

Marketing director Rob Robinson agrees. “It improves efficiency enormously. For example, the External Datasource feature creates an Excel spreadsheet that is populated with the manufacturers' products that you use. This spreadsheet is stored locally on your machine and can be edited to set the attribute values of your choosing (such as “cost price”, “sale price” etc.) From now on, every time you drag a product symbol into a drawing, the attributes from your spreadsheet will be imported into that symbol automatically. The beauty of this system is that you can enter all the data for all of your products into just one spreadsheet rather than having to edit individual program files; you only have to add the information once, although of course it can be edited as often as you like; and you don't even have to know how to use Stardraw in order to add or edit information on the spreadsheet – anyone with a basic knowledge of Excel can do it.”

“Synchronize Manufacturers is another database-driven web service which replaces the old monthly file download of symbols updates,” continued Robinson. “and is advantageous because you can be selective about the data you receive. Stardraw applications are victims of their own success: take Stardraw A/V for example - on average, any one user will be interested in about 10% of the 190 manufacturers and 32,500 symbols available. It therefore follows that, on average, 90% of any monthly download is not of interest to any one 'average' user. Synchronize Manufacturers does exactly what it says - it will deliver any changes to the symbol library, and ignore any unchanged symbols, for the Manufacturers you want. It is an extremely powerful tool that avoids lengthy downloads of potentially irrelevant data and allows the customer to create a local symbols library according to his own preferences.”

For further information on Stardraw.com and the Feature-per-Month program, please visit www.stardraw.com
 

Ends.

Notes to Editor

Stardraw specializes in the design, development and implementation of Internet-enabled software components, design/documentation tools for specific vertical markets and control applications (including Stardraw Control, Stardraw Audio 2007, Stardraw A/V 2007, Stardraw A/V Lite 2007 and Stardraw Lighting 2D 2007) Stardraw's corporate client base for custom software solutions includes Middle Atlantic Products, RCI Custom, Ramtech Industries and Simply Reliable Software.

For more information contact:		Press contact:
Rob Robinson, Stardraw.com Ltd. The 401 Centre 302 Regent Street London, W1B 3HH England T: +44 (0)20 7692 7117 F: +44 (0)20 7692 7118 e: rob.robinson@stardraw.com		Kiera Leeming, KLPR Ltd. T: +33 (0)684 06 26 42 e: kiera@klpr.co.uk