Friday, December 25, 2009

Clickbooq Review



Company name: Clickbooq

Website: www.clickbooq.com

Clickbooq offers a web-based site management and design application for flash photography websites. In general, the functionality of the Clickbooq CMS is rich, but we’ve got impression that it’s somewhat too rich and may look confusing for a non-professional user.

Clickbooq website editing solution doesn’t include design templates. You can create a website from scratch, using a content management system called Toolbox. The backbone of the website here is a number of pre-built layouts and some extra design services, such as custom BackDrop backgrounds. The company provides users with drag-and-drop editing environment, numerous tools for design and content management. The administration interface looks pretty intuitive and user-friendly, however and let me repeat myself, it makes me think the user can get lost in this variety of options.

There is a small drawback in Clickbooq photo website package, there is limitation in the number of content pages one can have as well as the number of portfolios. Thus, all Clickbooq plans (not really affordable, by the way) come with only 5 portfolios and 5 content pages. You can have bonus 5 portfolios choosing a one-time plan which is $1699 (!!!!!!!!!!) setup fee and $99/year for the hosting. This bonus pales before the price, don’t you think? Each portfolio can hold up to 36 full-size images and if you need some more galleries to store you photos, be so kind to pay extra money - $50 for the each additional portfolio.

We should admit that Clickbooq brings pretty cool opportunities to their customers in terms of website visual appearance. We had a look at the gallery of websites built with Clickbooq and most of them are attractive and stylish. Lightbox is another neat feature included, it allows the visitors of your site to fave your photographs and send them to other prospects. This can come in handy for the website promotion.

Clickbooq is another flash photo CMS provider failed the SEO-friendliness test. They claim clickbooq websites are based on deep linking and have HTML mirror sites to make all the content indexable. Well, a simple site: command in Google search applied to the sites http://www.simonandrewscooks.com and http://www.blakemarvin.com/ showed us ugly URLs and one indexed page that is duplicated multiple times. The snippet shown on the results page was nice, though. Conclusion: clickbooq websites are not completely SEO-friendly, but have good preconditions to be so.

Clickbooq delivers a fine service, but the price they want for it is totally unjustified. Another hosted solution and another astronomic price:
$99 setup fee + $79/mo
Or $499/yr + $99/yr hosting
Or $1699 one time fee + $99 hosting one time fee.

If your website design matters to you a great deal and you want to control the whole process, Clickbooq can be a reasonable solution for you, but I would order a fully custom unique website at this price. Be sure to take advantage of free 5 days trial to check the system. Although, some limits in functionality and features and of course, the price, seriously decrease the attractiveness of this software.

There are also lots of other photography website software reviews available on our blog, use the links on the right to browse. Good luck with your new photography website!

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