Ifp3 Review

Company name: ifp3

Website: www.ifp3.com

ifp3 provides a flash content management application that enables to “create an elegant, interactive flash website in minutes”. After a more thorough examination we would exclude the words “elegant ” and “interactive” from the above statement. There are 5 awful template designs each coming with 6 color themes to choose from and none of them can boast of being elegant or at least beautiful. We issue an appeal to ipf3: “Guys do fire your designer! This your only chance, seriously.”

Speaking about the functionality offered by ifp3, it’s not bad at all. All the core options a photographer’s or artist’s website should have are included: unlimited images, pages and galleries, shopping cart, appearance editor, color picker, search function, etc. Mobile phone optimization and integrated Lightbox are cool features as well. You can see a live preview of how your website will look on iPhone and BlackBerry. They offer 10 day free trial so you could check all the system and make a decision whether it fits your needs.

Testing one of the ifp3’s example websites www.jkennedyphotography.com for SEO-friendliness, we couldn’t say the result was bad. All text pages and image titles are indexed. Although URL structure is ugly and no hint at image keywords was observed. Our recap of the ifp3 SEO optimization is: fair, but still far from SEO-friendliness.

ifp3 is a hosted solution, this mean hosting is included in your plan and you have no option to host your site on a third-party server. They also charge additional $45 setup fee if you use your own domain name instead of ifp3 sub-domain. Another sad moment is that ifp3 doesn’t host email accounts. Their pricing policy is based on long-term subscription loyalty. Hence, if you choose to pay for the service on a monthly basis, it will cost you $30/mo. You can save $10 if choose an annual plan, but in this case you have to pay $240 in advance. $540 prepay for the 3 years subscription equals $15 per month.

In general, ifp3 offers a nice set of functions and that would count if it were not the very low quality designs that remind me of early 90’s. Double check everything before subscribing for this service and don't forget to check solutions by other companies ( you will find links to reviews on the right).