Ahead – Create a Photo Gallery or Media Wall

Making website building as simple as desktop publishing has long been the Holy Grail of the web. Ahead.com is the latest entrant into this high-stakes sweepstakes.  Ahead brands their version as “workspaces for the creative mind,” and they frequently like to compare themselves to InDesign. But in reality there isn’t an offline equivalent to what you can build on Ahead.

Ahead is a web-based tool that allows you to drag and drop content onto your page, much as you would in some of the Adobe products. You can drag videos (including HD-quality videos), images, pdfs, mp3s, and other multimedia content onto you page and size them and structure them however you want. The best way to think about Ahead’s model is a giant piece of paper where each little scrap that is added to the paper is another possible page. Users are then given access to navigate wherever they want on the page, zooming in and out, left and right, in a very non-linear fashion.

So far businesses are using Ahead to not only build full websites but also to build portfolio sites, presentations, and media walls. The developers say they built this product out of frustration with the shortcomings of current tools for online collaboration and publishing because it doesn’t support rich media and visual creative processes and communication very well.

Since Ahead is still in beta the basic service remains free for the time being. If you would like your own branded version with your own logo and URL it will set you back $500 per year, which seems like the package most users would need. Future package promise more options that we hope will provide options for all budgets.

3 Reasons You Might Need Ahead:

• You have a static site with limited photography or graphical elements but would like to work more of that into your layouts.
• You would like to build a non-linear presentation that you can use to be more spontaneous and flexible during your pitches.
• You have 100s of images you would like to display in a non-traditional way and mix other multimedia in with it.

3 Reasons You Wouldn’t Need Ahead:

• You know there are limitations to the discovery of Flash-based content, despite recent changes by Google, and can’t afford to not optimize your site for search.
• You have a full site built on a CMS, would like to build a media wall for displaying rich content, but can’t afford $500 annually for just a portion of your site.
• Your site wouldn’t or doesn’t use much rich multimedia content and is primarily text and database driven.

For more information on Ahead check out www.ahead.com.

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