Premium look and feel

Beautiful, practical templates and themes with social media features for publications of any style: online newspapers, iPad magazines, niche content sites, brand marketing initiatives, media rooms for corporate communications—you name it.

A dozen different monetization methods have been subtly positioned and built into various aspects of the site design so that they blend into the user experience.

Custom favicon that helps propagate your site's branding on the Internet. Favicon is short for "favorite icon," which appears on a browser tab and is also known as a Web site icon or bookmark icon. This feature is coming soon!

Optimized flow between content, community, and commerce elements

Social-media audience-building tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), commerce elements (virtual gifts, affiliate sales, ad units) and media components (images and videos) have an optimally integrated flow that enriches the end-user experience and keeps the focus on your content.

Well-researched and focus-group–tested navigation

Casual browsers evolve into dedicated, repeat visitors because carefully orchestrated precedence (guiding of the eye), spacing, alignment, clarity (sharpness), and consistency helps ensure a rich experience that builds loyalty to your site.

Effortless audience orientation

When new visitors arrive at your site, they will intuitively navigate and enjoy your content, participate in community discussions, search for specific information, and buy and sell products or services.

Global Pipeno log-in

One-time Pipeno account creation on any Pipeno site is enough to enjoy content, participate in the communities, or conduct commerce on any Pipeno site from the global Pipeno network.

Evolving compliance with design standards and best practices

What is cool today may not be cool tomorrow. The way your site looks and behaves on the Web is different from the way it should behave on an iPad, or whatever new device the future brings. We stay in sync with new design trends so that your Pipeno site stays cool, always.

Complete independence from technical knowledge issues

Creating great content is your business. Creating easy-to-use and leading-edge technology is ours. Pipeno provides an intuitive work flow so that your nontechnical staff can manage the content-publishing and audience-management processes easily. There is no need to learn about things like cascading style scripts, hypertext markup language (HTML), or installing third-party widgets.

Dynamic SEO techniques

From the moment you set up your site and publish your first article, you can rest easy that the most powerful SEO procedures have been automatically executed, including clean article links, proper tagging, and valid XHTML code.

XML-RPC pinging mechanisms ensure your site is crawled for updated content by all major search engines every time you publish. This feature is coming soon!

Tagging

You can informally capture the essence of your article using many relevant phrases so that it can be found even more easily by audience members doing searches on your site or in search engines.

Staff roles

As your publishing empire grows, you can grow your team into multiple staff members and assign roles to them, such as writers, article editors, Community Center editors, and Marketplace editors.

Compensation management

You can select the most suitable payment-model settings for each staff member.

Editorial-process management

Writers can send articles to the editors for publishing approval. If articles need editing, the editor can send corrections back to the writer. The whole process takes place online, within the control panel of your site.

Community Center management

You can delegate a staff member to monitor and delete discussion topics in the Community Center that aren't relevant or beneficial for your site.

Automatic Community Center comment hiding

Any comment in the Community Center that receives more than 15 negative votes will be hidden from the audience view. Audience members can see it if they press the "Show" button.

Printer-friendly settings

If a reader chooses to print your article, you can rest assured that it will look as good on paper as it does on-screen.

Discussion categories in the Community Center

Audience members often want to be engaged in discussions about content in your articles. These discussions are a great source of feedback for you and also provide you with ideas for future articles. So the categories you set up for your site are automatically duplicated in your Community Center. This helps keep community engagement structured and easy to follow.

Marketplace management

A staff member can monitor and approve the sale of products and services in the Marketplace.

Marketplace categories

You can set up categories of products and services relevant to your niche where people can place valuable advertisements targeting your site audience.

Promoting audience members to staff-member status on your site

If you are pleased with the article commentary and/or active Community Center engagement of an audience member on your site, you can invite them to become a staff member and offer them a writing and/or editing role.

Automated publishing calendar

If you are going on vacation, you can submit your article lineup onto your Pipeno site and set the dates in the calendar for when you want your content to be made available to the audience. Your articles will auto publish on those dates.

Virtual gifts

If your audience likes an article on your site, they can buy virtual gifts from your catalog and send it to the writer. Audience members can also send gifts to each other if they like article comments or Community Center discussions.

Performance marketing programs

While you focus on creating great content for your site, the Pipeno monetization team will analyze your site metrics and execute campaigns where you get a piece of every sale that is generated on other sites from visitors you refer.

Monthly subscription to access premium articles

You will likely want to provide most of your content for free to draw traffic and attract new audiences. However, you may want to charge for some of your content because it is rare, special, and/or rich in subject-matter expertise. The control panel allows you to choose which articles should be free and which ones require a monthly subscription to access. You get to decide what the monthly subscription should be.

Pay per article

Some visitors to your site may not want to become monthly subscribers and may just want to pay for one article at a time. You can set the price of an article, and they can pay it to enjoy your content.

Premium Marketplace ads

Ads in your marketplace can be mostly free, but if someone wants priority placement of their ad, they can pay a premium price that you set.

Premium newsletters

You have valuable knowledge to share. You can offer to send your audience a weekly or monthly newsletter for a monthly subscription fee of your choosing.

Premium Community Center discussions

Some conversations are worth more than others. For example, if you have an expert thread where financially beneficial discussions are taking place, you can charge your audience for visibility to those discussions.

E-book downloads

Your audience can pay for and download your e-books in PDF format.

Printed book sales

You can promote the book on your site. Those members of your audience who prefer a printed copy can order it on your site, and it will be delivered to their doorstep.

Paid events

You can announce events on your site, and the audience can prepay while registering for the event.

Market-research surveys

The Pipeno monetization team will contact market-research companies that could benefit from surveying your audience.

Branded content initiatives

Once you have developed a loyal audience of several thousand people, the Pipeno monetization and content-curation teams will work with brands to write and publish value-added content for your site.

Advertising

Your niche audience will be very valuable to some advertisers, and they will have two ad units to choose from — a 728 x 90 banner ad and a 300 x 250 rectangular ad unit. These ad units are among the most commonly used on the internet. They tend to be the most non-disruptive to the user experience and help keep the focus on your content.

Anti-spam protection

Advanced anti-spam technology and system restrictions protect your site. What technology misses, the human eye can catch — your audience can flag anything they consider spam and banish it to an area on your control panel for you to evaluate and delete.

We use CAPTCHA for profile creation, Marketplace ads, comments for your site articles, photos, and videos so that you can be sure a human is posting and not a machine.

We have password lockout after multiple invalid attempts so that hackers can't use their computers to try and unlock your passwords.

256-bit SHA256 algorithm encryption

Your site is protected by a powerful security algorithm designed by the United States government's National Security Agency (NSA). If this algorithm is good enough to protect the FBI’s and CIA's sites, we trust it is good enough to protect your site.

On-demand scalability with cloud computing

If you publish breaking news or write an article that suddenly becomes popular among millions of users, you don't have to worry about your site crashing because we use the latest cloud-computing technology to scale the servers that support your site.

High availability

Your global audience and your staff will be able to access your site any time because we offer an industry-leading 99.99% uptime.

Relentless monitoring

We constantly watch every piece of the infrastructure that hosts your content and engages your audience so we can react quickly to issues or opportunities the moment they present themselves.

High performance

Our advanced caching algorithms ensure that your audience gets speedy access to your content.

Progressive enhancements

As technology evolves, it is important that your site architecture evolves with it. We use techniques such as partial rendering because it lends itself to progressively enhancing an existing Web site.

Optimized load balancing

After your first site is successful and you have mastered using the Pipeno platform, odds are you will launch many more sites. We distribute your workload from these sites across multiple servers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, and other computing resources to get optimal resource utilization, maximum throughput, and minimum response time.

Publishing module

Best-in-class, easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and optimized presentation to your audience so that your content can be enjoyed in all its glory.

Image gallery

Enrich your stories with photos and images.

Video gallery

Find and publish videos from YouTube that are related to your stories.

Community Center

This is a comfortable place for your audience to discuss and connect.

Marketplace module

Products and services relevant for your niche can be bought and sold here.

Article search

A very powerful search engine that searches all the content in your site so that your audience can find what they are looking for quickly and accurately.

Marketplace search

Your audience will quickly be able to find products and services they need.

Pipeno network search

The entire Pipeno network is searchable through individual sites, which encourages your audience to come to your site first to look for anything they need. This feature is coming soon!

Photo gallery with community feedback features

Displays photos in a beautiful manner and allows you to share, rate, flag, comment, and search.

Lightbox implementation

Your audience members can see beautiful overlays of each of your photos. When clicked on, the photo enlarges automatically to provide an immersive audience experience.

Automatic image resizing for Pipeno system

This very cool feature allows you to upload a photo of any size and have the system resize it automatically to fit within multiple locations on your Pipeno site.

Professional cropping tool

This tool allows you to crop a photo quickly and easily. You select the point of maximum interest in the image and that specific piece becomes available to be inserted into an article or for any other general use on your site.

Advanced YouTube integration for video publishing with community features

The Pipeno video page contains all the videos associated with all the articles on your site. Your audience can select their favorite videos and create their own individual playlist with these favorites. They can also share, rate, flag, comment, and search.

Profiles for all registered audience members

People in niche communities like to know who they are communicating with. Your site allows your audience members to set up their profiles so that the community knows who they are.

One-click profile visibility for publishers

On a single screen in their control panel, publishers can see all active users and navigate to their complete profile with one click.

Publishing permissions

You can only invite a few selected members to publish.

Flexible comment-moderation settings

Comment-moderation settings allow you to delegate an editor to remove distasteful or irrelevant comments on your site. You have the flexibility to enable or disable these settings.

Tips in the back-end console

There are handy tips to guide you, every step of the way.

Help section

We have published several help tutorials in our help section.

FAQs

We compile all the questions we get from people and provide answers to them in the FAQ section.

Glossary of terms

If you encounter terms that you are unfamiliar with, you can refer to our glossary.

Pipeno Support Community Center

Pipeno publishers can share tips and best practices and interact with each other.

Rapid escalation

Issues that support engineers can't resolve are quickly escalated to senior platform engineers for resolution.

Personalized e-mail support

If all of the above support methods are not sufficient for your needs, you can choose to pay a $50 monthly fee for unlimited personalized e-mail and phone support or pay $3.95 per inquiry.

Wide social-network coverage to help build your audience

The articles on your site can be shared by audience members on almost all major social networks.

Facebook Connect integration

People can log onto your site using their Facebook credentials.

Article commentary shared on Facebook

Facebook comments about your site articles are visible to your audience. This feature is coming soon!

Writer's new article summaries automatically displayed on Facebook wall

When one of your site's writers is very popular (i.e., has a loyal audience fan base of at least 10,000 people per month who read his articles), his/her new articles on your site will automatically be displayed on his/her Facebook wall. This feature is coming soon!

Twitter integration

When people tweet about your articles, their tweets are available for your audience to view.

Sharing via e-mail

Audience members who like an article can quickly share it with their friends.

Favorites

People can save their favorite articles to come back to later or to share with their friends.

Recommendations

Your audience can recommend articles to other site visitors.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

People are automatically alerted via short article summaries about new content published on your site that matters to them. If they are interested, they can click on the summary to be taken to the article.

Atom-enabled

Your articles will be available to all atom-enabled software and services so that your audience can enjoy receiving updates about content they care about. This feature is coming soon!

Media RSS for videos and images

Photo and video updates from your site will be made available to your audience as they appear on your site. This feature is coming soon!

External widgets that publish Pipeno content

Audience members can create a widget based on various criteria (a certain category, tag or author), copy the generated code and paste it on their Web site for a real-time view of relevant content from a Pipeno site. This feature is coming soon!

Content widgets for audience members

The end user can create a publishing widget to display the last five articles based on different criteria, such as sections, topics, authors, and keywords. This feature is coming soon!

PubSubHubbub

People who subscribe to your feeds will receive near instant updates when content changes on your site. This feature is coming soon!

Reactions

Our automated algorithm tracks audience interest in an article by monitoring the number of times the article is recommended, commented, favorited, and flagged.

Facebook app

We are currently in the process of brainstorming Facebook apps that help promote Pipeno publisher sites. If you have any ideas for apps that you think will be valuable for the Pipeno publisher community, please e-mail them to us at ideas@pipeno.com.

Facebook open-graph integration

This is a Facebook plug-in that allows people to personalize their Web-browsing experience. The audience can indicate if they like articles, photos, videos, Marketplace ads, and community threads on your site. This attracts their friends to view the same content and is a great tool for driving large amounts of traffic. According to Facebook, The Washington Post has seen its referral traffic climb nearly 300%.

WYSIWYG editor

Your writers can write straight into the control panel of your site, just like they would into any other word-processing software. Their text will be automatically rendered and positioned to look great.

Built-in short URL service for articles

As articles are being published, short URLs will be generated so that audience members can share them easily.

Pricing control

Writers can control the price of their articles.

Auto-saving drafts

To prevent writers from losing their article drafts, they will be saved automatically every few minutes.

Article preview

Writers can see exactly how their articles will look on the site.

Word counter

Writers can track the number of words in their articles.

Access to writing tutorials

There are tutorials that teach best practices on how to write articles that reach niche audiences on the Internet.

Access to marketing tutorials

Tips and tricks to help writers build their brand on the Internet among niche audiences.

Book-cover design and illustrations

Our professional designers can help create gorgeous graphics for all aspects of your books.

Editorial support

Our experienced editors can help with formatting, typos, grammatical corrections, and rewriting direction.

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

We have been granted permission to allocate an ISBN for your book.

Book downloads

If you allow it, your audience can download your book digitally onto their computers and print it themselves.

Book printing and delivery

For those members of your audience who want a hard copy printed and delivered, we fulfill that request.

E-reader downloads

Your audience will be able to download your book onto e-readers such as the Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Nobles's Nook, or Apple's iPad.

Free Pips for audience orientation

Every audience member will be given some free Pips when they register so that they get used to the notion of using a virtual currency to acquire products and services.

Virtual currency helps manage affordability

Pips are the virtual currency used for transactions on Pipeno sites. Pips help make your site's products and services optimally affordable in countries around the world.

Global currency support

Your site can conduct commerce in all countries that PayPal supports.

Pip balance management

Everyone will be able to monitor their Pip balance very easily and will receive reminders when their Pip balance falls below a certain level.