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Remember the first page you published to the web? Remember browsing to it and thinking, "Wow, it's really out there for everyone to see," and then watching the server logs to see who came to visit? Publishing a web page for the first time had the capacity to blow your mind.

For most of you, the days of basic ‘Hello World' web pages are a thing of the past. Today your triumphs come from improvements to website usability and accessibility, innovative data-driven applications and designs that push the envelope. Right? Or at least that's the theory. But despite the occasional triumphs, there's still plenty of drudgery and hassle involved with building a website. And a lot of this hassle comes from one source: web content.

Of course, the hassle is usually more the fault of the content owners than the content itself. Web content doesn't call you on the phone five times a day to ask you when the changes will be done, or e-mail itself to you in the form of dozens of Word documents, or write a sheepish note of "Sorry!" on itself when it arrives a week late.

The content hassle can also come from constant efforts to ‘get content under control and keep it up-to-date' with a content management system, or even worse, trying to modify the system once it's in place. Occasionally you may even face the most dreaded hassle of all when someone leaves a voice mail that says, "I don't know what happened, I just made a couple changes and my whole site disappeared…"

There used to be no good way around the content maintenance problem. Either you bit the bullet and found a way to make the updates happen, or content on your websites slowly decayed and your sites became irrelevant. This was not a great state of affairs. Over the years you have told us quite clearly that you want a better strategy.

And we listened. I'm proud to introduce an entirely new product for creating and updating web content: Macromedia Contribute. It is a desktop application that even your most techno-phobic content contributors will find easy to use. Contribute also offers simple yet powerful administrative controls to protect your code, designs, and functionality. You can easily control who can edit what, and what kinds of changes they can make. Plus, Contribute works on any HTML website without any changes to site or server required, so you can end your content hassles in minutes.

It even imports Word and Excel documents, transforming them into standards based, cross-browser compatible, human readable, lightweight HTML. No kidding.

Even more exciting, while we built Contribute to reduce your hassles and free up your time for other tasks, we believe that this simple product may well transform the way organizations use the web. Thanks to our beta customers, we are beginning to see how much more useful the web can be when content owners can edit their web pages by just browsing to them and clicking the ‘Edit Page' button. Imagine what will happen now that people in finance or HR or operations can easily and affordably use the web to work together and share information with each other. Imagine what educators and students can do if they can build a custom classroom website in minutes. Imagine if the web became what it was meant to be, a continuously updated, collaborative, read-write experience.

Give the Contribute Technology Preview a try. You're going to love it. And if you want to see something really cool, give it to a couple of web newbies and watch their faces when they publish their first web page. Remember your first time? There are millions more who will be experiencing that same excitement over the next few years thanks to your customer feedback. Our hats are off to you, and we hope you enjoy the result of our mutual labor.

To the end of hassles, and beyond!