Vistaprint 2007 Annual Report Download - page 16

We have designed our infrastructure and technologies to accommodate future growth. We have
designed our website technologies to scale to accommodate future growth in the number of customer
visits, orders, and product and service offerings, with little additional effort other than adding servers,
hardware, and bandwidth. Our document and design creation technologies are architected to utilize the
processing power of the customer’s computer rather than our servers. This Internet- based architecture
makes our applications highly scalable and offers our customers fast system responsiveness when
they are editing their document designs. Our pre-press and print production technologies for
aggregating print jobs in preparation for printing are designed to readily scale as we grow. The more
individual jobs received in a time period, the more efficiently aggregations, or gangs, of similar jobs can
be assembled and moved to the printing system, thereby maximizing the efficient use of the printing
equipment and increasing overall system throughput.
Our systems infrastructure, web and database servers are hosted at Cable & Wireless in
Bermuda, which provides communication links, 24-hour monitoring and engineering support. Cable &
Wireless has its own generators and dual network access points. Our site systems are operated 24
hours a day, seven days a week. We believe this solution is highly scalable by adding relatively
inexpensive servers and processors.
Security is provided at multiple levels in both our hardware and software. We use 128-bit encryption
technology for secure transmission of confidential personal information between customers and our web
servers. All customer data is held behind firewalls. In addition, customer credit card information is
encrypted. We use fraud prevention technology to identify potentially fraudulent transactions.
The Customer Design and Purchase Experience
We recognize that our customers have differing needs, skills, and expertise, and we offer a
corresponding range of customer service options. For experienced or computer-savvy customers, our
websites offer a full complement of tools and features allowing customers to create a product design or
upload their own complete design, and place an order on a completely self-service basis. Those
customers who have started the design process but find that they require some guidance or design
help can, with the assistance of our customer sales and support personnel, obtain real time design or
ordering assistance. Those customers who would like us to prepare designs can call our creative
services group and after an initial conversation, quickly receive custom design and copy options.
Designing Online
Customers visiting our websites can select the type of product they wish to design from our broad
range of available products. When a product type has been selected, the customer can initiate the
design process by using our predefined industry styles and theme categories, by entering one or more
keywords in our image search tool, or by uploading the customer’s own design. If the customer
chooses to do a keyword search, our automated design logic will, in real time, create and display to the
customer a variety of product templates containing images related to the customer’s keyword. When
the customer chooses a particular template for personalization, our user-friendly, browser-based
product design and editing tools are downloaded from our servers to the customer’s browser program.
We enable the customer to quickly and easily perform a wide range of design and editing functions on
the selected design, such as:
‰entering and editing text;
‰cropping images or entirely replacing images with other images;
‰repositioning product elements using conventional drag-and-drop functionality;
‰changing fonts or font characteristics;
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