Melanie Kuderka wowed her husband when she showed him their new electronic photo album with the H... Quality screen time...
With background music befitting a red-carpet premiere, curtains open and a spotlight shines on a photo of Melanie and Jay Kuderka cradling their baby girl, Keira.
The marquee, "Welcome to our Family. Starring the Kuderkas," introduces the mini slide show of the Aliso Viejo family to a silhouetted still-framed audience staring up at a movie screen.
Melanie Kuderka is tech savvy – she runs marketing for Tickets.com , an online ticketing service owned by Major League Baseball and she has built Web sites before. But this wasn't her undertaking.
The dazzling presentation of the photos she uploaded within minutes was all the work of TheFamilyPost.com , an Irvine-based company whose mission is to offer easy-to-use and well-designed family-communication Web sites.
Some features – a chat room, a calendar, captioning and a family directory – come with every package. The more you pay, the more photos you can upload – from 1,000 to unlimited – and the more extra services you get, such as streaming video, e-mail blasts, a family newsletter, a message board.
Launched last October, TheFamilyPost joined the growing ranks of online photo-sharing services that offer a place for digital camera users to do something with the images they capture – other than leaving them in the camera, on their hard drive, or burned to a CD kept in a drawer.
There's a huge number of photos waiting to be seen: The Photo Marketing Association estimates that of the 17.1 billion digital images created in 2005, a mere 1.2 billion photos were uploaded to the Web. Still, the number of images permanently stored online doubled from what it was in 2004, says Dimitrios Delis, the association's marketing research director.
"The sharing aspect of photos has really boomed with digital cameras," he says. "Making it simple for people to do makes sense. Will they pay for it and what is a fair price, that's a different issue."
Some of the more popular sites include Snapfish, Shutterfly, KodakGallery, Flickr and Dropshots. Some offer free online sharing, others charge fees.
President and CEO Michael Sawtell envisions TheFamilyPost as a means to keep families connected, but without the exposure and potential risks that can come with a site such as MySpace.
A bachelor until his early 40s, Sawtell discovered after the birth of his only child that there is nothing like fatherhood. And taking pictures of it.
He's the photographer in his family, and his wife, Libby, an Orange County attorney, shoots the video. Like many families with digital cameras and recorders, they had amassed more images than they knew what to do with.
Sawtell had just left a job as president and chief operating officer of an Internet company and wondered what to do next. He started thinking about all those photos of his daughter Skylar, who just turned 2, and how to make them more accessible to relatives in New York and Michigan.
TheFamilyPost has an Orange County feel to it, from the names of some of the templates – Mission Point, Newport Nouveau, Dana Point Deco – to background music selections like "Groovin' Down the 73," "Spectrum Boogie," "Brunch on Balboa" and "Mile Square Rock."
It's that kind of cool factor that played a part in earning TheFamilyPost a place in the June issue of OC Metro Magazine as one of 10 "OC Websites That Deliver."
Kuderka says she did her homework before settling on TheFamilyPost to share her young family's photos and milestones with relatives here in Orange County and in Minnesota.
She has sent photos of their wedding and 4-month-old Keira by e-mail. She has made them available for downloading on other photo-sharing Web sites. TheFamilyPost, Kuderka said, offered more whiz-bang for the buck.
"Not only does it have more features, but it's more economical," she says. "Honestly, if you're going to keep a family site, all this stuff that needs to go on, having a child and two working parents, there isn't all that much time to do all this. I look for ease of use, comfort. As nice as our site came out, it looks like I spent hours on it but really, I didn't."
There is one other feature that got her attention: For every paid subscription, TheFamilyPost is offering a free subscription, called Websites For Heroes, to military families with members deployed overseas.
Marijke Roark, the wife of an Air Force sergeant deployed to the Persian Gulf, got her family's donated site from TheFamilyPost in time for July 4. A mother of two who lives in Phoenix, Roark has uploaded everything from photos to the kids' drawings to their birthday party invitations for her husband Robert to enjoy while stationed in Qatar.
"I go through the house, 'What else can I scan?' Just so he can see everything," says Roark, whose family in Holland also enjoys the postings.
Before, Roark could only e-mail her husband a couple of pictures at a time. Sometimes he wouldn't get the e-mail at all. Sending a video was impossible.
"Now, he can see them move and hear them talk," she says of their children Kate, 2, and Ilse, 5, who sent her father an "I love you, Papa" video message on TheFamilyPost from her backyard wading pool, her little sister waving along beside her.
Adrienne Elsass' husband, Doug, who is in the U.S. Navy, shipped overseas in early August from their home in Poway to a location she can't disclose. She found out about TheFamilyPost through the Operation Homefront military support organization.
"We have MySpace and things like that but this is a secure Web site," she says. "Where he is now, he can't access MySpace at all but he has been able to check on this Web site."
She plans for her husband to see the schoolwork done by his stepsons, Tyler, 12, and Nevin, 6, once school starts. And with a new baby expected in December, a video will allow Doug Elsass to share that special moment.
Bill Mickle added a link to The Mickle Family Archives, a treasure trove of 150 family photos and documents dating back to the 1800s that his grandfather left to him.
The feedback he's gotten from family in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Virginia, Washington state and Washington, D.C., is all positive, says Mickle, who lives in Aliso Viejo.
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