Last July, international ISP United Internet took a 30% stake in Jimdo, which markets a simple tool that allows users to build their own websites with little time and effort, and now the first results of the tie-in are becoming visible.
Today United Internet’s hosting provider subsidiary, 1&1, is debuting a new business service to its customers dubbed ‘1&1 MyBusiness Site’, which boasts Jimdo as its underlying engine.
1&1 later today will start offering this new package to its corporate customers, enabling small and medium-sized businesses to create their own website in just a few minutes without the need for extensive website design experience, starting at $9,99 per month.
There have been simple, browser-based website creation tools available on the market ever since the WWW turned mainstream, but there’s clearly still a significant demand for this type of services, especially with the way the web is evolving.
SynthaSite is one of the players in the DIY website / blog builder field, and they’ve just gotten a huge vote of confidence from their investors: the company has announced a $20 million Series B round from Luxembourg-based Reinet Fund and plans to use the money to grow both organically and through selected acquisitions (they made a first small one past December when they bought Clickpass).
This is actually the same investor as the $5 million Series A round it raised in November 2007, but then then-called Columbus Venture Capital was recently restructured into Reinet, which is now a listed entity on the Luxembourg & Johannesburg Stock Exchange with over $2 billion in market cap.
They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.
In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.
But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.
And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.
The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.
It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.
Pumping out HTML may be simple for tech heads, but it’s not simple enough for everyone else. These days it’s not a matter of just designing and coding a page once, but of redesigning it on a whim. MySpace and it’s capricious community of design junkies are case in point, often changing their layouts almost as much as their favorite band of the moment.
Several services have popped up to fill this need by offering simple site creation tools. They’re like Geocities v 2.0. Jimdo is another easy to use AJAX site editor out of Hamburg Germany that launched earlier this year. You can use Jimdo to easily and quickly create a personal website including photos, text, a guestbook, rss feeds, and YouTube videos. They are close competitors with Weebly (one of my favorite), another AJAX editor we have covered before.
One issue I have with these sites is that design can still be fairly constrained. Today Jimdo has tackled that problem by letting you easily grab a design from any site in a couple steps.
copy and paste the HTML source from the target site into Jimdo.
click on “xhtml” – the system will automatically cut out the relevant code (content, sidebar, navigation, footer) – and validate it.
copy your CSS into Jimdo.
upload the pictures that you need for your layout under the label “Files”.
Jimdo basically places their widgets into key parts of the template using special tags their site understands. The result is that the template displays your Jimdo navigation bar and content. You can see an example of the TechCrunch site here. I still had to fool around with the HTML code to make it work, though, placing the special tags manually where the content needed to go.
A team of three friends originally started selling simple site creation tools for the enterprise as CMS solutions, but decided to add a consumer version this year. They currently have over 25,000 users and sites in three different languages (German, English, and Chinese). Their basic accounts start with 500 MB of storage, with pro accounts going for $6 a month with the ability to host them on your own domain name.
There are some other site design tools out there as well, aimed at different crowds. RealEditor makes an editor specifically for MySpace. Synthasite is a good AJAX based editor with detailed control of the page layout. Sampa, while having a weaker layout editor, is aimed at families looking to create a group website. Webjam is a community of sites created with their editor.
Update (Arrington): Just to be clear, we are not granting permission to copy our site template.
Last July, international ISP United Internet took a 30% stake in Jimdo, which markets a simple tool that allows users to build their own websites with little time and effort, and now the first results of the tie-in are becoming visible. 
