Sampa, the personal homepage creator for families, has raised $1M in Series A financing from a group of individuals including Geoff Entress and former executives from Microsoft, Netscape, and Lightsurf.

The Redmond-based company has also rebuilt its user interface so that it’s more intuitive for soccer moms who don’t know any of the concepts behind making websites. The new design puts the editor side-by-side with the end result, allowing users to see immediately how their changes affect their pages. In contrast, the previous version had users going back and forth between two different views as they would in a desktop program like FrontPage.

While there are not many new features per se, Sampa now has a completely new set of themes and colors. CEO Paul Gross says that the changes in aggregate make the site more of a competitor to focus sites like Babyjellybeans and MyFamily.com rather than website builders like Weebly or Jimdo.

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When we covered the slate of companies helping people chronicle family stories and milestones, we left out a quiet but excellent Redmond, Washington startup called Sampa.

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.

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Sampa is a personal website creation tool that lets you customize your own freely hosted website. Unlike Weebly and Synthasite, Sampa is not as much focused on layout as it is on content. Site creation is focused instead around adding content to your site through modules. They’ve recently crossed 1,000,000 page views to their site last month on a $4,000 per month burn rate and have added their service to Facebook today.

Sampa sites revolve around modules. You can add modules for blogging, photo galleries, static pages, YouTube, Flickr, Twango, Amazon, Delicious, Blue Dot and Blogger. When you add a module, a link to it is added to the menu bar at the top. You can restrict access to any of your content to anyone, friends, or different Sampa members. The layout of the page is basic, allowing you to move around modules and adjust the number of columns. The design can be changed by applying any of the templates from their gallery.

The addition to Facebook allows you to create and manage your page right through Facebook. You can view your page and your Facebook friend’s pages through the Facebook canvas page. Sampa also adds a mini version of your site to your profile page.

Other website personalization services may enter Facebook, but it will be a tough slug considering the site’s rigidly spartan design principles.

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