Well I guess Synthasite wasn’t all that desperate after all. The South African company has raised a $5 million round of financing to support their easy-to-use web page builder from Compagnie Financière Richemont’s subsidiary, Swiss-based Columbus Venture Capital.

We first covered the company in late 2006.

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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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Is this a brilliant PR move, or a sign of desperation? Web site builder Synthasite, which we took an early look at in November 2006, is giving 1 million shares of stock away to users.

Users earn shares by creating templates. Each template accepted by the company earns 1,000 shares for the creator. “We’re only selecting the best templates,” the company says.

The company won’t say what percentage of the company they are giving away, but do say that the shares are valued at $250,000. Since Synthasite has not raised significant outside capital, that valuation doesn’t mean much.

“If SynthaSite was ever acquired or became a listed entity, these shares would be worth exponentially more than what they are today,” the company says. That’s a bold statement, and one that would almost certainly get them in trouble if they were located in the U.S. Since Synthasite is located in South Africa, U.S. securities regulations don’t apply to them. So if you’re a designer willing to take a little risk, go get those shares.

Synthasite has a sophisticated site creation tool that competes with a host other startups and Google’s own page creator. Other competitors include Weebly and Jimdo. Webjam, Sampa, and Freewebs are creating communities around easily editable personal websites.

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South Africa based incuBeta will soon launch a website builder called Synthasite to help people build webpages entirely online. It will include a lot of the functionality of desktop applications like Frontpage and Dreamweaver (think Writely or Zoho Writer v. Word).

Like Sitekreator and Google Page Creator, Synthasite will be an entirely online application. The service, which is in private beta testing, won’t be launching until later in the fall. However, we’ve had a chance to test it.

Synthasite is going to be very popular. Like Sitekreator it has a wide variety of templates to choose from, and the team has a few ideas on how to help site creators integrate with third party web services as well. It has significantly more functionality than Google Page Creator. However, the beta product is only working currently in Internet Explorer (Firefox will be released soon), and we had a lot of trouble with the site repeatedly crashing and closing down. When we persisted, the results were good, though, and we assume that there will be no public launch before the the site is completely, or at least mostly, stable.

We’ll have a detailed review just as soon as it’s available on Firefox (and therefore Mac) and compare/contrast to Sitekreator.

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