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.

No word on the startup’s valuation, although co-founder and CEO Vinny Lingham (also an occasional blogger) tells me it was definitely not a down-round and that they’re in it for the long run. He also added that the company is growing nicely, boasting 1 million registered users and graphs clearly showing an upwards traffic trend (Quantcast). Compete shows a similar curve.

SynthaSite makes building simple websites a breeze, but in that it doesn’t differ much from the dozens of similar services out there (e.g. the just launched DevHub, WebJam, Sampa, Jimdo, Weebly, webme and many many more) apart from the fact that they integrated a bunch of third-party services into the application (e.g. WidgetBox for widget distribution, Picnik for photo editing, etc.). SynthaSite is also up against services from established companies, like Microsoft Office Live and Google Sites. It remains to be seen if the now heavily-funded startup will be able to keep growing at the current rate in this economic climate and with an increasingly competitive playing field.

As for the business model: SynthaSite generates revenue from domain names sales only (as an affiliate to Network Solutions) as the service is entirely ad-free. Premium services (like advanced features, unique templates, etc.) are coming later this year, says Lingham.

Strategy-wise, SynthaSite is looking for partnerships with ISPs and large computer manufacturers and internet companies, who could offer a co-branded solution to their users without paying SynthaSite for the service but rather getting a chunk of the revenues back from the company.

It’s a good strategy, but many have tried – and are trying – to do the same, so again, the jury is still out if SynthaSite will be able to justify the faith their investor obviously puts in them in the years to come.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

There are no details on the purchase price or terms of the deal, other than that Clickpass CEO Peter Nixey will be joining the SynthaSite team (Clickpass had one other employee who will not be making the jump). Synthasite has raised $5 million in capital, Clickpass just raised the Y Combinator seed round.

Clickpass helps make OpenID more accessible to users by allowing them to use their accounts on services like Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN to log in to other sites. This is essentially what OpenID was built for in the first place, but it has taken many months for major companies to actually implement the standard (though they have been making strides lately). Randy Almond, SynthaSite’s VP of Marketing, says that the Clickpass technology will be used to make it easier for users to import content from other services into their SynthaSite pages.

This may help streamline SynthaSite’s website building process, but it could have just as easily been done though a partnership. There’s also the issue of Clickpass’s longterm utility – as more companies do wind up embracing OpenID as fully as they’ve promised, much of Clickpass’s usefulness with disappear. Perhaps it’s a mercy acquisition in a down market where I imagine Clickpass would have trouble raising funds.

Either way, we’re fans of both services, it just seems like SynthaSite acquired Clickpass for its talent rather than its lofty goals of bringing OpenID to the masses.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

We first covered the company in late 2006.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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.