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By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
September 7, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A Web site builder that enables users with little technical knowledge to easily build their own Web sites has become a standard part of any Web hosting package. Independent software vendors and in-house development teams have produced a variety of solutions for hosts, but none has come to dominate the market.
"There is a ton of [site builder] offerings out there without any clear winner yet," says Kurt Daniel, director of marketing for Web hosting automation software developer SWsoft (sw-soft.com). "No really successful product has demonstrated great value, innovation and adoption by hosting providers."
With an eye towards breaking into the Web site builder market, SWsoft released its SiteBuilder late last year and on Wednesday unveiled SiteBuilder for the Windows platform. In conjunction with the release, SWsoft and Microsoft (microsoft.com) announced that they would offer SiteBuilder for Windows free to Web hosting providers through September 30 of next year.There are no strings attached with the special promotion and hosts that sign up will also receive free updates and upgrades for a year after they sign up or until the close of the promotion next September. In addition, SWsoft will offer free email support with Microsoft's assistance, something Daniel says few if any vendors are providing.
SWsoft's SiteBuilder for Windows is designed for both end users and service providers and features a library of more than 300 Web site templates. A five-step point and click wizard enables users to build a basic layout and a WYSWYG editor is available for non-technical users. An assortment of skins can be integrated with Plesk and other third party control panels to facilitate private branding.
What separates SiteBuilder from other solutions, says Daniels, is its unprecedented ease of use. SiteBuilder can be deployed within minutes and the software's intuitiveness enables quick site creation for even the least technically inclined users. For more advanced users, an open architecture enables users to make modifications to default template designs, and add new templates, page sets and modules.
SiteBuilder features complete integration with SWsoft's suite of automation solutions - Plesk, PEM, HSPcomplete and Virtuozzo - as well as other third party control panels and Microsoft's Windows Server operating system and SQL Server.
Microsoft worked with SWsoft to make sure the product was easy for hosts to get up and running and customer friendly, says John Zanni, director of shared hosting for Microsoft. Most importantly, Microsoft wanted the product to run well on Windows and raise its profile in the Windows hosting community.
"We worked with them to make sure that on a Windows platform this product works very well, and also to make sure that hosters are aware that this product is for them to use and grow their businesses."The solution is available in three languages - English, Japanese and German - and more are on the way, says Daniel, noting that the company's flagship control panel Plesk supports 14 languages.
"For those hosters that are going beyond their own national borders to grow their business with their end users and resellers, that's going to be more and more critical," says Daniel.
In terms of business benefits, SiteBuilder can contribute greatly to a company's bottom line. "It's a way for hosting providers to attract many more customers and also retain more customers," says Daniel. "If they have an easy-to-use tool and there's not a better one somewhere else, there's less of a need to migrate away from them."
For Microsoft, working with partners like SWsoft is part of its overall efforts to expand its presence in Web hosting, an effort Zanni believes is dependent on enlarging Microsoft's portfolio of hosting-related applications.
"We're committed to helping Web hosters build their Windows businesses, we want to do this by working with partners like SWsoft to really create a rich ecosystem of applications that hosters can use to increase revenues, reduce costs and start offering great Windows-based offerings to their customers."
Daniel says SWsoft will be following an "aggressive roadmap" for SiteBuilder. Two more versions will be shipped in the near year with the next release slated for six months from now. The upcoming releases will feature additional functionality, says Daniel, with more components and modules designed to enable the building of more powerful Web sites.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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