By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
July 25, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A template-based Web site builder that enables customers to easily build their own Web sites is now a standard part of any hosting package. This is especially important when dealing with the small to medium-sized business market, where customers often lack the knowledge and technical skills to build Web sites, and as a result often don’t even bother putting them up.
Helping small businesses overcome their fear of technology is a key to accessing this still-growing market. Research firm the Yankee Group (yankeegroup.com) estimates that in the US alone almost five million businesses don’t yet have online presences.
“Tapping this huge market is still a huge challenge for most ISPs, Web hosts and other service providers,” says David Hill, director of business development for Akmin technologies (akmin.com), developer of the SiteGalore Web site builder. “What you need to do is to get a powerful yet easy-to-use online Web site building tool that allows you to target the small businesses, and allow them to quickly build and maintain their online presence … this is where SiteGalore comes in.”
Akmin’s SiteGalore (sitegalore.com) is a Web site building solution designed specially for Web hosts, domain registrars, ISPs and other providers of Internet services.
The solution, with its user-friendly interface, has seen a consistent series of improvements since first being developed four years ago – including the addition of new tools this year – and contains a breadth of functionality that sets it apart from comparable solutions, Hill says.
One of these is a security implementation feature that smaller hosts should find particularly useful. A problem some hosts face is customers who sign up for a month’s service, create and download a site, only to host it with another provider once the month’s term has expired. SiteGalore’s security feature combats this problem, preventing “unethical” downloads of site templates with the browser “save as” function.
“We want to protect [service providers] customers from being poached by other service providers,” says Hill. “[This] protects the investment for the service provider.”
Another useful feature is the integration of the company’s Editlet (editlet.com) technology. The cross-browser and cross-platform compatible Editlet enables users to cut and paste text out of their Microsoft Word documents directly into SiteGalore while preserving all the formatting.
Other features include a bandwidth-saving publish feature, step-by-step wizards, flash intro animation builders, integrated payment gateways with PayPal and VeriSign, blog and photo album creators, image editors, mailing list generators and more.
SiteGalore literally comes with hundreds of features. But not all may be applicable to the specific market a host is targeting. So SiteGalore has enabled service providers to pick and choose the features they want to offer, putting them together into customized packs.
“It helps you create these packs to suit the needs of your target segment more effectively, and of course, you can go ahead and price them as you prefer,” says Hill.
Service providers can also make use of a variety of private branding and reseller options. With a single installation of SiteGalore, hosts can sign up resellers and sub-resellers under them. And at each level, the solution can be completely privately branded with the company’s colors, logo and domain name. SiteGalore’s private labeling can also accommodate hosts offering multiple brands.
Each page of SiteGalore also includes links to Flash movies designed to accommodate novice users when they require assistance. Hill says this is the best way to help users, as it is generally accepted that “nobody reads user documentation.”
SiteGalore offers more than 900 unique Web site designs. And colors and images to suit any user’s preferences can be easily edited with a straightforward user interface. The sites produced are pure HTML, compatible with nearly any Web server on the Internet.
Through a comprehensive set of API tools, SiteGalore is deployed as a single hosted installation on the service provider’s server, and can be integrated with any control panel that a Web host deploys. Prashanth S, CEO of Akmin, says SiteGalore deployments take approximately two weeks, though larger service providers may take up to four weeks.
SiteGalore comes in ten different languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese and Japanese and is in compliance with ISO 9001:2000 and National Software Testing Labs standards. Several different pricing models for all sizes of service providers are available.
SiteGalore’s customers include major industry players such as Tucows, DirectI, HostMySite.com and Host Europe. Hosting automation software developer Ensim (ensim.com) recently announced it would offer SiteGalore to its service provider customer base.
Ultimately, SiteGalore creates confidence for users, says Hill, enabling them to say “hey, I can do this”. And it is this kind of response that will help hosting service providers to acquire and retain customers.
