Comparing hosted services for small business websites
As Jackie Huba and I mentioned last week, it’s vital to create a web presence for your small business. It’s also damned easy these days.
As promised, I’ve provided some capsule reviews and a comparison chart for five tools that make building a website quick and (relatively) painless. Anne Zelenka at Web Worker Daily provided a brief but excellent overview of these web development tools last week. My goal is to dive a little deeper and see which provide the most utility and benefit to small businesses.
If your goal is to get a site up quickly and cheaply, you almost can’t go wrong with any of these web site platforms. I am most critical of SiteKreator and Webnode and for a simple reason: if one of them goes out of business, it’s not clear how you’re able to get your content back. SiteKreator has the more obvious business model, so that may be less of an issue, but speaking from experience, if you don’t have access to your content and your provider goes belly-up, you could find yourself good and well hosed. SynthaSite, Weebly and Wordpress all allow for moving content out of their systems in some form or other, which wins major points in my book.
A second - though minor - critique is that each of the tools assumes some level of HTML/web knowledge at some point in the process. I highly recommend anyone doing this for themselves take the time to get familiar with a couple of the tools to see where they run into the ceiling of their knowledge before committing their entire web operation to one of these sites. Now, on to the show.
Weebly - Very, very cool. It’s got a simple, hip interface that I found easy and fun to work with. Its low price (i.e., free) is very tough to beat. Integrated blogging feature. Nice designs. My main concern/critique is their lack of an obvious business model. As GigaOM pointed out, they’ve got a tough road to hoe to profitability. You can download site in a zip file, which is nice. Overall, a very solid, well thought out product.
SiteKreator - I looked at the Personal edition as that allows you to have your own domain. Offers different designs based on paid level, so make sure the designs are available at your level. Simple, sophisticated content creation tools. Ability to insert custom HTML into the templates, which is nice for advertising and analytics code. No scheduling of content. Integrated blogging. Some templates not very SEO-friendly. Strong business model - the company creates custom site designs, provides consulting, or integration of existing designs into its content management tools. Very sophisticated options for folks willing to dive into the toolkit, such as access controlled pages, meta description and meta keywords sections, page title customization, custom 404 pages, etc. Limits ability to delete pages linked to, eliminating risk of broken hyperlinks, which is particularly nice. SiteKreator offers the least amount of storage. Shouldn’t be a problem for the types of sites we’re looking at here, but, could be an issue for long-term site growth.
Webnode - Very capable tool and completely free (nice!) but I can’t figure out their business model. Also has - to my taste - a much more complex interface compared to the others. For small businesses with limited experience, that’s a con in my book. Tagging for pages, a nice feature. Slowest interface. Not horrible, just a bit frustrating after the simple, quick elegance of Weebly and SiteKreator. Allowed me to delete a page linked to from other place and removed links to page, which is way cool. Easy custom 404 page builder. Advanced features include ability to incorporate custom designs and RSS feeds. Still, can you get your content out of it?
SynthaSite - More of a site creation toolkit than the others, which allows you to get your content out. The downside is that fewer tools (blogs, forms, etc.) available by default. Vinny Langham, the company’s CEO has mentioned that they’ll look to make money via paid widgets in the future. Works best on a big monitor (tough to see everything on the screen on my 15″ laptop screen - much better on my 17″ one). Otherwise, this is a very cool tool for building your site. Could almost serve as a poor man’s Dreamweaver.
For quick comparison, take a look at this chart (I’ve included Wordpress for baseline comparison):
| Weebly | SiteKreator | SynthaSite | Wordpress | Webnode | |
| Domain hosting | + | + | + | + | + |
| Integrated CMS | + | + | + | + | + |
| Price/year | $0 | $95 | $0 | $25* | $0 |
| Ability to move content | + | - | + | + | - |
| Design options | + | + | + | - | + |
| Viable business model | ??? | + | ??? | + | ??? |
* - Price/year includes cost to direct a custom domain to the Wordpress hosting platform. Domain registration cost isn’t included.
While I recommend you take the one that’s most interesting to you for a spin, a few things became obvious during this process. SynthaSite or Weebly look like the best choice for creating content to host elsewhere and Webnode, Weebly or SiteKreator seem to be the better choice if you’re going to use their hosting. I give gold stars to Weebly in particular, but to be completely fair, the fact that we’re debating which sub-$100 a year web hosting/content management system service provides the best small business starter website is remarkable. No business has an excuse for remaining invisible with these options available.
By the way, web developers building sites today need to get an account to one or more of these services and see how high they’ve set the bar for a basic site/content management system. Each of these tools will cover the basics and each offers a handful of advanced features. I wouldn’t suggest that these tools can replace the knowledge and skills strong development shops have built for themselves. But those developers are going to have to work hard to show their potential customers what they’re paying for.
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Full disclosure - I’m both a Wordpress.com and hosted Wordpress user, but have no financial stake in either.
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January 19th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Nice article. It’s great if you can set your small business up with a low price. That statistics will be helpful for all to do that.
January 24th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Definitely worth checking out your list of sites.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Comparing Jimdo to SiteKreator, Webnode, Weebly and Wordpress…
Jimdo provides small business owners an excellent option for hosting their small business website. How does it compare to SiteKreator, Webnode, Weebly and Wordpress?
……
January 29th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I must say that this article doesn’t go deep and to me it seems to be biased. The criteria for comparison are strange. What is “Ability to move content”? Was your goal really to compare these systems from the point of view of small business? What are their requiremens? Do you really know what small businesses need? Why should small businesses care of the business model of their webhosting (refer to the criteria “Viable business model”). How come you are the one to judge the quality of business model? So, do you think you really went “a little deeper” as your goal says? Due to my experience many of these systems are not so much suitable for small business……. I must say that I use one of these and I’m really satisfied with it, but I won’t tell you which one. Better to try it yourself….
January 29th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Hi Tom,
I appreciate your point of view. Let’s see if I can address your concerns:
What makes you say the post is biased? I’ll admit I’m a fan of WordPress (I use it myself), but I think all of these are pretty good tools. And when I don’t like something, I explain why. Some criteria (design templates, ease of use) are definitely subjective, but are based on my experience (see below).
Great question about why businesses should care about the “ability to move content.” When you’re going with a low-cost provider, you want to be sure you can switch easily should the need ever come up. If you can’t get your content out of one of these tools, you could find your business in real trouble. Hopefully that day will never come, but, trust me, you don’t want to find yourself in that boat.
My goal was to compare these to see if they’d meet the needs of a simple website for a small business, inexpensively, quickly and with stability.
I’d never claim to know the exact needs of every small businesses. but having run e-commerce, online marketing and web operations for companies large and small for the last dozen years, I feel pretty comfortable I know the minimal requirements that most small businesses should look for in a web hosting provider. Those include ability to create relevant content for their customer, customer and search engine friendly layouts, stability/viability and the ability to do all these things for a decent price. Frankly, all the sites I looked at meet these needs pretty well. You could do a lot worse. And if I missed the needs of a specific business type, let me know. I’ll correct it.
Why should small businesses care about the quality of the business model? I’d turn it around. Shouldn’t small businesses care about whether their key providers can remain in business? I was reminded of that one the hard way recently with this site. The last thing a small business wants is their provider going belly up in the middle of the night. Or worse, during peak business hours.
Now I’ve got a question for you. You say many of these sites aren’t suitable for small business. Can you explain which one and why? That would be something we could all learn from.
Thanks again for your thoughts. Keep on readin’.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Briefly:
- How do I implement product catalogue in Weebly (SiteKreator etc.). Is it simple?
- How do I implement polls in Weebly? (I’m small business without experience and I don’t know anything about widgets…)
- Forms? (I need my customers be able to suggest me something..)
- Forum?
- Image gallery?
- Shopping cart and checkout? (This is most important for SB i think)
These are IMHO the real criteria. Your experience looks great but maybe you missed something in the real world….
“Ability to move content”: I’m sorry I didn’t get it before. You explained it now.
“Business model”: well, I think any service, even if you pay a lot for it, can go down…. and it really happens to tycoons as well….
January 30th, 2008 at 4:14 am
All good questions, Tom. You’re right that I missed something; however, it was entirely intentional. We’re actually referring to different types of small business sites, a distinction I should have made clearer in this post (and the earlier review comparing Jimdo with Weebly, SynthaSite, SiteKreator, and the rest). These two posts built on an earlier question, which asked why so many small businesses have no web presence at all, particularly when many useful tools exist for managing those sites. As I’d stated in that post (and not clearly enough in these) “This isn’t about e-commerce or driving sales online (though you’ll want that in the long run). This is about Marketing 101. No matter what your business is, you need a website. Period.
At a bare minimum, you should have your own domain and some simple content with your contact information. In the old days, folks called it brochure-ware and for some business types (doctors, lawyers, dentists) it may still be all you need.”
As such, these reviews were focused on that level of site, with little thought towards e-commerce. Which is funny, as I’m an e-commerce guy by background. But, for many small business types, their customers may start online, but will necessarily buy offline. Not only is that true for the service providers I mentioned above, but also for restaurants, auto repair shops, grocery stores, farmer’s markets, what-have-you. Those are folks who stand to benefit from having a site today and often don’t and who were the primary audience for this series. Speaking from experience, the power of the web has been oversold to these types of folks the past bunch of years, with the focus primarily on e-commerce. But, for many of these businesses, that’s not where they’ll see the greatest return on their web investment. Sorry for creating confusion (and for the lengthy response).
Regarding your specific questions, I am going to answer the contact form question here and address your e-commerce questions separately below.
For the types of small businesses these posts were meant for, a contact form can be an extremely valuable tool. Fortunately, all the sites I looked at make it really simple. It’s generally a two-click process to create a new page and insert a mail contact form into it. No knowledge of widgets necessary.
We may need to “agree to disagree” on the value of business model. You’re right that high-cost services can go down, too. It’s just less likely. Being forewarned about a supplier that has little chance of survival would make me less interested in that supplier.
Finally, you raise great questions about “stepping up” to e-commerce. E-commerce is another beast altogether and one deserving of its own treatment. Look for more on that in the coming weeks.
Thanks again for your insightful questions and for allowing me to clear up the misunderstanding.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:08 am
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March 19th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I’m a graphic designer whose small business and not-for-profit clients often ask me for help with their web presence. Given their extremely limited resources, I’d like to find a site which would allow me to really get in and tweak with templates —and then allow my clients to manage and update their own content with minimal technical expertise. Suggestions?
March 20th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Hi Occassia,
All of these allow you some degree of changes to the templates, from changes to CSS to full-blown site design. If that’s your only requirement apart from inexpensive hosting, you might want to look at Wordpress or Drupal, which let you customize the design however you choose. Paired with cheap hosting (I like and use Dreamhost), you’ll have a solid combination of power, flexibility, and cost, along with room to grow in the future.
Drop me an email (on the About Tim Peter page) if you need further direction.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:18 am
[…] know it’s one of my more popular posts, but you might want to look at these simple solutions for creating your small business site. If you have a site and just need hosting, I’d check out Dreamhost, too. They’re who I […]
March 27th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Occassia: You can create a “normal-looking”, cms-type or “brochure-ware” type site using the PmWiki flavor of wiki.
PmWiki is an open source wiki project, with a large and very active developer community. http://pmwiki.org. It’s php-based, and uses a flat-file structure instead of a database; setting one up would probably be over the heads of most users, but once installed on a host it would probably be easy for you to skin and for the owners to maintain.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:35 am
[…] Compare site hosting for small business websites […]
April 5th, 2008 at 5:12 am
Hi there I ran across your site while searching for website design price and your post regarding g a website quick and easy: a review of Weebly, SynthaSite, SiteKreator and Webnode caught my attention .. Good info thanks Saturday
April 7th, 2008 at 1:07 am
found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later ..
April 7th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Good site I “Stumbledupon” it today and gave it a stumble for you.. looking forward to seeing what else you have..later
April 7th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
[…] small business web hosting comparison continues to garner the love as does the follow up Jimdo […]
April 10th, 2008 at 7:14 am
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May 6th, 2008 at 6:53 am
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May 30th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I know its been awhile…but I’d love to hear what you think about doodlekit
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:18 am
The Webnode business model you can’t figure out is in the main control planel page. They sell Premium services.
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Thanks for the update, Zone. I believe that’s a recent addition. Either that, or I completely spaced when doing the first review. Given the popularity of this post - in terms of traffic, comments and longevity - I’m going to need to revisit these in the near future. Thanks for reading.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:25 am
[…] of the most popular posts here on thinks compared tools for building your business’ website and looked at additional entries into the small business hosting space. So, why don’t we do […]
September 16th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Yes, good article….but, I would go with SiteVIN. They are a SiteKreator reseller with all the same tools, and for less.
September 17th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Hi Bob,
Thanks for the additional site. I’ll take a look at SiteVIN in a future update.
Thanks,
Tim
September 18th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Hey, http://www.edicy.com - another to add to review - we think we are best - or at least on the way there
We try to achieve:
- simplest UX for anyone starting a business to get their site up and running
- good quality designs to choose from
- multilanguage support both in our editor and for end-users languages
- SEO friendlyness
- openness - ability to customize design over time, move or add hostnames, migrat to other sites when your business grow out of our service
Give us a try and leave feedback, we are eager to improve!