When we started Webvanta (a hosted CMS), we spent quite a bit of time talking with small business owners, understanding their web needs, and trying to figure out if we could provide them with a "do it yourself" solution.
Our conclusion was that, for the vast majority of small business people, there is no such thing as a do-it-yourself solution that is going to yield a quality site. They need help with their writing, marketing strategy, and approach, even if all the technical issues go away. And most of them need help with email marketing, social media, and so forth.
For the $200 customer, they're just going to have to figure it out on their own, using something like Wix, or Weebly, or -- if they have a little budget -- SquareSpace, GoDaddy Website Tonight, or Intuit Sites, or something like that.
For anyone who wants a quality site, and wants to have an effective Internet marketing strategy, they should hire someone to help them. That someone typically goes by the name "web designer", but a good one is as much a marketing consultant as a designer.
Typically, this is going to cost at least 10 times the $200 figure, but that's life. Most business people undervalue design and undervalue the web, and that's what needs to change if they are going to use it effectively.
So with the Webvanta hosted CMS (www.webvanta.com), we have focused on serving professional web designers, to give them a powerful tool they can use to deliver great sites to their clients. We did not attempt to make it easy for a business owner to create their own site; instead, we made it easy for a designer to create a great site, and for the business owner to then be able to add content and maintain the site.
fyi, Webvanta is built with Ruby on Rails, and a bunch of other stuff... It is a designed as a SaaS system and uses a cluster of servers running various things (nginx, clustered MySQL, and a few others). As noted above, there's some more details on the technology we use at www.webvanta.com/technology.
Our conclusion was that, for the vast majority of small business people, there is no such thing as a do-it-yourself solution that is going to yield a quality site. They need help with their writing, marketing strategy, and approach, even if all the technical issues go away. And most of them need help with email marketing, social media, and so forth.
For the $200 customer, they're just going to have to figure it out on their own, using something like Wix, or Weebly, or -- if they have a little budget -- SquareSpace, GoDaddy Website Tonight, or Intuit Sites, or something like that.
For anyone who wants a quality site, and wants to have an effective Internet marketing strategy, they should hire someone to help them. That someone typically goes by the name "web designer", but a good one is as much a marketing consultant as a designer.
Typically, this is going to cost at least 10 times the $200 figure, but that's life. Most business people undervalue design and undervalue the web, and that's what needs to change if they are going to use it effectively.
So with the Webvanta hosted CMS (www.webvanta.com), we have focused on serving professional web designers, to give them a powerful tool they can use to deliver great sites to their clients. We did not attempt to make it easy for a business owner to create their own site; instead, we made it easy for a designer to create a great site, and for the business owner to then be able to add content and maintain the site.