Webbed

from the pages of the WashingtonPost;

The Company That Turns Your Page
By Leslie WalkerThursday, April 7, 2005; Page E01

I feel guilty not having my own Web site, as if any self-respecting journalist covering the Internet ought to be blogging her heart out and learning firsthand the latest trends in Internet publishing.
But blogging is a lot of work, and so is any kind of publishing on the Web, a bottomless pit if ever there was one. Once you start, you're never done.

So I was all ears last week when Justin Kitch stopped by my office to show off QuickSites, a Web publishing service his company launched on Monday. For $49 to $499, depending on how fancy your tastes are, you can buy a ready-made site pre-designed down to navigation menu buttons and logos related to your industry. After the one-time creation fee, a customer pays $25 a month to Kitch's company, Homestead Technologies Inc., to host a site on the Web.
Since only half the country's more than 20 million small businesses have Web sites, and many that do are unhappy with theirs, I figured there would be much interest in any service that truly provided a professional-looking Web presence for under $500. I decided to test QuickSites to see what small businesses face today when they try to go online.
A decade after the Web went commercial, the reality is that most small firms still can't figure out how to get a useful site without paying thousands of dollars to a designer or settling for a crude collection of static pages slapped together by a teenager or friend. Web publishing innovations in the past year have focused mostly on e-commerce stores and personal publishing, helping people create blogs, for example. That hardly helps if you're a dentist or engineer. And those who do manage to design custom sites using off-the-shelf software or online tools find it's still not easy getting their sites published or "hosted" on the Web.
"For many people, the most complicated part is figuring out where you are going to host your site and then getting your site up there to the Web," said Kitty O'Neil, a Web designer based outside San Francisco who has been selling her designs to Homestead. "You have to keep a Post-it note around to remember how to get into your [Web hosting] server. The nice thing about QuickSites' software is it does that high-tech stuff behind the scenes for you. You can go in and change your daily special without knowing anything."
So far, Homestead has hundreds of site designs and is recruiting designers to submit more, offering royalty fees of 10 to 25 percent each time someone buys one of their creations. Unlike prior click-and-publish services, QuickSites offers pre-built sites with up to 10 connected pages, rather than page templates people have to assemble on their own.
I tried out the service this week and got a clean, personalized test site up and running in about two hours at www.lesliewalker.homestead.com. The design I chose cost $250, a price common for non-e-commerce sites at QuickSites (www.homestead.com). Anyone can try the service for free for seven days.
You customize a site by clicking and typing on dummy text and images, then substituting your own words and pictures. Most of the canned text and images are tailored to specific businesses, such as real estate.
The "Rusty Thai" design, for example, offers five restaurant pages, including a menu with 30 common Thai dishes, along with ingredients and prices.
In my test, QuickSites grabbed several photos from my computer's hard drive and automatically resized them to replace images in the Spartan design I chose. Editing took place directly online, with changes showing up quickly on the live Web site. People familiar with Web-page editing can download and use a more advanced software program to tweak their layout offline, a tool I tested and found helpful to expand the navigation menu on my six-page site.
Kitch, Homestead's chief executive, said his seven-year-old company became profitable for the first time last year and has 60,000 paying customers for its existing publishing service. Soon, QuickSites will add other premium services, he said, including the ability to register visitors at a site and schedule appointments online.

I randomly contacted designers building for QuickSites and found a wide range of experience. California's Kitty McNeil, for instance, has a long résumé of full-time work at big technology companies. Ljubisa Cavic, 20, has done little professional design work, lives in the small city of Red Hill in Alberta, Canada, and said he is hoping to land a job with a design firm. Ted Hantak, co-owner of Roxana, Ill.-based Sitedesigns4u.com, has been putting together Web sites for clients for seven years.
Most saw the service as a boon for small businesses more than for designers, who typically charge $1,000 to $5,000 to custom-design sites.
"Trust me, it hurts our businesses," said Hantak, who called QuickSites a useful but limited tool for small firms. He and other designers said many pre-built sites don't get customized much, leaving customers with cookie-cutter displays.
I also contacted a dozen small and medium-size firms in the D.C. area that have Web sites and found most had paid a lot more to develop them than QuickSites charges. Moreover, several said site updates are costly.
Typical was Greenworks, a D.C. florist with four shops at hotels including the Willard and Mandarin Oriental. Greenworks paid a contractor $1,500 for its existing Web site six years ago. Recently, it contracted with a designer in Milan to develop a fancier site that will cost more than $4,000 when it goes live. "We need a Web site that reflects the creativity we display in our cutting-edge designs," said employee Peggy Stanley. Greenworks staffers, however, won't be able to make site changes, which will require going back to the contractor.
Calibre CPA Group, a D.C. accounting firm, also is grappling with the updating issue. Its elaborate Web site has 70 pages and was built by a staffer who spent two weeks developing it. Calibre initially sought a bid from an outside contractor, but the $20,000 price tag was more than Calibre wanted to pay.
"The biggest challenge with our site has been keeping it relevant, trying to keep fresh information on it," said marketing director Mark McClain. Making changes still requires effort by the in-house programmer, he added, so Calibre is exploring whether to hire a consultant to add an updating tool to its home page.
And that, to me, is the most valuable part of QuickSites, the way it lets you click to feed the Web beast yourself at no extra cost. Of course, figuring out what to feed the beast is another story, which is why I may give my test site the heave-ho next week.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32848-2005Apr6_2.html