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    • Mon Mar 26, 2007

    Yahoo Small Business Rolls Out Site Solution

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    Yahoo Small Business has offered very good, inexpensive web hosting for some time now. They also offer software called Site Builder to help you build a small business site. Site Builder is a bit clunky and comes with a learning curve to make it work.

    Today, Yahoo announced an addition to the small business web site world that I think is a very solid contribution. The new web application is called Site Solution. With Site Solution you can log into your hosting account and build a fully code compliant, CSS design for a web site in about 30 minutes. The design and layout of the tool is one of the better I have seen. You choose a design, select the layout for the pages and start entering your text. This tool should help make Yahoo Hosting more appealing from a competitive standpoint.

    The initial designs are very up to date and stylish. The only drawback is the limited number of designs to choose from at launch. If this is going to be a serious play from Yahoo they will need to add hundreds of changing designs and explore industry specific designs.

      When I was given a demo of the tool from the team at Yahoo I also suggested:

    • Give users access to the meta data like the title tag for optimization purposes
    • Add a form creation tool, list management and email newsletter tool
    • Offer a template matching install of WordPress (they already offer WordPress with hosting)
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    Posted by: John Jantsch on Mar 26, 07 | 2:02 pm
    Category: Yahoo | Tags:

    « Stay Out of The Bad Part of Town | Home | Seriously Kule Color Tools »
    • <pingback>...Yahoo’s ad network. … Valleywag - http://www.valleywag.com Yahoo Small Business Rolls Out Site ...</pingback>
    • Lars H
      I've been using Yahoo Store (now known as Yahoo Merchant Solutions) since 1998, and still haven't found any kind of ecommerce solution that comes close.

      My main store does more than $2 million a year in sales online and has been featured in both Inc. and Entrepeneur magazine, so reliability is important to me, and so is data security. Yahoo delivers on both counts.

      I don't use Yahoo for my non-ecommerce informational sites, because I am technically inclined enough to use Dreamweaver and update myself from a designer's beginning design.

      But if I weren't technically inclined, I would go with a Yahoo hosting template style solution like this.

      I have more than one Yahoo Store, and several of my smaller stores actually use default Yahoo templates because they look good enough that I didn't feel it was necessary to upgrade to something custom.

      That's an excellent suggestion about blog templates that match the site template, by the way. Seems like a no brainer, and it would totally add to the value of the hosting, because custom Wordpress templates are too hard to do yourself, and often expensive if you hire someone.
    • <pingback>...by displaying relevant Google ads on your website. Yahoo Small Business Rolls Out Site SolutionToday, Yahoo announced an addition to the small business web site world that I think is a very solid contribution. The new web application is called Site ...</pingback>
    • Hey John, I definitely agree with you that the designs that Yahoo! is offering are among the best out there in "cheap template" sites. However it really worries me that we will start seeing homogeneous, template-like websites everywhere...

      It's starting to look like the "commoditization" of websites. No differentiation between them just for the sake of doing it faster and cheaper.

      Not to mention all the talented designers that might find it hard to get new jobs. Just my opinion.

      Thanks,
      Ron E.
      http://brandcurve.com
    • Jane D.
      "With Site Solution you can log into your hosting account and build a fully code compliant, CSS design for a web site in about 30 minutes."

      I doubt it. Yahoo's example site, accountantsforthearts.com, has about 65 HTML errors on the front page alone. Could you please provide a link to a "fully code compliant" Site Solution website?

      Thanks,
      J.D.
    • John Jantsch
      JD,

      The site I built using a real hosting account worked out this way and the code did validate. I'm not a code expert, but I checked that much out. Perhaps the example site wasn't set up that way.
    • Jane D.
      Can you provide a URL to that site?
    • Hey John,

      Thanks for pointing this out. I've thought (for quite some time) that it's crazy that non web-savvy people can't easily create a web site.

      I think they've got a hit on their hands!

      Best,
      Ryan
    • John Jantsch
    • Have used yahoo small business hosting before but had to drop it because of problems with mysql database and running php scripts
    • From what I'm gathering on this blog, it sounds like the Yahoo small business solution is a good solution for the basics. And in the event i need a more robust site and/or features, it should suffice.

      Thanks everyone for the info. Regards,

      Jesse
      www.SpecialsOnTheWeb.com
    • josh
      "I doubt it. Yahoo's example site, accountantsforthearts.com, has about 65 HTML errors on the front page alone."

      I validated the site and found no errors including no javascript errors. The code seems clean. Can you point out the errors you encountered?
    • very
      very
      nice
      thankss...
    • <pingback>...is a bit clunky and comes with a learning curve to … Original post by unknown and software by Elliott ...</pingback>
    • This is definitely a step up but with places like rentacoder.com you can get a real snazzy site customized to your utmost desire for around $25-50...and it won't LOOK LIKE every other small biz website out there.

      Just post on rentacoder for a joomla customization and you'll get more responses than you know what to do with. And, if you use godaddy.com you're looking at hosting for about $4 per month.

      ~ Jason ~
    • All these template-based website tools for SMBs are very useful ... up to a point. As you hint, John, familiarity (i.e. everybody's sites looking something similar) may well breed contempt.

      I think these tools should be offered as a starting point with the option to modify and get someone to build your own templates.

      Web design has become a commodified market. If Yahoo opened template creation to the community a) there's be a much wider choice, b) small businesses could hire someone to design a personal template for very little money indeed.
    • Hi - I just created a website yesterday using Yahoo!'s Site Solution -- it was pretty easy once I got the hang of it -- but they don't offer anything except more tabs. I want to add a product tab. Within the product tab, I want to be able to go to different types of products (several pages). Is there something I can upgrade to without losing all the work I've already done? Thanks.
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