Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi all,

I am starting a hosting business that hides the user from the complexities of setting up the website backend and only providing a dedicated website builder only.

services to include:
- domain and email setup for the user
- easy to use website builder
- full support of email and builder products
- targeted towards small/medium business that are not computer savvy
- website fully hosted

My question is, will a business like this likely generate sales enough to make the business profitable? Is the market way too saturated with businesses homestead, moonfruit, citymax, web hosters providing sitebuilders, and web designers?

Also, are there any additional services I can provide to bring in more revenue apart from custom webdesign, or banner/logo editing?

SR5k!

There is room for it if you offer something new.....better.I have tried so many and end up not liking anything, but I do not know HTML. I wish so much I knew HTML.....

Consider two examples of this type of thing from the word processing world: MS Word and WordPerfect.

WordPerfect came along after the original Word, and did two things. They first had the idea of offering the user a blank screen where you could simply start typing. WordPerfect would take care of all the basic formatting, leaving it up to you to create your content.

The idea was that more complicated formatting was too hard for people, and they wanted something "simple." MS Word, at the time, did require you to do a fair amount of formatting, and understand what that formatting meant and how it worked.

WordPerfect then included the nearly unique option of ALSO allowing you to go way down deep under the hood, so to speak, and take control of just about anything at all in the program. You could customize everything.

Eventually, WordPerfect dominated the entire word processing market. Novell bought them out for an astronomical amount, then Corel took it from Novell. Because neither company had a clue about how customers work, the program eventually disappeared.

Now MS Word dominates, but doesn`t allow you to do more then about 50% customization. Certain codes are unreachable, but you can customize a fair amount. On the other hand, Microsoft, in their fantasy world, believes they`re creating an easier and easier product. Instead, they`ve prevented anyone with knowledge from making the program simple to use.

YOU may think that "everyone" or "a lot of people" would love to have a way to set up a Web site without all that back-end complexity. And indeed, there are people who don`t want to learn the skills, but want to do it all themselves to save money. They`ll be your customers, and cause countless hours of tech support issues for you.

Windows ME was supposed to do exactly what it is you`d like to do for the Web hosting with SiteBuilder. That version of Windows became legend for being the worst of all possible worlds. I`ll suggest that if you follow the same business model, you`ll end up with similar problems.

What can you offer more than GoDaddy gives people with "Website Tonight"?

If you ask me, most of the website builder problems are that they lack quality.
What would be cool is a way to a la carte purchase wordpress elements and be able to select from a list of purchasable quality themes, some offered for use and some offered for exclusive content.
And then your service is setting it all up.

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Mike Michalowicz
Author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur