Whether you've got two dozen customers and rent the software, or have thousands of resellers and buy the software, Akmin's SiteGalore has a massive feature list and a price to match your business model.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 19, 2005]

Chennai, India-based Akmin Technologies offers SiteGalore, a full featured website builder product already embraced by such big names in the industry as Tucows and IKANO.

The key feature of any website building software is usability, says David Hill, director of business development. "We know that a user will switch off when they hit the first problem," he says.

Each page of each wizard within the builder has a "help movie" link that users can click on to watch a video explaining how to use that page. Users can jump back to previous pages using a drop down menu, make changes, and then return to the current step of the wizard.

Among the products many features are:

• A blogging tool
• A store, with payment integration
• An order form builder
• A word processor
• A WYSIWIG editor, Editlet, available in application and Java applet editions
• A site download prevention feature to aid customer retention
• Cross platform compatibility achieved through basing the app on J2EE
• Flash intro creation tool (not everyone thinks flash intros are good, but it does seem wise to offer them to people if they might want them)
• Site design templates whose number continues to grow
• Available in nine languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, and Chinese

The product has undergone extensive independent testing, and Hill is especially proud of the fact that SiteGalore passed is ISO9001:2000 international quality test at KPMG without even a minor non-conformity (minor issues are allowed). Separately, SiteGalore was tested at Philadelphia-based National Software Testing Labs (NSTL) "after it achieved an equivalent of 2,795,904 successful transactions per day without a single failed transaction."

For users who find even wizards too complex, Akmin offers a site building service for $125 per site that ISPs can resell at a markup of 100 to 400 percent. Any company that absolutely cannot use wizards to build their own site would, we believe, be willing to pay $600 for this service. Paying $125 for a service you're selling for $600 is exactly why you'd consider outsourcing to India. Everybody wins in this transaction.

A slew of additional features are planned for the future. They are too numerous to list here, but they include:

• A content management system
• Live chat support
• Live web statistics
• Search engine submission
• Local weather report module
• Stock quotes
• Event calendar

Pricing and availability
Sounds like a carrier grade product but the pricing is reasonable. The product is available in two versions, rented or purchased.

The rented, Application Service Provider (ASP) model pricing is visible on the service's website. It starts at $33 per month for 20 users, with volume discounts dropping the price rapidly to $249 per month for 250 users.

The licensed product is available in a variety of configurations with different prices. S. Prasanth, the company's CEO, tells us that companies tend to switch from the ASP model to the licensed model after they have 3,000 to 4,000 users on the service. Even the largest deployment, he adds, would pay little more than $4,000 per month.

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