When web design is integrated into software that is delivered as a service, no tech knowledge is needed (but design talent is not supplied).

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 11, 2007]

Immigration to the U.S. is a hot topic again, and the debate is framed by a vision of agricultural workers streaming into the country. But in tech, many important businesses were founded in the U.S. by people who came here from India or Eastern Europe. One such person is Ivalyo Lenkov, who founded his company in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1991 but now runs it from Santa Clara, California.

Like many internet companies, his enterprise has changed its core business several times over the years. Founded as NetClime, the company released the RoNet Network Operating System. In 2001, the company moved to Los Angeles to build content management systems for movie studios, Lenkov says. Now the company's big product is SiteKreator, a website building system that provides more features than the competition because it is a stripped-down, streamlined version of the content management system.

"Our goal was to try to fill the gap between the normal site builders currently available (almost every ISP has one) and the professional services provided by design studios," Lenkov says. Thus the goal was a product with more features than usual but priced about the same as, say, DotNetNuke or CM4All's offering, familiar to customers and resellers of 1&1 (see the ISP-Planet article: Handling the Thermodynamics of Webhosting).

Features, features, features
The feature list for the Business Edition is impressive (the Personal Edition is free for any website of 10 MB or less). It includes a broken link prevention mechanism, photo galleries, space for downloadable files, a blog, web forms, and mailing lists.

Lenkov says that the forms and lists allow store owners to build communities around specific products. "Every website has to be interactive to be competitive in the Web 2.0 world," he says. "Our tools are integrated so people without tech skills can add a form or send a newsletter to a group or give access to a part of the site to a community."

Lenkov is a hands-on CEO, running a small company, and was doing QA on the software the night before we spoke. He's as proud of what users don't see as he is of the features they use every day. SiteKreator, he says, is very efficient, using caching to reduce the load of a website.

"An ISP is able to put between 20,000 and 30,000 websites on a two-CPU box, depending on the size of the hard drive."

The software caches frequently loaded elements of a site, such as headers and navigation bars, separately from the content. "Let's say a website is 100 MB. When we divide the frame content from the page content, we are able to hold it in 50 MB of memory because the parts that appear on every page are only stored once. Of course, this is just one of many techniques we use to reduce overhead."

He was not eager to describe other techniques—every business needs its secrets.

Pricing and availability
SiteKreator is available now. The Business Edition retails for $15 per month (that's $180 per year). ISPs can pay an unpublished monthly per-user fee. Larger ISPs will pay an unpublished license fee plus an annual support fee.

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