Publishing Prepared Her For Webhosting

Linda Miksch found her publishing company background gave her some unusual insights into webhosting, enabling her to build a business that really differs from its competition.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 30, 2004]

Scotts Valley, Calif.-based SpinSite doesn't market itself as a webhost. Instead, the company advertises "Build your website in 4 easy steps." Bingo! It's already out of the commodity market with a targeted audience.

Linda Miksch, company co-founder, created her first website in 1996. A Jewish community site, it included chat rooms and other features that were novel at the time.

But it was publishing software that gave her the ideas that made SpinSite what it is today. "I owned a printing company for fifteen years, and had a strong background in PageMaker and Quark."

With the benefit of a crack team of database programmers, some of whom were company co-founders, she built a content management engine that's designed to take the pain out of website building.

It wasn't done in a day. The company was founded in 2000, and spent 18 to 20 months in software development before opening for business.

She gives all the credit to the programmers. "I have been privileged to work with some of the best database programmers in the world. We have programmers in six states and five countries."

The idea was to compete for the small business website market. "We've taken all the complex features that can be built in: surveys, polling, discussion forums (with topic notification, and full threading) and made it easy. Doing it yourself or hiring someone to do it would take 1 to 6 weeks. With SpinSite, you just click a radio button, give it a title, and enter you return, and you have a fully threaded forum with notification (which sends you an e-mail each time there's a new post)."

Compared to layout software, website software was restrictive, Miksch says. "The software was all template-based. We're theme-based. We use the row and column principal. Each row is independent of the next row. You can float a color or adjust widths with radio buttons."

Customers galore
In fact, SpinSite acquired a wider variety of customers than expected. "It spans from people who've never touched anything before and need a website but cannot afford $15,000 to Web consultants building websites faster."

"We've also got school districts. Teachers have definite needs. Because of the way our software is written, you can assign administration rights on a page by page basis so each teacher gets their own page, where they can post homework and collect volunteers. Teachers were using free resources, and the principal had no control. Schools can work with us for under $50 per month."

"Churches are a very strong group that fall into the same category. You can assign rights on a page by page basis, so you can provide smaller groups pages within your church website."

Even large companies are signing on. "We recently entered the retail marketplace. If you've ever gone into the retail market, you've seen how long things take. It's stressful. We're not like that. We're an instant kind of company."

SpinSite is a virtual hosting company. It uses the infrastructure of San Antonio, Tex.-based RackSpace and open source software (UNIX and PHP MySQL), all of which keeps costs down.

Miksch says everyone saves. "Using SpinSite, it's easy to build something that quickly turns into a site comparable to a $7,000 or better website if you're really good, without that upfront cost."

She says store owners of any size want to control their websites. "When we were doing market research, we found sad people who were put off by Web designers they'd selected who wouldn't make changes to the sites they'd built. Making changes isn't profitable for a designer, so there's a group of frustrated people out there."

Citing a mixture of market data and personal experience, Miksch foresees a big change in the way people do business. "It's similar to printing. When Apple came out with the 300 dpi printer, the print industry said that customers would always demand typesetting. The change took 10 years, because it's complex to change, but it happened."

SpinSite's final benefit for customers is that, because the interface is Web-based, customers can change their websites while they're on the road. "I have a customer who's an antique dealer who was in England. They found things they could not really afford, but bought them anyway. They put pictures up on the website while they were still in England, and got it all sold before they returned to the U.S. If you have a website, it's about doing things right now, not about waiting for two months for a designer to take care of you."

The SpinSite future
For the future, SpinSite is working on adding calendars and reservation systems, but maintaining the Web-based nature of all the company's software.

And, yes, the company would love to work with ISPs. "We haven't done ISP agreements, but we're open to working with ISPs, and we certainly do not provide ISP services ourselves."

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