VentureBeat

Synthasite, one of a handful of companies that lets you build your own Web site easily, has raised $5 million in its first round of funding.

We’ve mentioned the company several times, referring to its tools that let you drag and drop features onto a template.

While both Weebly and Jimdo — Synthasite’s most significant competitors — have more advanced products, Synthasite now has more money than the two other companies combined. Synthasite’s co-founder, Vinny Lingham, said his investor, the Swiss-based Columbus Venture Capital, is taking the long view on this investment. The company aims to be a place where anyone, regardless of programming skills, will be able to build any type of site, ranging from regular websites to blogs to storefronts and more. Vinny says Columbus acknowledges that it may take time to get the product to align with the vision.

Weebly has about 113,405 monthly uniques, according to Quantcast, compared to Synthesite, which isn’t even tracked.

The market might not be so forgiving. Weebly, which has a team of three founders plus one contractor, has managed to crank out impressive products at regular intervals, starting with a remarkably simple drag-and-drop website builder and growing to a MySpace profile editor that puts MySpace’s own tools to shame.

If I were Vinny, I’d set aside $2 million of that capital to try to buy Weebly.

Synthasite is based in South Africa, but hopes to move to the Valley next year.