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A company called SynthaSite has just unveiled its new, improved and easier-to-use interface for building Web sites.

SynthaSite’s goal is to provide a graphical drag-and-drop interface that enables un-Web-saavy business owners and even your proverbial grandmother to build their own sites. (No, seriously — one of the samples offered in the press release is a guestbook site created for the user’s 88-year-old mother. It’s called Grammy’s Corner.) To make that happen, usability is crucial, and SynthaSite — founded in South Africa, but now headquartered in San Francisco — has made some real progress.

Changes include a streamlined “one-click” start-up process, a wider area to edit your page and a column that displays metadata about the different elements on your site. I haven’t really used either the old or new interface in a serious way, but quick glance at the two confirms that the new version of SynthaSite is prettier and friendlier.



SynthaSite raised $5 million in venture funding last year. At the time, VentureBeat writer Dan Kaplan was more impressed by the tools offered by competitor Weebly (which, speaking of interfaces, is quite pretty and friendly itself). But chief executive and founder Vinny Lingham says the difference stems, in part, from the two companies’ contrasting approaches. Instead of trying to create every site building tool that a user could need, Lingham wants SynthaSite to tie other useful services together. For example, photo editor Picnik and form creation services Wufoo are both integrated into SynthaSite already.

The Picnik integration also illustrates what stands out about SynthaSite’s business model, Lingham says. Rather than charging for premium services or running its own ads, SynthaSite’s revenue comes from its partnerships with other sites — with Picnik, SynthaSite makes money by showing Picnik’s ads when you use the Picnik tool. I suppose it’s nice that the company isn’t trying to make money from its users directly, but I wonder if it makes a difference to most people. After all, even if you only see ads when you open specific features, that still means you’re seeing ads.

Update: A company spokesperson tells me SynthaSite actually doesn’t make money from the Picnik integration — that’s just an example of possible revenue sharing deals for the future.

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.

Here’s the latest action:

1) IAC splitting into five companies
2) Sea change ahead for Time Warner
3) Google’s merger plans may be foiled by the EU
4) Synthasite launches website creation
5) Whrrl opens local opinion site
6) Internet users like their free stuff
7) Andersen exacts revenge on PR flacks

IAC to split properties into five companies — IAC, the large parent company of Ask.com, is splitting into five separate publicly traded companies: Home Shopping Network, IAC, Interval International, Lending Tree and Ticketmaster. CEO Barry Diller characterized the move as a strategic one, intended to allow the disparate units to concentrate on their own respective businesses. He will remain on as chairman of IAC, which will control a number of well-known web properties including Ask.com, Citysearch, Evite and Match.com.

Sea change ahead for Time Warner with new CEO — The media firm’s leader of the last six years, Dick Parsons, is no longer at the helm. A recent board meeting resulted in the ouster of Parsons and nomination of Jeff Bewkes, the president and chief operating officer, as a replacement. Both moves have been expected at the company for some time; Parsons is commonly described as a diplomat who helped keep Time Warner in one piece through difficult times and smoothed the process of merging with AOL, but is no longer helping the company grow. Bewkes, on the other hand, has a more aggressive management style. Time Warner is notorious for being a slow-moving behemoth, and AOL is mostly known for failing at everything it puts its hand to. Whether Bewkes can change the institutionalized culture at the $75 billion company remains to be seen.

Google acquisition of DoubleClick faces biggest hurdle in EU — The European Union, which famously hounded Microsoft for years over anti-competitive practices, may well set its sights on Google as the next giant up for kneecap-bashing. We’ll skip the legal details here, but this insightful post on ClickZ covers most of them, concluding that “the parties cannot complete the deal unless both EU and FTC approve it.” The European commission is set to decide DoubleClick’s fate a little over a week from now, on November 13.

Synthasite launches beta, but is late to the table – The do-it-yourself website creation company now allows you to publish the sites you build with it, offering free hosting. Synthasite had an early start when it came onto the scene in the beginning of this year, but has since lagged behind its competitors, Y-Combinator graduate Weebly and Germany’s Jimdo, which both have simpler interfaces and offer more ways to customize your site. Synthasite’s big ambition — to open a platform for third-party developers — is likely to collide with similar efforts from the competition, but the market is still anyone’s game. Synthasite generated some controversy (and a spike in traffic) when it offered stock to users (scroll down) in exchange for website templates.

Whrrl, a mobile social network for sharing opinions about locales –Like Yelp, users can find information about restaurants, bars, and other retail joints and share reviews with other Whrrl members or your friends. You can download the application on your mobile phone or use it with SMS. It carries maps, too, so that you can scan your screen and pull up reviews from the dots on it representing your favorite places. You can select only those places recommended by your friends, for example. You can also filter for places based on type of restaurant or other keyword. It will soon let you track friends by GPS, and so is a lot like Loopt. There’s tension here. Loopt is backed by Sequoia Capital. Whrll, meanwhile, is backed Sequoia’s chief Silicon Valley rival, Kleiner Perkins.  KP led a $7.4 million investment last year, joined by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners. Seattle PI first wrote about the company last year. Techcrunch also reviews it here. Robert Scoble interviews the CEO of Whrll parent company, Pelago.

Most internet users still expect to freeload – At first blush, it appeared that an experiment by popular band Radiohead to offer their music for donation-only download had resulted in most users choosing to pay. Oh, really? A comScore study begs to differ: Only 38 percent of downloaded decided to lay down any dough, and on average it was only $6. The upshot: Don’t expect big media companies to stop the fight to charge full rates and stop free downloads on the internet.

PR flacks get spammed following Andersen post – The New York Times has a good retrospective on last week’s scuffle between Wired editor in chief Chris Andersen and 300-plus press relations people he claims spammed him. The latest: Since Andersen posted the email address of every one, the accused spammers are now, themselves, being spammed.

Here’s the latest action:

 Facebook to launch people search in one month — Facebook will let search engines find and display very basic information from your Facebook profile, including only your name and the option to message you or friend you, it announced early this morning.

This way, if somebody searches for you on Google, this “public” page will show up — making it even easier for prospective employers to know where to find you on Facebook, and delve into your personal life. Of course, anyone else trying to find out abut you through Google now will know how to become your friend, which may help drive Facebook adoption even more.

The company says it will wait a month before letting this information loose for the search engines to find, so people have time to change their settings and keep their profiles hidden.

Business 2.0 to be officially shut down — As it proceeded to lop off the tech-business arm of its media empire, Time Inc., owner of Business 2.0, decided not to sell the magazine to Mansueto Ventures, owner of rival magazine Fast Company, reports The New York Times. The reason: it did not want to arm another competitor: The Business 2.0 brand and its 600,000 subscribers, in someone else’s hands could undermine its other business property, Fortune. Some Business 2.0 staff members will join Fortune, while most others reportedly will join other tech publications.

Microsoft releases Silverlight — After months of hype, version 1.0 of Silverlight, Microsoft’s multimedia plugin for developers has been released. It’s the company’s challenge to Adobe’s Flash online multimedia player. While Silverlight has gotten positive reviews from tech circles, it is trying to challenge Flash’s 90 percent-and-growing market share for multimedia players. Microsoft has made a number of major deals to promote Silverlight, including a video deal with Major League Baseball (screenshot left, with the sample here).

Rockyou’s integration of Like.com search results, needs work — Like.com, a visual search engine company that has changed directions since its founding, has integrated its search results into the slide shows featured on the popular photo site RockYou. See example at left. If you’re looking at a picture of a woman in a shirt, for example, Like.com will show you similar shirts and let you buy them. Or at least that’s the idea. It could use improvement, because the example given shows shoes and other items that have little resemblance to the shirt in the picture, and so Like is more likely to become annoying than useful. People don’t want to be distracted by advertising that isn’t relevant to them. In a Techcrunch piece, Like says its ads are getting $0.80 CPM, and that its sharing the revenue wtih RockYou. However, no word yet on the number of ad pages being served. (Via Techcrunch)

Palm scraps the Foleo its laptop-like companion to the Treo — The Foleo, from the beginning, had looked like a questionable project, and we were surprised it got as much publicity as it did. Who needs another device, when you’ve got a Treo and a high-powered laptop already? So Palm yesterday said it has canceled the project, and is taking a charge of “less than $10 million” for the work put into it.

NBC embraces Amazon after ditching Apple’s iTunes — NBC Universal canceled its contract with Apple’s iTunes, and instead announced its shows will appear on Amazon Unbox as soon as next week.

Synthasite, the Web site creator, gives out shares — The company is giving out 1,000 shares in its company to designers who create templates it can offer to users. It says its stock is worth $250,000, but its all very questionable, so participants beware.

MetaCard offers credit card for SecondLife — Details here.

Weebly, a start-up that lets you easily create Web sites with the latest Web 2.0 tools, has raised seed cash from YCombinator, and moved to San Francisco.

The company is just three people from State College, PA. Co-founder David Rusenko originally told VentureBeat he would move to Mountain View. He changed his mind, he said, because he found a vibrant Internet start-up ecosystem in hipper San Francisco — the latest sign that San Francisco has become more of a magnet for these kinds of companies.

Providing similar Web-based tools to create Web sites are four-year-old Santa Clara, Calif.’s Sitekreator and South Africa’s Synthasite — and the biggest of them, Google Page Creator.

Of all of them, Weebly is most oriented around easy AJAX-based dragging and dropping of elements on a page. For example, if you want a Google Map, you drag the Map icon onto the page where you want it, select the map coordinates you want shown, and that’s it. Weebly supports any Javascript-based elements.

Even Google Page Creator doesn’t let you drag maps to your page. Google requires you to get the HTML code from Google Maps, and paste it in.

Weebly has also just opened its software interface (open APIs), so developers of widgets can allow users to add them directly on to Weebly. For example, if we created a widget that shows VentureBeat headlines, we could build in an “add to Weebly” button. That way, if you have a Weebly account, you could visit our site, click on the button, and VentureBeat headlines would be automatically added to your Weebly page.

The only question is, how will Weebly make money? Weebly’s Rusenko said the company is considering a number of options.

While some aspects of the site are intuitive, some others are not. It helped to watch the company’s various demos, including the main one below:

Techcrunch reported on the company here.