Web.com Offers FREE Website Design
It is almost impossible for a
small home based company like pageBuzz to complete with a company
the size of Web.com who in 2012 acquired Network Solutions for $405
million in cash and 18 million shares of web.com and now sees $500
million is annual sales in the small to medium size business
website hosting market.
With that kind of bank account,
they can do whatever they want, whenever they want and wherever
they want.
They are currently (in
2012) running a heavy TV ad campaign offering FREE Website Design
for any business, and if you like it, then you just pay for the
website hosting.
This is actually an amazing
offer, however I have not directly seen any of the website they
are building. I have to assume that have a standard template that
fits all businesses, change the name and some pics and call it a
day.
In many cases, this is enough
to satisfy most small business.
But we have been down this
road before when we first started in 2003-2004. We built hundreds
of custom sites for free nd the people never stayed on as
customers.
It seems that people looking
for FREE stuff don't want to pay for anything.
So we would give them 3 months
FREE and then when the free ride ended they moved to someone else
that was free.
It is a well known fact that
offering free website hosting just does not work.
In fact yahoo bought Geocites
for $3.6 Billion and eventually closed it because it did nothing
but cost money and very few customers ever moved from free to
paid hosting. That was an expensive lesson.
We learned our lesson because
we did all the work ourselves, and when we spend 20 hours
developing a website and someone was unwilling to pay a few
dollars a month to pay for hosting it hurt. That is nearly 1/2 a
week of work down the drain.
Companies like Web.com can pay
people to do it and waste away millions to build their brand and
become popular like Godaddy. But there is no way we could ever
compete with that kind of marketing.
So at pageBuzz we don't
even try, but we have revisited the idea of building free websites, but we now require 2 key elements:
1 year hosting
Requirement
If we are going to build a
website for free, we need to make some money someplace. We do
that by selling the website hosting services. But if the customer
only pays for 1 month we might get $20 for 20 hours of work. So
we have to require customers to host with us for 1 full year.
Otherwise, they would have us build the design and then move to
the cheapest or free website service while we go broke working
like dogs for nothing.
Customers Must Have
and Existing Business
This will not likely shock
anyone but 90% of the new businesses online fail in the first 3
months. So anyone starting an online business has close to 100%
chance of never lasting even one year.
This makes it impossible for
us to build free websites when we need 2 years of hosting just to
pay for the design.
Website design is a loss
leader and when you do it free it is expensive when you pay
someone 1/2 a weeks pay to build it. So if the customer has
little chance of being a lifetime customer we can't take the risk.
So we only do free sites for
businesses that have been in business and will remain in business
and will generate an long term income for our company.
Our margins are so low it is
just impossible to spend $500 to build a website for free. We
would have to charge $2000 for the website to make money.
Now web.com can do it all day
long, but we just can't.
And for us, that is OK,
because we will both get very different customers.
Web.com will get all the
people looking for free websites and see 90% of them fail.
pageBuzz on the other hand
will get only business that will stay in business. We will work
with them on a more personal level to build not just a simple
cookie cutter website, but a long term plan.
We have to work harder because
we need the customer to stay longer. If they get no value, we
lose the customer.
Our customers will enjoy
personal service, help with all aspects of their website as they
grow and build their web presence.
Web.com customers will pay for
the website and forget about it waiting for the site to produce
something.
We work with companies
that know being online is an important part of their business.
Web.com will work with people that want a website because
everyone else has one and never get much value from it at all.
So as you can see pageBuzz and
web.com are after different things.
We actually used web.com
to register domains back in 2004 and they closed the domain
registrations while they were supposedly becoming a registrar.
Well, months went by and nothing happened, they never
reopened that option so we moved on to other services.
It just made me wonder,
what kind of company would close such an important service
and tell people that it was going to reopen in a couple of
weeks and never do it?
Since then I have always been
weary of using web.com for anything.
But we have remained small
while they have become huge. They are a mega machine and growing
to uncontrolled levels and eating up small companies that are in
their path.
Will this FREE Website design
offer work for them? Or will it be just like when we used them
for domain registrations in 2004?
We will have to wait and see,
but one thing is for sure, it has forced our hand to try to
compete. And maybe that is all they wanted, to force us little
guys out of the market.
All is fair in "Love, War
and Website Hosting" and we have to deal with it. Hopefully
we can hold on while they learn that offering free website design
does not build a company.
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