With thousands of web sites out there already selling commodity items, it was only a matter of time before the web sites themselves became commodities sold in a similar way. ImageCafe Inc is one such company, a start-up promising hot web sites to go.
The Columbia, Maryland-based firm has about 25 web site master templates, about 150 graphics and motifs and various color schemes. Graphics and images can also be inserted from the user. Each costs $300 and after a two-week free trial a monthly charge of $10 is levied to use the management tool to make changes to the site.
The idea came from a previous company run by president and CEO Clarence Wooten, who found that small businesses couldn’t afford the $3,000 or so needed to build even a basic web site; they expected to pay only about $500. The idea is not new; SiteMatic is another firms offering a choice of numerous templates. The main difference is that SiteMatic requires you let it host the site as well, whereas ImageCafe partners with ISPs or lets the users stick with their existing ISP if they already have one.
Wooten spent last year building a company and building template web sites and launched the service back in April with about $600,000 from angel investors. The idea is to make the creation of a basic web site a shopping, not building experience, but without sacrificing the quality of the design, which is often the main casualty in self-made web sites, says Wooten. The company groups its web sites under the headings commercial, professional services (which covers the majority of small businesses in the US) and non-profit organizations and has tweaked the look and feel of each groups accordingly. Wooten says on average five new designs are added each week.
The company partners with ISPs to link into their hosting schemes and crate ImageCafe franchises. Under this model, the ISP gets a percentage of the $300 fee, gets to keep all the hosting fees, and ImageCafe gets the monthly fee for use of the web site management tool. The main ISP partner that can be named at this stage is Mindspring Enterprises Inc, but others will be announced later this month and the usual suspects are in the frame. If the customer already has an ISP, the FTP settings can be plugged into the web site manager tool to transfer the site to the existing ISP.
ImageCafe offers domain name registration through Network Solutions Inc, which also appears to be the main investor at this stage. Wooten is in the process of closing the company’s first venture capital round this month worth $3m, with two east coast companies ‘duking’ it out to be the main investors, he says.
The potential for affiliate partners for this sort of service is quite large, ranging from professional organizations through affinity groups, chambers of commerce and to other office equipment suppliers. For example, ImageCafe is shortly to announce a deal with Paper Direct an office supply company that distributes three million catalogs each month to small businesses, offering customized stationery. ImageCafe has made web site templates to match the top 50 stationery designs offered by Paper Direct and each will promote the other.
The company has plans to offer other services below and above the current price point. It plans a simple one-page placeholder site (much like the dot com business card offered by its partner NSI) for $39 around the beginning of October and a high-end Macromedia Flash-enabled set of web sites towards the end of the year, which will cost between $600 and $700. http://www.imagecafe.com
