Ken Yarmosh – Product Strategist and Technology Connoisseur

SiteKreator.com is the easy and affordable way for small businesses and independent professionals to build and host their web presence. Their intuitive tool allows quick in-page edits to both the site layout and content – all without software installation or having the ability to understand HTML or CSS.

Background and Purpose
The origins of SiteKreator.com are in the dot.com days. During that time, its parent company NetClime built hundreds of websites and began developing in-house tools to help automate the process. Once the bubble burst, they decided to utilize their experience to formally build tools that would help make the web accessible to the average joe. Hence, SiteKreator.com was born.

Audience and Features
SiteKreator.com really has been designed with the non-technically savvy in mind. It is a complete solution from start to finish. To get going on SiteKreator.com, a user selects a template. They can then add features like a blog, photo gallery, web forms, and even a mailing list. As they add content, all of the created pages are search engine optimized, including search engine friendly URLs. Users also get access to site stats.

Considering that audience, there are some limitations. Those who use SiteKreator.com will have to use the templates available on the site. They feel confident with this strategy because this tool really exists for those who are clueless about the web. While not ecstatic about that, I have to admit that the template they helped put together for me was quite impressive.

There are two different editions of SiteKreator.com – Personal and Business (the Business Edition is still in Beta). The Personal Edition comes with less file storage, does not provide the option to utilize the high-end Business Edition templates, and does not allow header customizations. But both allow domain mapping, so that sites don’t have to exist solely under the SiteKreator.com domain.

One additional feature to note – and I think it’s a strong one – is that those who utilize SiteKreator.com also get access to its global Content Delivery Network. As I spoke with CEO Ivaylo Lenkov, he told me that several sites had been slashdotted and that they were easily able to handle the traffic (he also mentioned that whenever they reach 35% bandwidth utilization, they upgrade the network). This sort of robustness often is not available at the pricing point they offer this service under.

Pricing
For those that only have a 10 MB site or less, they can utilize SiteKreator.com for free. Otherwise, packages start at $19.95 / year for the Personal Edition and $95.00 / year for the Business Edition.

Conclusion
SiteKreator.com is a promising tool, truly making the web accessible to the artist, doctor, lawyer, or just the average joe. Their biggest challenge will be to reach out to the market they are trying to serve. But if they can get a foot in that door, I think they will be quite successful.

In response to my Hosted Gmail Goodness post, I received two notes from Sproutit. The first was this comment from Peter. The second was a note from Charles Jolley, the Sproutit CEO, via e-mail:

I just wanted to let you know that we added the branded email feature you asked for a little while ago to Mailroom. You can just go to the Email part of your settings and set the From: address you want Mailroom to use.

I hope your summer is going well!

Cheers,
-Charles

PS. We actually use Gmail for your domain for Sproutit right now. Gmail works great for personal email. Of course, we forward any address we need to share as a team such as sales, support, and contact, to Mailroom. Many of our customers use Mailroom and Gmail together like this as well.

I use Gmail for both my personal and business e-mail. The business side of things is relatively new (within the last month or so). I’ve fortunately been selected as a beta participant for the Hosted Gmail service – so I am using my TECHNOSIGHT e-mail address with Gmail, as opposed to an ‘address@gmail.com’. In order to get all my TECHNOSIGHT e-mail addresses running through Gmail, the only thing I really needed to do was change my MX records.

Hosted Gmail is going to be a real winner for Google, especially if they decide to offer it as a paid service. I’d gladly pay for it – it is just that useful. I previously was using Mozilla Thunderbird via IMAP to do work e-mails. I actually really like using an e-mail client, as I think most people do. But with that being said, I am a relatively mobile worker and I use multiple laptops. Even with IMAP, it still was a pain to use Thunderbird.

Now, no matter where I am, my e-mail inbox appears the same because I view it through a web browser. Sure, I give up a couple of niceties like fuller rich text editing and return receipts but it’s worth it for me.

A similar service is what Sproutit is doing with Mailroom (see my interview with Sproutit CEO Charles Jolley). My biggest qualm with Mailroom though, is that you don’t get a fully branded e-mail address (e.g., my e-mail would show as ‘technosight@sproutitmail.com’).

Over the past month or two, Gmail has been painfully slow. I imagine that it’s because of its popularity. Among my friends (20 somethings), there are few people I know who don’t have a Gmail account. Hopefully, they can do some sort of hardware upgrade in the near future.

I’ll be posting on some tools for mobile workers pretty soon.

Yahoo! Messenger with Voice now includes plug-ins “designed to let people to do things like track eBay auctions, see friends’ wish lists on Amazon.com, collaborate real-time on event planning and compare calendars with contacts” (via ZDNet).

Guess what? I don’t care! I don’t need my chat application to do any of that – I already have a web browser.

But what I do need it to help me with is to better manage my interactions with those on my buddylist. If presence is the new dial tone, then I need better ways to manage my presence. I want to be able to make my availability known to certain subsets of my contacts.

Perhaps, for example, I’d like to be available via IM to a group of people I am working with but not all of my business contacts. The only option I have right now is make my IM “invisible” to everyone. That’s obviously not useful if I do want to take advantage of IM for a subset of all my contacts.

Presence based systems – AIM, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, and others – could benefit from this concept across the board. But as I mentioned in the past, social networks could utilize a similar idea too, by refining the types of contacts in your network and changing the way each contact can access and interact with you.

Right now, the only way I’m accomplishing this separation is by having two different AIM accounts. One is exclusively for work and the other is personal. I can run both through Trillian but I have the option to shutdown the personal one when I really need to concentrate or to run only the personal account on the weekends.

If presence is to become the new dial tone, this functionality will have to evolve – and I’m surprised it hasn’t already. For me, better presence management is more important than getting Yahoo! Messenger to support RSS. When we have that, then we can talk about Instant Messaging 2.0.