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Partnership With SAM Information Technologies
Posted by Fletch, 21 Dec 09

After releasing our product into the small business market a couple of months ago we found we were missing something. After talking to customers and small business owners we discovered that most of them didn't have the time or the computers skills to use template-based DIY sites, let alone our easy drag'n'drop system.

But they pretty much all agreed that a website was becoming something of a must-have.  Our software was always designed to provide us with the opportunity to scale as a business, and the mechanics of trying to scale human web design was something completely new to us.

However, in providing a value-added service and therefore being able to charge fairly for it, we found that customers had no problem paying because we got them going on the web for such a small amount of money - and suddenly that represented real revenues (although not large).

Because our software reduces the time of building a 4-5 page website down to about 2-3 hours, and I was charging £25 an hour to build them the sites myself, the finished products were being published for around £100 including the first year's hosting and domain name subscriptions.

So if this service was to scale, it needed web design input from many people. I'd met Ivan Trajkovic from SAM Information Technologies in Belgrade on the online Open Coffee forum, and he offered for his team to build a few sites for us. This was on the basis that he could scale the service to 100-150 bespoke sites a day if everything worked well between us.

As we have a beautiful online system for managing these processes thanks to Philippe at Ofuz, we are also starting to work with teams in India and Java so we can provide more service if Ivan get's too stressed :-)

Things are working well, the quality of design has markedly improved, and we've now worked out how to reach manageable (and virtually unlimited) numbers of new potential customers via Google Adwords - where from the top three items on page 1 of relevant searches, we appear and invite them to our site for a free quote.

The brand we've put together to market this service is ukwebmakers.com, and uswebmakers.com, ozwebmakers.com and nzwebmakers.com are going live shortly.

This solution to the small business website problem also presents a new opportunity for Agencies. As we build more and more sites, there is a specific role that suits a local person from within a country - and that is to ring up the small business owner when their online design brief has been received, let them know we're on the job, and give them their estimate (backed up by an email) as well as ironing out any unanswered questions from the brief.

They then liaise between the customer and our web designer (average of 3 phone calls and 4 emails so we allow 1/2 hour human time per website for the Agent). At this stage we're only putting a few agencies up for sale so to assist this little growth phase, and there's more about those here.