Zoho Sites Could Shake Up The Industry
July 5, 2012 Tags: business model, Google Sites, sitekreator, Squarespace, weebly, yola, Zoho Sites
Category: Articles 14 Comments 
Zoho Sites, the new entrant in the DIY Drag & Drop Web Site Builders, should be a cause for serious concern for many companies offering the Drag & Drop Web Site Builders.
We have seen many different Drag & Drop DIY Website builders entering the market. None of them came any where close to causing tremors for the established players like Weebly, Yola, Webs, Google Sites etc etc. ZOHO Sites is Different. It has the potential to shake up the whole Drag & Drop Website building space. Read on to see why.
Up until now, the competition remained within a league
There is one league of players where the concentration is on providing a wonderful DIY Drag & Drop Website builder, players like Weebly, Yola, Webs, Jimdo etc. They adopted a Freemium Business model. Their policy has been to get people to start with Free site and have them upgrade to a paid Pro service for additional features.
Then there is the second league of providers
Providers like SiteKreator, Squarespace, Homestead etc offer “Paid only” option with the promise of better themes, features, integrations etc. These companies concentrate on getting business from those customers who look for a fool proof website (we are not going to debate which of them really delivers a fool proof platform).
And then there is the premier league
Players like Adobe Business Catalyst offer plans to meet the needs of starters, and at the same time, offer expanded features as the needs grow. They offer integrated email, CRM, Web Apps, eMail Marketing, eCommerce, Blogs, Forums, Event Management, Customer Database, etc. Businesses can simply switch to the suitable plan as their needs grow or shrink. It is premier pricing for premier services.
Now, Zoho Enters this sacred space with a foot hold on all three categories
Zoho Sites’ pricing is adequate to compete with Freemium Model Players. Zoho has well established platform to compete with “Paid Only” players. And Zoho is a small business central for Collaborated Applications, Business Applications and Productivity Applications.
Unlike other entrants, Zoho Sites launched a well polished platform with sufficient features like Mobile Sites, Multiple Authors, HTML/CSS Editing etc. Zoho has the potential to create a stampede in this arena. Zoho can integrate it’s all other products with Zoho Sites, which is a tremendous advantage to Zoho.
Zoho Sites can be a significant revenue boost to Zoho’s wide portfolio of business products. Zoho can go to great lengths to meet or beat any competitor pricing because of the windfall. Zoho creator is already integrated into Zoho Sites. It is only a matter of time for their other products to be deeply integrated with Zoho Sites. This really distinguishes Zoho Sites from the rest. In addition, Zoho’s products are widely used by millions of users. So, they have the market base ready to hop on the “Pro”.
There are some aspects like “No Header Code or Footer Code” areas, which may cause some discomfort. There is only one page layout in Zoho Sites. Whereas, Weebly lets you add any number of layouts and independently edit the corresponding html. Even though Weebly has not fully exploited the potential of multiple Page layouts, this is a very powerful feature. The right template would use the multiple layouts in combination with Flexible Content Areas to produce a very effective site with Weebly. We will produce a full review of Zoho Sites in an upcoming article. Mean while, let us know what you think.
I’m more interested in seeing what becomes of new.squarespace.com.
Well, I am more interested in seeing how each of these players change their game plan. I am sure all of them have a few tricks in their hat.
Interesting article. Wondering how it really compares with Business Catalyst. They are different markets.
You bring up a good point, Tim. Adobe Business Catalyst does not operate the same way as others. Business Catalyst is patroned more by designers who build and manage web sites for businesses. Designers are their primary audience.
The point I was trying to make is about the integration of CRM etc in the plan. There is a segment of businesses who are looking for low cost alternative to CRM integrated with websites. This is the segment that may be swayed.
I am definitely going to follow this development.
Today I decided to get the pro-version of Weebly.
I considered Zoho Sites too. I looked at the forum of Zoho. What I saw there at that time was mostly annoying talk about bugs in Zoho Sites.
Of course Zoho Sites just started and bugs can be expected.
But to start with Zoho Sites now would be time-consuming working around these unforeseen bugs, is my opinion. The great advantage of Zoho Sites is the easy combination with their Zoho database. Perhaps Zoho Sites will be great in the future. For now I stick to Weebly.
Can you point to the forum that was discussing the bugs in Zoho sites ? I tried Zoho Sites a week ago. Either those are fixed. Or, I haven’t yet encountered them. Would like to see what kind of problems were reported.
Can’t find it either anymore Raju. Sorry. The forum seems to be “clean”. It could also have been the blog. I checked that out too. No bug complaining here.
Perhaps I made the wrong decision after all
Not at all a wrong decision. No doubt Zoho Sites has a vast potential. But Weebly Pro is the way to go for now. The features and flexibility of Weebly Pro are much ahead of Zoho Sites.
If you want to see how professional a zoho site can look have a look at mine.
http://harmony-with-the-universe.co.uk
Setup in half a day, most impressed with the mobile version that is automatically rendered.
Been using Zoho CRM for a couple of years now, and if their “sites” offering is anything similar in terms of usability and support, I think they have a winner!
Zoho Sites is on a roll. The pace with which they add the new features amazes me. I suggested them that it would be good if they can add separate passwords for pages, and within two days they released it. They recently added 8 new themes. Sounds like they have 5 more themes coming. If you notice their themes, all of the 45 themes they released so far are great themes. I would say, 3 more months, and they would be a very tough competition. I will be doing a full review of Zoho Sites in a couple of weeks, and you will see the advantages in detail.
I wonder what is best from a client point of view. If paid plans on all the above webiste providing platfomrs are more or less the same as the hosting plans for one website, well then I thin that WordPress is much above all the mentioned platforms. What do you think?
It really depends on client’s needs, their budget for building the site and their budget for on-going maintenance.
WordPress provides lot of flexibility but takes lot more effort to build it right (compared to Weebly/Webs/Zoho/Yola/Wix). So the client’s need to be evaluated thoroughly.
Maintaining and supporting 100 Weebly sites is much easier than maintaining and supporting 100 wordpress sites (self hosted). For on-going support, WordPress sites cost 4 times more than weebly/webs/yola etc. Training support people to maintain Weebly sites is 10 times easier than training them to support WordPress. (Each wordpress theme has its own shortcodes, features and there is decent amount of relearning to do every time a change is requested by clients).
WordPress.com has an inherent bottleneck that you MUST keep the footer “Powered by wordpress.com” even for all paid plans. A lot of clients do not want this.
That is a rough idea without getting too much into the details.