Page.ly Breaks the Speed Record for Website Creation

Earlier this year Michael Galpert looked at what type of products and services we are willing to pay for. I think website creation tools are one of those offerings that users are willing to open their wallets to use. There are plenty of website creation tools on the marketing including Germany-based Jimdo.

A new offering has hit the market that offers something I haven’t seen before. Page.ly offers a full website service from soup-to-nuts.  Typically the current process is to: buy a domain, set up the new domain with a hosting provider, install WordPress, install any needed patches, instal the most popular plugins and find/instal a theme. Page.ly says they can reduce that entire process down to two minutes (see video below).

Page.ly includes domain management, email manangement, a variety of themes, patch management and they backup each site nightly.

I asked Page.ly co-founder Sally Strebel for a comparison of what Page.ly and WordPress.com offers. Her reasoning makes a lot of sense. She ended the conversation with, “What we hoped to do is create a system that would drastically minimize the setup time and headache of a full hosting account and wordpress for the consumer, or micro-small business. More of a complete web solution if you will. Bottom line, if you need a full fledged wordpress install + web hosting + email service + unique domain (everything needed for a complete web presence) we think page.ly is the fastest and easiest way to do it.”

The Page.ly service is $15/month per domain. I’d like to see Clicky, Mint or Woopra hook up with Page.ly for integrated web analytics.

I could envision pushing some of my consulting clients to Page.ly instead of having to set everything up from scratch for each client. The best part is that Page.ly stays current with the WordPress patches to keep the sites hacker-free.

My only advice for Page.ly is to make the homepage show off their full feature set. Currently it looks like they are just offering a customized install for WordPress.

Patrick Sullivan has another look at Page.ly.