GoDaddy is a monster.
With more than 14 million customers worldwide and more than 63 million domain names under management, it is an exaggeration, but an understandable one, when GoDaddy calls itself the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers and manage their work. The only metric that matters for a company that has such a singular focus as GoDaddy is the rate of growth of its hosting customers.
So, if you’re GoDaddy and have a voracious appetite for new customers, you’re keen to consider anything you can do to get new customers on board. Whether it is incredibly expensive (and, for that matter, somewhat gross) Super Bowl ads, or something simpler, like giving a service away for free to gain new customers, GoDaddy is on it.
Luckily (for us, anyway) today’s news is of the free service variety and not the awkward French kissing type. GoDaddy is announcing GoCentral, a new service that aims to enable customers to build a “professional looking website” in under an hour.
GoCentral is more than just a website builder, however. After all, there are a huge number of those already, including many who offer free hosting, which is obviously toxic to GoDaddy's real business. GoCentral, as well as the site builder stuff, includes marketing and e-commerce tools that aim to really deliver the entire package -- not just a website, but a platform for e-commerce.
The way it works is that GoDaddy has templatized website creation. They’ve classified over 1,500 different industries, from plumbers to hairstylists to soccer coaches (although, one presumes that Bar Rafaeli is out of luck and they haven’t thought about supermodels' website needs). Users type in their name and industry and GoCentral generates a nearly complete website, including relevant sections and stock imagery. As one would expect in this multi-device and mobile centric world, sites created with GoCentral are fully responsive across phones, tablets and computers.
GoDaddy is quick to point out the efficiency and effectiveness gains that GoCentral delivers:
“Traditional DIY site builders got it wrong by forcing people to focus their time on tweaking page layout instead of generating results,” said GoDaddy general manager and senior vice president Lauren Antonoff. “Many small businesses struggle to attract visitors to their sites, and the little traffic they do get is largely coming from mobile devices. We’re fundamentally changing the approach by creating a mobile friendly experience that lets customers focus on achieving their goals, rather than worry about site designs. GoCentral is unique in that it helps customers get noticed, reach audiences wherever they are, and drive real results, including sales.”
And to show how much effort GoDaddy is throwing at GoCentral, the slightly uncomfortable news comes that they are creating yet another Super Bowl ad to herald the launch of GoCentral -- watch out come February 5th!
MyPOV
The reality is that simply building an online presence for a business isn’t a massive hurdle -- even with slightly more complex tools, building a site is far easier today than back in the days when people had to learn HTML.
The question then remains whether these somewhat generic sites really deliver the results that businesses need. If the real driver is getting seen, then one would think that by creating an ability for millions of additional entities to create somewhat vanilla sites will reduce the potential impact for everyone.
That said, I recently spent some time with a Bedouin tour guide who was wondering how he could build an online presence in order to attract more customers. While this guy is a very handy person to have when stuck in the desert, he’s not exactly a tech whizz. For him, a tool like GoCentral, for all its limitations, is a very useful thing. Horses for courses.