SiteMaker Licensing and Partnerships
SiteMaker has been designed to allow commercial partners to offer their own version of SiteMaker, quickly and very easily, to their customers.
There are several ways in which SiteMaker can be customised and integrated into your website depending on your requirements. As well as a significant number of smaller partners, some of the larger partners who have created their own version of SiteMaker for their customers include:
Channel 4
EMAP (The Box, Smash Hits, Kerrang and Mixmag websites)
Embarq
While any level of customisation of SiteMaker is possible, there are 3 primary ways that our partners seek to use the tool for their needs:
SiteMaker Resellers
SiteMaker White-Label Partners
SiteMaker API Partners
If these don't meet your requirements, please feel free to contact us to work out a bespoke solution.
Most often used by web agencies or designers, SiteMaker Resellers use SiteMaker to build sites for their clients as a quick and easy web design tool. These partners often charge clients for their design time, but use the basic SiteMaker packs as the building blocks of their service. This allows them to either make changes to client sites quickly and easily, or hand over the username/password of the site, once complete, to their clients for a instant content management tool.
For these types of partners there are two options. Some simply sign up as an affiliates to benefit from the 15% revenue share on packages purchased, as we do require that you buy a new pack for each client site rather than putting them all on a single Max account. The other option is to sign up to one of our SiteMaker Reseller packs which allow you to build multiple client sites on your Reseller account. To sign up for a Reseller account please contact us.
This is the type of implementation used by our SiteMaker web designers on our community pages.
SiteMaker White-Label partners
SiteMaker White-Label Partners get the opportunity to rebrand the SiteMaker tools and offer it to their customers as their own product. In this option the partner is able to customise a number of different elements to help personalise the product with their own flavour. These include:
i) the partner specific domain name e.g. sitename.partnerdomain.com and not sitename.moonfruit.com
ii) the starting templates used in the ‘build a site’ process (to appeal to their customer base)
iii) the product specifications and pricing
In commercial terms these partners are offered wholesale prices based on volume and can choose their own retail price at which they sell the product to their customers. White-label partners can choose to collect payments directly themselves and receive invoices from SiteMaker for sites used, or we can continue to collect the payments on their behalf and provide a share of revenue.
There is a small set-up fee for these partner implementations depending on the degree of customisation required.
This is the type of implementation used by Channel 4 and EMAP with the versions of SiteMaker they offered.
API Partners get all the benefits of the SiteMaker White-Label Partner, but can more tightly integrate the product with their own service by using our APIs (Application Programming Interface). We offer APIs for a number of key functions that allow API Partners to create and manage user accounts, manage user product codes (upgrade/downgrade), and integrate with their own billing system. All of this happens via calls to scripts on our servers that allow the API Partner to fully control the information presented to their customer.
API Partners are offered the same volume based wholesale pricing as White-Label Partners, and generally choose to collect the payments themselves and receive monthly invoices from SiteMaker for sites built. Again there is a set up fee for these kinds of partners depending on the degree of customisation required. They will also need to do some work themselves to integrate with our APIs.
This is most commonly used when partners want to offer SiteMaker services direct from inside their existing customer interface or control panel, i.e. domain, hosting or ISP partners, and is the type implemented by our integration partner Synacor for Embarq.
So there you have it. For more information about partnerships please contact us.
