By Carolyn Schuk

 

Santa Clara-based NetClime wants you to be your own Webmaster. Its on-demand SiteKreator (www.sitekreator.com) system provides one-stop shopping for your website – from registering your URL, to designing and building the site.

 

SiteKreator is the latest brainchild of Sophia, Bulgaria native and technology seer Ivaylo Lenkov, who got his first taste of computer programming as an eighth grader. By high school, he was programming industrial robots to assemble hard drives and, later on, writing software for weather satellites – some of which are likely still in orbit.

 

Barely out of college when the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1991, Lenkov started NetClime the same year. Since then, he's never looked back, leading the company through more than one reinvention as changing markets wiped out once-lucrative businesses and evolving technology created new ones.

 

Long before "broadband phone service" was a household term, NetClime launched IRIS Phone, which let people talk over the Internet using a PC and a microphone. IRIS Phone gained a devoted international following of more than 1.2 million users between 1994 and 2001.

 

As others – including the 800-pound gorilla, Microsoft – began to see the opportunity in Internet telephony, Lenkov was looking ahead. The company began capitalizing on the Internet gold rush, building websites and other Web-based services for businesses. NetClime built a solid reputation in the entertainment industry with its sophisticated Web programming and soon Lenkov was spending more time in Los Angeles than Sophia.

 

When the tech bust hit NetClime in 2001, Lenkov decided to take the software tools the company had developed to support its own development work and package them for anyone to use. "We decided that if there weren't a few big clients [to pay for big projects], why don't we figure out how to give this technology to small companies for a small amount," he explains.

 

The result was SiteKreator, launched in 2004. An on-demand service – you simply use it from the SiteKreator website without buying or installing software – SiteKreator offers a variety of subscription levels from its free basic website to full-service custom website design, with comfortably priced $7.99 Personal, $19.99 Business, and $39.99 Power accounts in between.

 

Once you sign up, you can point-and-click your way to a website layout in minutes, using SiteKreator's templates and menus -- all without any technical knowledge whatsoever.

And if you change the design, the system automatically reformats your content for the new design.

 

"SiteKreator lets the small business person, without hiring a designer, create a professional site that doesn't look 'cookie-cutter,'" Lenkov explains. "You can create an attractive 'look and feel' for your website that expresses your identity and brand, and that's self-service. We give the control back to the owner of the site."

 

Although NetClime's engineering operation is still in Bulgaria, being in Silicon Valley is essential, says Lenkov.

 

"This is the only place where you have the ecosystem with all the elements for a technology business." Because Santa Clara offered an office location that was affordable, centrally located and well maintained, Lenkov also makes his home here, enjoying a seven-minute commute.

 

Currently SiteKreator is adding thousands of new users every month and the company is growing 400 percent annually. But success isn't going to Lenkov's head. NetClime is currently testing a system for professional Web designers, allowing them to create new sites in about a quarter of the time.

 

While a bad economy might hurt other tech companies, SiteKreator stands to benefit as businesses seek ways to trim expenses, Lenkov says. "When the budgets are cut and people don't have enough money, they start to look for ways to do things less expensively."

 

Carolyn Schuk can be reached at cschuk@earthlink.net.