Wix.com is a website creation service where a regular user without any education or experience in professional coding can create his own page by doing something as simple as dragging-and-dropping elements into a template. Their business model is that of a Freemium, allowing consumers to use their tool but offering higher values for paid services, such as hosting, storage, vouchers for online advertising, and so on.

This week, Wix.com has announced that it is bringing an app market where third party developers can use its SDK (Software Development Kit) to develop, publish, and sell their apps for people to integrate into their website. If it’s a paid app, the company splits the profit with the developer at the industry average rate of 30:70. I think the company serves as such a good example of Freemium business model and its spirit–opening its content and benefits to the general public so it can quickly penetrate the market and provide enormous incentives for trial by eliminating risk.

Also, in this day of age, in order to have any kind of business, you have to have a website–preferably a one that looks half-decent. More and more businesses are investing on their online presence, which means that average level of sophistication is increasing in terms of quality of websites. If you are an average entrepreneur who’s strapped for cash, as many of them are, creating a polished & presentable website can be a huge barrier for you to break through to establish yourself. I find this category of service contributes greatly towards levelling the playing field somewhat for them. However, whoever decides to use it should of course go beyond considering their webpage as a functional tool, but possibly a focal point of their marketing. Once they acquire their website, it is still up to them to continuously work on SEO, monitoring website analytics, and etc. It’s a tool, not a magic wand.