For small businesses, building an online presence (a website) for their business is already a big pain, not to mention they have to incorporate a mobile friendly website, since Indonesia is a huge mobile market. Vistamobi is trying to solve this exact problem by making it easy for anyone to create and publish a professional-looking website easily with no need for any coding involved.
I tried the service and it’s very easy to use, not harder than using WordPress or any other popular CMS. Pick a theme, publish posts, static pages, upload images it all works swiftly. For now, users can only use *.vistamobi.com subdomain names but in the future Vistamobi will provide options for users to use their own domain names and host it using Vistamobi’s infrastructure.
The websites made using Vistamobi works well with every major smartphone browsers, although there are some issues with feature-phone browsers (which are lucky enough to have browsers anyway). But the main objective of Vistamobi is to give access for small business not just to go online but also create and maintain their mobile presence which is a big deal for Indonesia market.
Besides web solution, Vistamobi also has an SEO solution integrated with social networking sites, allowing users to connect to their customers via Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The current version of Vistamobi is in English, but the company claims they will launch an Indonesian version soon.
Google is doing exactly the same thing by promoting Google Pages to small business all around Indonesia, enabling Indonesian small businesses to go global with their online presence opening a whole new global opportunity for them. The same idea goes to Vistamobi, only they focuses on mobile complimenting the full desktop presence.
Vistamobi is a subsidiary of Vistaprint, an online supplier of printed and promotional material as well as marketing services to micro businesses and consumers, especially print on demand products. Vistaprint was founded in France in 1995 before went public (IPO) in the US in 2005.
