The WIX IPO, the future of website creation, and the designer’s changing role

Unless you’ve been living in a cave  (with no Wifi — no cheating), you’ve probably heard about the arms race in the do-it-yourself (DIY) website building space (we did a great run-down of the entire market in Where to invest in the next generation of website building tools).

Wix’s upcoming IPO and what that means for the market

The largest player in this space, Israel’s Wix.com, makes it stupid-easy to build your own website using simple fill-in-the-blank templates. Wix recently filed for an IPO in the U.S., according to Bloomberg. Sources say that Wix will raise $75M at a valuation of $400M.

This validates that there’s a business here: 28 million people have used Wix to build websites. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Wix ‘s revenue rose 60% to $40 million in 2012 from $25 million in 2009. Wix has a strong hold on the DIY end of the market.

Website creation for professionals

But this is far from a winner-take-all market. If DIY website creation sits on one end of the website development spectrum, professional tools sit on the other. Professional designers have long had to share development budgets with the guys who actually take the designs and translate them into code (an estimated 70% of web development budgets go to developers, leaving designers with the rest).

Current options for designers — who focus on usability and aethestics of web projects and tend not to know how to code — are primarily desktop tools, like Photoshop, that miss out on the build-on-the-fly ethos that makes working in the cloud so compelling.

Webydo is changing all this. It’s an Israeli startup built by designers for designers, to put them back into the driver’s seat of the website creation process. Webydo is keenly focused on serving the 17+ million professional web designers around the world, who are estimated to create over 70% of all websites (compared to under 5% created by amateur do-it-yourselfers). Forbes nailed it when they profiled the Israeli startup, Webydo.

The interface looks very familiar to designers, like a web version of Photoshop without any coding. Webydo also enables designers to bill their clients and take a credit card through their Webydo environment. Designers make money and Webdyo lands valuable paying clients (designers, who unlike DIY users, typically have multiple paying clients). The company understands how valuable these clients are and is investing heavily in servicing, educating, and collaborating with the professional web designer community.

The company is scaling revenues (it uses a fremium subscription model), new client acquisition, and its presence where designers like to hang out.

An opportunity to invest in Webydo: the future of professional web design

OurCrowd and our investor community are currently investing in Webydo. We’ve made our own due-diligence (which is essentially our thesis for investing our own money in the company) and a webinar we conducted with the company’s founders available to our investors through our platform.

Register to join OurCrowd to view more about the Webydo opportunity