Website Pros
 |
|
|
Type of site
|
Public |
|---|---|
| Traded as | NASDAQ: WEB |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Headquarters | 12808 Gran Bay Parkway W. Jacksonville, Florida, U.S. |
| Key people | David L. Brown, Chairman, President, and CEO |
| Industry | Internet |
| Products |
Websites Website design Website hosting Internet marketing Lead generation eCommerce |
| Revenue |
 $106.5 million USD (2014) |
| Operating income |
$10.32 million USD (2014)(GAAP) |
| Employees | 2,200 (2015) |
| Website | Web.com |
| Alexa rank |
 8,404 (March 2015[update]) |
Web.com Group, Inc. is a provider of Web services catering to small and medium-sized businesses. As of December 2014, Web.com had over 3.3 million subscribers. It is headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida.
The Web.com Group was formed as a result of the acquisition of Web.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: WEB) by Website Pros, Inc. (WSP, NASDAQ: WSPI).. Website Pros subsequently took on the name of Web.com.
Website Pros was founded in 1999 by Darin Brannan with a goal of becoming the largest nationwide website design and related value-add services company to the small and mid-sized market in a subscription model (SaaS). The idea was to provide these services at 1/10 the cost and time of that offered by thousands of small web design shops dominating the cottage industry. It went public in 2005. George J. Still, Jr. from Norwest Venture Partners provided the seed financing and joined the board of directors.
The company was initially funded with $65 million from lead investor Norwest Venture Partners, Crosspoint Ventures, Chase, Verizon (Bell Atlantic), Office Depot, and Dell; and subsequently by Insight Venture Partners just prior to its IPO. The company used a portion of this initial money to acquire both the SaaS website-builder platform company (first in the market), and the servicing infrastructure company (technical call center), Atlantic Teleservices Inc. (founded and CEO’d by David Brown). The company recruited a professional management team and board (senior officers from Office Depot, Kmart and Intel among others) to begin executing on the operational and sales plan.
As the market (pre-bubble) was flush with cash, it could afford both a direct sales (through two Kinko’s-like sales offices) and indirect channel sales strategy. When the market downturn hit in 2000, the company quickly shut down the direct sales model and focused exclusively on the less expensive indirect channel strategy, consolidated operations in Florida (where the call center was acquired), and let go of the expensive senior management team in favor of a leaner operation to survive the post .com bubble era.
David Brown was asked to return to the Company as CEO and pursue the vision with the new leaner operations. The company was successful in landing enterprise channel partners and in focusing on the fundamentals of building this business model. The company completed several acquisitions along the way, including: NetObjects, Innuity, Leads.com, Renovation Experts, Submit-a-Website, eBoz, and 1ShoppingCart.
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