Evolution of a startup website

by Mark Davis, CEO

Posted Thursday, October 29, 2009 in News          2 comments

Tags: startups

If you’re among the 43.6 million people who've hit www.virsto.com since about 5:29am US pacific time on Monday, you’ll note a couple things.

First, the site has a very different look. Dark and mysterious has been replaced with light and open. We even have graphics to help explain the problems we’re working on. Woot!

Second, there is a lot more content.  Double woot!

Third, you’ll perceive a tone, a style meant to foster dialog with IT professionals, consultants, bloggers, integrators, investors, partners, and journalists.

We hope the content, the layout, and all the places where we encourage interaction make you want to connect with us. We’d love to hear from you about anything on the site, its design, or its functionality.

A brief history of virsto.com

One way to trace the state of a startup is by the maturity of their website.

Phase 1: Under construction

When it came time to name this company, we were fortunate to find a great top level domain that was available. So I got out my credit card, plunked down some exorbitant fee to Network Solutions (what sleazebags – if you used their whois service to look up domain availability, their front running policy meant you had to buy it from them) and I owned virsto.com.

Phase 2: Exceedingly lame placeholder
With no small amount of effort, I managed to get Google Page Creator (yes, Google was right to kill it) to build this beautiful home page.  Yes, that's really what our website looked like for a few months.

Phase 3: Super stealth

We took in some seed venture capital, and were starting to attract attention (we won a couple awards at Under the Radar), so we needed some kind of website, no matter how minimal. Decent looking, if non-descript. Extremely vague about what our company was all about.

Phase 4: Mysterious

A year later, we were pretty far along in product development (our core engine had been running on multiple hypervisors for months), and we needed to accelerate recruitment of employees, customers, and partners. We had to start talking about what we working on. We put up a few pages that hinted at the problems we were working on, masked in an eerie dark background, complete server racks that glowed like alien space ships. That site lasted a few months, up until Monday 5:29am.

Phase 5: Revelation

The full stealth cloak is dropped, and we’re ready to talk in a good deal of detail about the issues we’ve been passionately attacking for the past couple years. We aren’t ready for full-on product launch, but we’re getting close. We hope that our new site is informative, thought provoking, engaging, and even entertaining. Your feedback is encouraged.