Yahoo Small Business has offered very good, inexpensive web hosting for some time now. They also offer software called Site Builder to help you build a small business site. Site Builder is a bit clunky and comes with a learning curve to make it work.

Today, Yahoo announced an addition to the small business website world that I think is a very solid contribution. The new web application is called Site Solution. With Site Solution you can log into your hosting account and build a fully code compliant, CSS design for a website in about 30 minutes. The design and layout of the tool is one of the better I have seen. You choose a design, select the layout for the pages and start entering your text. This tool should help make Yahoo Hosting more appealing from a competitive standpoint.

The initial designs are very up to date and stylish. The only drawback is the limited number of designs to choose from at launch. If this is going to be a serious play from Yahoo they will need to add hundreds of changing designs and explore industry specific designs.

When I was given a demo of the tool from the team at Yahoo I also suggested:
• Give users access to the meta data like the title tag for optimization purposes
• Add a form creation tool, list management and email newsletter tool
• Offer a template matching install of WordPress (they already offer WordPress with hosting)