Sampa, the personal homepage creator for families, has raised $1M in Series A financing from a group of individuals including Geoff Entress and former executives from Microsoft, Netscape, and Lightsurf.
The Redmond-based company has also rebuilt its user interface so that it’s more intuitive for soccer moms who don’t know any of the concepts behind making websites. The new design puts the editor side-by-side with the end result, allowing users to see immediately how their changes affect their pages. In contrast, the previous version had users going back and forth between two different views as they would in a desktop program like FrontPage.
While there are not many new features per se, Sampa now has a completely new set of themes and colors. CEO Paul Gross says that the changes in aggregate make the site more of a competitor to focus sites like Babyjellybeans and MyFamily.com rather than website builders like Weebly or Jimdo.