When Christine Telyan co-founded UENI with her husband a decade ago, they recognized a critical gap in the market: small businesses were struggling to establish an online presence due to a lack of time, resources, or technical expertise.
Driven by a mission to level the playing field, UENI was created to provide these businesses with an easy and affordable way to go digital. In an interview with
Website Planet, Christine shares how UENI builds custom websites in just seven days and offers continuous SEO and marketing support, ensuring small businesses can thrive online.
Today, UENI stands as a powerful ally, helping over 700,000 businesses compete in the digital world.
What inspired the founding of UENI and what is its primary mission?
I founded UENI with my husband 10 years ago because we saw a huge gap in the market. So many small businesses were struggling to get online, either because they didn’t have the time, resources, or technical know-how. Our mission is simple: to make it easy and affordable for these businesses to establish a strong online presence. We want to level the playing field, giving every business the opportunity to compete online.
How does UENI help small businesses establish and enhance their online presence?
We enable sole proprietors and small businesses to launch, manage, and grow their businesses online. We build each customer a fully functional professional website in 7 days. These tailored websites are visually appealing but also optimized for search engines.
We write the content, handle SEO, and even provide tools for bookings, e-commerce, and customer engagement. Our goal is to take the technical and content headaches off the business owner’s plate so they can focus on running their business while we take care of their online presence. We also want our customers to feel proud of their business online.
The websites are a foundation, but they are only part of what we do. Customers can rely on our team for concierge edits to update their design, add functionality, or refresh with seasonal content. They can also benefit from our growth marketing services by getting paired with a marketing advisor who will build a personalized program for them and meet with them monthly to deliver ROI on their online presence.
This means building their reputation online with reviews, writing SEO content for their website every month, helping them to launch email marketing campaigns, creating social media assets, and working with the business owner on the specific strategies that are relevant and accretive to their business. So while websites are the cornerstone, the biggest value unlock is partnering with UENI experts to manage and grow your business online at incredibly affordable prices.
What key features or services set UENI apart from other website creation platforms?
Our service really sets us apart. We are a technology company, but our secret sauce is the customer experience. Our team makes tech immediately useful to our business owners and empowers them to do more.
We don’t just give you a website template and send you on your way to figure it out yourself because, for the vast majority of small business owners, that just doesn’t work. Only 1-2% of customers on DIY website building platforms end up moving to a paid plan, which has the features you need to run a professional website. This means the 98-99% of businesses that start on a DIY builder don’t succeed at launching a site that works for them.
At UENI, we are in the business of launching a site small business owners love, guaranteed. We build the site, write the content, optimize it for search engines, and provide ongoing maintenance and marketing support.
We also can build thousands of websites every month and support our owners on their growth journey. So we can help many businesses, quickly. There are very few digital agencies in the world able to do that.
Can you share a success story where UENI significantly boosted a small business’s online visibility?
One of the stories that sticks with me is a small bakery that had been a staple in its community for years. When COVID hit, they had to shut their doors, and like so many small businesses, they were really struggling to make ends meet. The owners were at a loss—they’d always relied on foot traffic and word-of-mouth, and suddenly, all of that was gone.
They reached out to us at UENI, and we quickly got to work. We built them a beautiful, easy-to-navigate website, complete with online ordering and delivery options. We also optimized their site for local search, so people in the area could easily find them when searching for fresh bread, pastries, or birthday cakes. We helped them build up their online reputation by making it easy for happy customers to post reviews and photos of the sweet treats.
Within weeks of launching their website, they started receiving a steady stream of online orders. People in their community were thrilled to have access to their favorites again, and the bakery owners were amazed at how quickly things turned around. What started as a desperate move to stay afloat during the pandemic ended up transforming their entire business model.
Today, they’ve opened a new, larger physical store than before with online orders a huge part of their business. They’ve expanded their offerings and even hired extra staff to keep up with demand. It’s stories like these that remind me of the impact we can have—helping businesses not just survive, but even expand in challenging times.
How does UENI ensure ease of use and effectiveness for its clients?
We’ve designed UENI to be as user-friendly as possible. The website creation process is straightforward, and our team is there to guide clients every step of the way. We also provide continuous support, so if a business owner needs to update something or needs help with marketing, they’re never on their own. Our interfaces are simple to use and straightforward. Our goal is to make sure that anyone, regardless of their technical ability or time constraints, can grow their online presence.
What new features or updates is UENI planning to introduce in the near future?
UENI is now celebrating 10 years in business, having helped over 700,000 small businesses get online. Continuous improvement has always been a big part of our culture, but the pace of improvement is accelerating.
One innovation I am especially excited about is extending UENI’s website building and service to work on other platforms. Several website-building platforms out there offer excellent technology and features. But that tech only adds value in the hands of people who build websites and do marketing for small businesses every day, for years. Soon we will launch tools that enable the UENI team to build websites efficiently and effectively on a variety of platforms, not just our own. This gives us and our customers more flexibility and expands the range of marketing solutions we offer on top of the website foundation.
Find out more at:
www.ueni.com
