Switzerland-based Columbus Venture Capital has taken $5 million and invested it into a South Africa-based web creation company called SynthaSite. SynthaSite works very similarly to Weebly.

The idea behind SynthaSite is to allow users to build websites in minutes without a programming background and includes free hosting and a free domain name.

SynthaSite uses AJAX to utilize dragging+dropping capabilities. There is a two-pane view on SynthaSite, one side that displays the workspace and the other to support the tools needed for building a website.

SynthaSite will soon introduce an API that will give a chance for developers to create mash-ups and widgets. The company plans to move to Silicon Valley, Calif. eventually. This is SynthaSite’s first round of funding aside from seed investors.

Pulse 2.0 Silicon Valley correspondent, Mo Kakwan told me about how he went to SF Beta, a mixer in which startup web companies showcase their ideas. Mo told me about some of the startups that really stood out, including Weebly, an online application that makes web creation easy. To find out how easy it is, I created an account and decided to test out the application.

Here is what the interface looks like once you create an account and log in:

After clicking Create Site, an AJAX pull-down menu appears:

Once you choose a title, you are ready to add content:

As you may notice in the above screen shot, you can drag paragraphs, paragraphs with pictures, two columns, standalone pictures, and add titles to any pages that you create. When you click on Picture in the frame at the top, you can embed pictures from Flickr, Badgr, or your own hard drive-based pictures. When you click on Video, you can embed videos by providing URLs from YouTube, Google Video, and/or YouAreTV. When you click on More, you drag+drop Ads from Adbrite, and add an RSS feed reader.

Very similar to Blogger, Wordpress, Xanga, Windows Live Spaces, etc., you can also Choose a Theme. As of right now, there are over 23 themes.

After you select a theme, design your website, and save it, then you can either publish your new website using a Weebly sub-domain or download the files as a .zip. Once you download the .zip, you’ll find the picture files and the HTML files compressed.

Just as the tagline for Weebly says, “Web Creation Made Easy.” Weebly just proved to me that the website is exactly what it says it is.