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Web 2.0 Review: DIY business websites
With the boom in readymade Web 2.0 sites showing no sign of slowing down, John Stokdyk documents his experiences with three of the leading providers for small business users: Mr Site, BT Tradespace and Microsoft Office Live.The success of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook over the past couple of years has inspired a "me-too" movement within the business world, as providers recognised the potential for applying some of the same principles to commercial websites.
The fad for readymade business websites that incorporate blogs, mailing lists and even interactive spaces is understandable. If all these facilities are available to teenagers, why shouldn't businesses have them too?
Each of the ready-packaged business communities offers a different collection of facilities, but which offers the best tools for the lowest amount of money? And, in this brand-conscious age, which looks best and helps to present the best corporate image?
More than a year ago, I set off to explore the options in a series of experiments with three of the highest profile providers - Mr Site, BT Tradespace and Microsoft Office Live. This article recounts what I found during my quest.
The Mr Site starter pack arrived in the shape of a box containing a booklet and a CD-ROM. This seemed anachronistic in the internet age, but if you look at the competition Mr Site is up against (Microsoft and BT for this review - but there are others), it's an understandable strategy. Mr Site needs to play every card it can to get noticed. The company's physical distribution network is extensive and imaginative. You can find the little blue boxes in high street stationers as well as trendy office equipment stores.
Once I'd loaded up the CD and typed in the software key code, I was impressed by how easy it was to get started. Mr Site really has boiled the web design process down into a basic step-by-step procedure. You can have a site ready to publish in 15-30mins, or waste the best part of the day adding content and tinkering with the layout.
There's a good collection of design templates - some of them quite attractive - plus options to ply with the colours, fonts and size of your title text, or to cook up your own title band.
It was easy to paste or type content straight into the page template. For the more adventurous, Mr Site's Creative Mode includes an impressive array of layout, hypertext and graphical tools, similar to the editing and mark-up commands you find in a typical blog or wiki environment. When I first started experimenting, Mr Site was way ahead of its bigger rivals on the presentation side and user interface, but such is the nature of competition on the net that rival providers have adopted some of these design utilities.
Having done the basic spadework, it was time to publish my page. With a click and a background whirr from Mr Site's servers, the page was ready. Yet within a few seconds I was suffering from post-partum depression. First, the URL www.mrsite.co.uk/usersitesv6/johnstokdyk.com/wwwroot/index.htm was somewhat less classy than the www.johnstokdyk.com I dreamed of (since I opened the account Mr Site has made it possible to register more alluring domains). Secondly my attempts at graphic innovation resulted in a site that confirms why DIY site design is not always such a good thing for the uninitiated.
I went back a day or two later to see how my page performed with various search engines - and was disappointed that I had to dig through several Google results pages to find it. With so many directory layers to navigate, I will have to do some SEO of my own to get a higher profile.
I also had a few arguments with the default settings - a stray copyright symbol floated around my text and the "created by Mr Site" link crashed over into the navigation menu if I added too much text to a page.
In trying to create a personal look for the page, I struggled to get the page template and heading panel mechanisms to work together. All the templates have the title text ranged left as a default, but the text style I chose interfered with the graphic I had selected from the Business menu options. Eventually I found a solution - the layout section lets you drag the text around until you're happy with its placement. Simple really, but my design solution still looks like an on-the-fly compromise rather than a true brand vision for JohnStokdyk.com.
Mr Site has matured over time, adding an online photo gallery, blogging tools and a "jukebox" facility into which you can load appropriate music (but what about copyright clearance?). Most importantly, it was also the first to provide a secure PayPal shop, so I could start selling things if I wanted to - and even link into Express Checkout Online Shop for stock control, shipping management and basic accounting. At the end of the first year, Mr Site wanted £39 to renew the domain. I could also get myself a more suitable domain name, but that would cost a little more.
BT Tradespace
BT Tradespace was my next point of call. It's free to join and easy to get to grips with. But one thing I didn't like was being stuck with another clunky URL bttradespace.stokdyk.co.uk. Back when I first tried it, though BT Tradespace probably offered the better all-round facilities for the small business user, including an electronic payment mechanism.
In contrast to Mr Site, BT's menu-driven content management system places more limits on the design possibilities. A quick visit to the other pages confirms most BT Tradespace sites have a standardised look. Somewhat irritatingly, BT Tradespace wraps itself around your individual page, dominating it with links to its own blogs & communities.
Nevertheless, most of the things you might need are here - a blog engine, photo and video galleries, plus premium facilities to encourage customers to call you or to deliver your business card to them electronically by SMS text or email. You can advertise your postings to other Tradespacers and invite them to become your friends, just like Facebook or MySpace. Like many social networking sites, Tradespace has a facility to import contacts from email providers such as BT Yahoo!, hotmail or Google. To do so, however, requires entering your email username and password into Tradespace - which from a data protection point of view might not something you want to get into the habit of doing. That said, you can also import a CSV file of your contacts to get networking with them in Tradespace.
Way before Microsoft came up with its Windows Live Spaces, , BT Tradespace was doing the community thing with a set of user forums organised around industry groupings. Initially, Tradespace volunteers you for three of its own communities - Tradespace help and suggestion groups, plus "The Lounge", where you can supposedly chat, hang out and perhaps do a little business with other Tradespace members.
The three default communities currently have around 91,000 members, but I've never found anything very compelling happening within their threads. And I don't appear to be the only Tradespacer who thinks so. Just last week, another member of the 189-strong BT Tradespace internet and computing community commented, "So far it seems that people are using it to advertise their services or stick up a couple of links. As we are all in the same sector while our clients lie outwith this sector I don't see what this will achieve."
As I have previously reported, BT also runs a Workspace site, where you can share documents and set up collaborative online project teams with other (non-Tradespace) people. But this facility functions separately to your BT Tradespace account.
BT Tradespace also offers facilities to sell goods online and its advanced Tradespace Contact service gives you free phone calls. But there's a catch. In contrast to the relatively low monthly rates charged by the rivals assessed here, the enhanced subscription costs £15 a month, or £134 a year.
As mentioned, BT Tradespace has all the ingredients needed for Web 2.0 commerce, and was the most comprehensive service available when I first set off on this assessment. But in spite of a claimed membership of 165,000, it has failed to take off. It's hard to pin down the reasons why the buzz has gone elsewhere, but BT's hold on Tradespace seems to have weighed it down
Microsoft OfficeLive
Oh dear. One of the reasons this review has taken so long to complete was because of the complications I encountered with Office Live. I initially signed up with the site more than a year ago and posted some initial guff on the beta test version. At the time, it insisted on taking my credit card details, it claimed, to verify my identity.
Otherwise, aside from giving me my own tidy domain (stokdyk.co.uk) and a nice layout template, there wasn't a lot to attract my interest. Then I started getting £26 monthly invoices. The beta test conditions included a small print notice that the service would convert to a full account in May 2007 and before I new it, they were charging me for a full Premium account, with extra AdWords thrown in. It was the oldest trick in the book and I fell for it.
To be fair, the company did eventually terminate my account and refund my money when I finally got through to customer support, but it was enough to make me suspicious of Office Live. For starters, Microsoft now owns my stokdyk.co.uk domain and I have no way of reclaiming it until the registration expires.
After sorting that little issue out, I eventually did return to Office Live and created a new page stokdyk.tech.officelive.com. In spite of my prejudice, I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by what I found.
The Office Live control panel is stuffed with extra features and facilities, ranging from a contact manager and other business applications such as an electronic email newswire manager and an Ad Manager program, to collaborative online Workspaces. All of these elements are backed up with copious guides for creating a more effective business website. The Office Live WebSite Manager and Site Designer tools are the most sophisticated of the three I've tried and produced the most professional looking page. Office Live also gave the best results for Google searches on my name.
Some of the Office Live features are accessible only if you upgrade, for example £7.99 a month will get you access to 10 online Workspaces, and the Ad Manager will let you buy into online ads worth anywhere between $5 and $10,000 a month.
Office Live fits into the Microsoft business model of trying to integrate (and effectively control) all of your computing activities. So Office Live has its own email service on one hand, but also has a diary and calendar that will synchronise with your Outlook email client system.
As a result, Office Live is close to providing a complete small business infrastructure - but for one glaring omission. There is currently no facility to sell products from your Office Live website. The greater part of Microsoft's corporate attention is on the US market, so they already have access to an online Store Manager program as well as a hosted version of Microsoft Office Accounting. International users will have to wait until Office Live reaches commercial critical mass in the US, or when Microsoft gets around to pushing the suite internationally.
Which do I recommend?
This review has been a long time in the making, and somewhat frustrating. These DIY web facilities are moving targets and to really understand their strengths and weaknesses requires a big commitment of time and effort - not the snatched hours that I have managed over the past year.
To make a success of any website or social networking page, you really need to devote whole-hearted attention to it on a sustained basis. There will always be compromises around the design or functionality of a site, but as you become more familiar with the limitations you discover ways to work around them. Any of these three facilities would do a job for a start-up/pre-start up, but the final selection would be down to the user's attitude and abilities.
For a novice net user who's intimidated by technology and just wants a simple site that can handle online sales, I would recommend Mr Site. The company has the clearest view of its small business customer base and appears to offer a more personal service, starting from a reasonable £39 annual fee (don't forget to look into extras such as SEO and online transaction fees).
BT Tradespace had what we used to call "first mover advantage" in the old dotcom boom days, but has failed to convert that lead into further innovations and community growth. The commercial features come with a higher price tag, which the weak communal elements may not justify. But Tradespace would give you a basic web platform if you were interested in bundling it up as part of a wider BT broadband/telecoms package and a sleek, unique website wasn't the top of your priorities.
Over the course of this study, Microsoft Office Live has developed the most rapidly and now looks like the most comprehensive package with the most potential to grow along with your business. But customers place a lot of trust in their website provider and end-user service has occasionally been a Microsoft blind spot (BT has similar issues here). If you are ambitious and confident in your strategy, and don't need to rely on an online fulfilment mechanism just yet, then Office Live might be for you.
There is also a big Google-shaped gap in this review. As I explored the first three web utility platforms to cross my desktop, Google options for web hosting, page creation and email have come on in leaps and bounds, bringing in their wake things like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Sites, blogging and calendar tools. Most of which are free.
There's a parallel here with open source software. I could give my money to one of the three commercial providers covered in this review to take care of my web needs, knowing that as I expanded my horizons they would start wanting a bigger cut of my revenue. Or I could take a slightly more patchwork approach and see what I could put together from components circulating in Google's ecosystem.
Mr Site and BT Tradespace have the advantage of online sales mechanisms, but if my requirement didn't involve handling online sales now, I would probably pass on the three systems I have reviewed over the past year and begin experimenting more seriously to see what Google's portfolio could do for me.
Number of comments: 5
AccountingWEB.co.uk 2-Sep-2008
Categories: IT Features, Software
Times read: 2384
really cheap and almost free for basic website
also has templates to help create website
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/09/09/37NF-Demo2008-web-2_1.html
We researched the market in depth about three years ago and chose Sitemaker from http://www.webeden.co.uk/
It's also marketed as Moonfruit http://www.moonfruit.com/
Both versions offer an initial free trial. Nothing to download - entirely web based and therefore has the advantage that it is regularly updated.
It's a very easy product to use with all the resources you need, and it's a fraction of the cost of Microsoft Office Live. It's also easy to set up with your own domain name(s)
You can set up a mailing newsletter, and even set up a secure client log in area with downloads.
There is a good selection of templates, but we started with a clean sheet approach and designed our own (err.... not perfect..... work in progress, and a few pages need tidying up)
But most importantly though, it integrates well with Google Adwords and Google Analytics and has good SEO functions. After all, there's no point in have in web site if it can't be found.
Reliability has been 100% and customer support is good.
Surprising that an accounting site reviewing DIY sites missed this one too. DIY Accounting at www.diyaccounting.co.uk/
Googler page one search engine listing for accounting software and over 2 million hits last month alone.
Accounting software written on excel spreadsheets for self employed and smaller limited companies that non accountants can use to produce their final year end accounts and automatically produces the self employed or corporation tax returns.
Terry Cartwright
Proprietor
www.diyaccounting.co.uk
I am surprised that you did not include Referral Key. They were in Accounting Today a few months ago.
I generate most of my business through b2b referrals. This system helps me manage my professional relationships and generate new referrals.
It is the only online business referral networking tool.
Take a look
