Irish Small/Micro Businesses and the web
A recurring conversation I have had recently is around very small non-technical Irish businesses having a web presence. I do a lot of Tech-Checks for the Cork CEBs and I continue to be surprised by how many of these businesses are invisible online.
One of the reasons for this may be that companies still think it costs a lot of money to have a web-site and non eircom.net email addresses. And there are still gougers out there charging people €2k for a simple off-the-shelf brochure site with stock graphics.
Jim Flynn of MTS Consulting in Innishannon is a perfect example of someone who realised that his business could be helped with a simple web-site, a basic blog, his own email domain and a LinkedIn profile. For very little money he got his site built via one of the online broker sites like Elance/RentACoder/ODesk etc. He can now be found using the default method for a lot of people (Google!).
When the total investment in getting an online presence is now in the very low three figures, there is simply no argument for even the tiniest business not having a web-site.
If you are a little bit technical you could even do it for less as follows:
- Get a .com domain with the cheapest hosting package at somewhere like GoDaddy for $46 per year, giving you 5 GB Space, 500 Email Accounts, Forums, Blogging, Photos
- Use an online service like Synthasite to create a simple site very easily with info about what your company is and how to contact you
- Upload that design to your webhost
- Done!
- Total cost = $46
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Thanks for the mention Conor,
It is our intention to assist small businesses in creating their web presence cheaply and easily.
Businesses can get online with zero cost because SynthaSite will host your site for free. If you need your own domain GoDaddy will charge you about $10. When you publish your site just enter the domain and follow the instructions.
new website < $10
Hey Conor. Glad to hear you recommend SynthaSite as a free website builder. You can now use your own domain name with SynthaSite hosting, so you can remove about $38 from your total, as our hosting is totally free. So all you need is a domain name (unless you want to use *.synthasite.com) and the rest is free forever.
Wow you guys are fast! Technorati has sped up its watchlists
That is a total bargain.
Since you guys have a ton of money in the bank, we also know you are not going away any time soon.
I will go through the process myself with a spare domain I have and then recommend it if it looks doable by technophobes.
One of the reasons I mentioned you specifically is that you also let people download the designs so there isn’t lock-in. Did I read that correctly/
Other suggestions via Twitter and Jaiku have been:
Blacknight Blog hosting (Irish web host)
eWrite Essentials (Irish hosted service with CMS)
Terapad (UK similar to Synthasite)
Weebly (but seems more locked-in than Synthasite?)
Buy a domain from http://www.register365.com for €5.95 per annum and point it at sythasite .
I’m going to do follow-up posts on two approaches. One based on eWrite which is more expensive but provides full service CMS and handholding including hosting on an Irish host like hosting365 or Blacknight. The other is the cheapest approach of .com domain pointing at Synthasite (or similar). Each approach has an appropriate target audience I think.
Is there a market for domain registrars to provide a ‘one page site’ type service or template based engine with a domain name?
Yes, you read it correctly. You are able to download the content and take it elsewhere, or just back it up if you want to. And the service, both website creator and hosting well always be free, without adverts. We are also doing a lot of work to make sure that the hosting speed and uptime is impeccable.
It is still early days for the website creator but we have tried to aim it as users with no technical know-how. There are a lot of features and usability improvements in the pipeline. We are particularly interested in what users need so if you come up with any recommendations during your trial run please feed the back to us,
Stephen – half the Tech-Checks I have done to date would have been perfect candidates for a zero-effort web-site, a mini-blog for news and their own email domain. The only thing they would have to provide is the content. The issue you would have as a hosting provider is getting that message to the target demographic.
From what I can gather, the response on Tech-Checks has not been as good as hoped and this is probably down to the fact that if a micro-biz doesn’t know they have a problem, they are not going to look for help.
There is a widely held perception out there that you cannot have a web-site for less than €1000. I don’t know how we kill that except one by one on each TechCheck we do.
Thanks Lisa. I learned a huge amount about non-technical users when I ran a Wordpress training course recently. We used wordpress.com as the hands-on system and most of them could not get past the registration screen without help from me. Stuff that was obvious to me simply wasn’t clear to them. I’ll try and apply that mindset when trialling Synthasite.
Connor, you should also take a look at Jimdo (http://www.jimdo.com), can use your own design (upload via easy API) and have tons of additional features, i.e. newslettersystem with integrating link tracking, different privacy settings -> stuff thats really usefui especially for SME.
[...] Post. It’s a lovely part of the country and you’ll come away refreshed. Oh and to echo a topic I wrote about on my business blog yesterday, they really need to get themselves a web-site! Rated 3/5 on Feb 9 [...]
Thanks for the Jimdo tip, I’ll look there too.
I’d love to be just able to say to the average micro-biz, “you don’t need do know anything. Just go _here_”. At the minute with Tech-Checks we’re not allowed (rightly) to do the actual work for people or tell them names of local suppliers, we just tell them what they need to get done. The downside is that if the client doesn’t know who to use they are stuck. I break the general rule on no-recommendation but only by pointing people to obvious things like GMail, AVG or Dell/HP laptops.
[...] had a great exchange of ideas on the previous post about ways of getting very small businesses online. Of particular interest to me are the companies [...]