Free Website Service Offered For UK's 'Invisible' Small Businesses: Britain's small businesses are being offered free domain names and website hosting in a bid to get every plumber, window cleaner and green-grocer online.Up to 1.5 million of the UK's sole traders and micro-business owners don't have a web presence at the moment. The British government wants to do something about this, and they've teamed up with Google and BT to solve what they perceive to be a problem.
The result is an initiative called Getting British Business Online which has the bold ambition of getting 100,000 commercial websites running by the end of 2010. The core of the program is the GBBO 'wizard' that makes it easy for a business owner to create a site in about 15 minutes. There are plans for PayPal to add an e-commerce platform in the next couple of months.
Subscribers to this free service get their own choice of a .co.uk domain name and two years of free hosting. The pages are built with Google sites, while BT offers free telephone support to allow users to "create an effective online presence." In addition, the UK has launched a qualification called, ITQ for Doing Business Online, which is aimed at helping businesses get the most from their website, thus allowing them to become more competitive.
According to the UK Secretary of State for Business, Lord Mandelson: "Encouraging more businesses to seize the opportunities the internet offers is particularly important now that the economy is growing again." It remains to be seen whether Britain's army of offline entrepreneurs are tempted to start promoting their wares online through this offer of a free website.
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