Behemoth Microsoft Offers Free Web Sites for Small Businesses

By Zukowski, Paul

Microsoft is supposed to be the giant dinosaur, lumbering along while more nimble innovators invent alternatives in its footsteps. Yet at least some of its 79,000 employees are apparently concerned with the needs of small businesses and have come up with a nifty way to get them on the Web.

What causes me to write this is something called Office Live Small Business, a suite of online Web marketing tools for small businesses. It reopened in February in an improved 2.0 version at www.smallbusiness.officelive.com.

Office Live Small Business aims to close the gap for the estimated 70% of one-person businesses and 50% of other small businesses in America that don’t have a Web site.

It looks to be an easy, quick way for even the smallest business to get a functioning Web site going and manage it like a pro. Fm talking design, hosting, e-mail, and sales management tools, most of which comes free.

That’s right, free. Microsoft hosts your site for free, and also offers an array of analysis tools at no charge. This is a big change from the 2006 version of Office Live that charged for the higher levels of service.

Not only is hosting free, but there are simple design tools available that let even a total amateur put up a decent-looking Web site. You have a choice of color and design themes, and can add photos and links. You’re not limited to the canned designs, either. You can put up a Web site design you get done on your own, if you have the resources for that.

Computerworld magazine reviewed Office Live and said, “The site designer is perfect for small-business owners who lack the experience, technical skills or time needed to learn even basic Web coding and can’t afford (or aren’t willing to pay for) a professional Web designer. This is truly a simple, do-it-yourself approach to building a Web site that can yield professional-looking results.”

Office Lives free analysis tools let you see a graph of the traffic to your site over time and find out whether the visitors are coming from search engines or through links from other sites. You can even tell which Web browsers they are using.

The freebies go on. Office Live offers an e-mail marketing system that is easy to use and includes enewsletter design and an address database. You can track who opened your e-mail and what they clicked on. Microsoft does the e-mail sending for you so your own Internet provider doesn’t think you are sending spam.

For those who want to get more sophisticated, the free Office Live services include a list manager for tracking employees, resources, reservations, and more. You can also track projects and share documents online. There are also collaboration tools so your employees, if any, can discuss things online.

You can also synchronize the Office Live address books and calendars with Outlook, so you can work with them when you’re not connected to the Internet. That’s one way Microsoft hopes to keep you in the Office family.

There are some things Microsoft is charging for, of course. Starting with the domain name. Unless you can settle for something clunky with “officelive.com” tacked on, you’ll pay $15 a year to register your domain name with Office Live. But you do get up to 25 e-mail addresses with that.

And if you want to do e-commerce and sell things through your Web site, you’ll pay $40 a month for an online shopping cart, integration with eBay, and automatic figuring of shipping and any taxes. Add another $30 a month for a PayPal fee if you want to accept credit card payments right on your site instead of having it go over to the PayPal site.

So hats off to the big softie for giving small businesses a chance to compete on the Web like the big boys do.

Paul Zukowski is a freelance business writer. He can be reached at PZMadison1@cs.com.

Copyright Trails Media Group Apr 2008

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