Is Getting Australian Business Online right for your business?
Author: Paul Wallbank on 8 March 2011
Last week accounting software provider MYOB and search giant Google announced the Getting Australian Business Online initiative to make establishing a website easier for those 50% of Aussie businesses that aren't on the web.
Tim Reed, MYOB's Chief Executive, said at the launch they had identified three barriers to these businesses going online – fear, time and cost. All three barriers are addressed by the Getting Australian Business Online service; it's free, simple and takes less than half an hour to configure.
The service is gratis for the first year and $5 a month afterwards, the domain name can be transferred anytime at no cost.
Providing the domain name for free saves a business around $40 and the simple question and answer driven set up wizard gets the website up quickly and painlessly. For time-poor business owners it's probably half an hour well spent.
The results are a fairly basic site, with the template showing the business' location, contact details, some links and a description of the enterprise. Advanced users have the option of adding an image gallery and additional information pages. While the sites won't win awards, they do achieve their stated aim of getting a business online quickly.
An important thing to consider is that the service has no online selling facilities beyond a contact phone number. There is no way to integrate a sales feature and any links, HTML coding or Javascript will be stripped out of the site. So these pages are really only for the most basic online presence.
The biggest downside with the free service is businesses won't get an email address; instead they have to rely on their ISP or a webmail services, which is not always the best look.
Another drawback is integration with Google Places isn't particularly tight, so creating a business profile in Google Places is still necessary. MYOB says they are looking at adding features soon that will include links to eCommerce services and their own accounting services with open Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that will let people connect other services.
There are other cheap options available, registering a domain name for around $20 year and then using Google's free Blogger platform is a straightforward alternative and there are other options using hosted services like WordPress, Weebly and Squarespace which, while a little more complex and expensive, meet the needs of most businesses with a lot more flexibility.
While MYOB's CEO believes there are three barriers, there is in fact a fourth – many businesses think they don't need to be on the web. That's changing as customers abandon Yellow Pages and the local classifieds and this service is for those who haven't made the change.
Because Getting Australian Business Online is a basic product with the aim of getting a business up on the web quickly, there's little in the way of bells, whistles or customisation. If you want a more scalable, sophisticated or flexible presence then you're going to have to look elsewhere and you're probably not the target market anyway.
Overall this is a good service for the micro business or the entrepreneur who's just starting out. For many businesses this is just what they need at a price a lot cheaper than classified ads in the local papers or the Yellow Pages.
Paul will be holding a masterclass that will get a small business fully online in two hours on March 24 at Mosman, NSW. Seats are still available.
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written by Nominal Accounting Software, March 08, 2011
It is obevious that the main benefitors from this arrangement will be both MYOB and Google, for the cost of a domain name (8-12$ for two years) and a bit of hosting.
they will gain a captured audience for both their internal marketing (accounting software for a business just starting up and online advertising) as well as the oppertunity to market other services (?) and to upsell the solution after the initial period.
When looking through some of tweets about this new initiative I saw a couple of examples of websites made by this tool and it is not very aesthetically pleasing, to be polite :-)
written by Magnetic Knife Racks, March 08, 2011
written by Radialabs, April 29, 2011
With just minor adjustments, websites that are serving no purpose, could be drawing traffic and sales.
As pointed out, there are many free options available now for business to use to be found online. Some of them don't even require you to have a website at all.
The website alone solves nothing. Without some basic understanding of the online environment and how to make it work for the business, then it can be just another thing to work poorly and business owners are prone to use that as an excuse, rather than putting some effort and resources into learning to understand how to use it well.
There are some fantastic resources available that can work very well. It can take a bit of digging to find help to make them work for you but is well worth the effort.
And by the way. A lot of those websites that don't work? They paid a lot of money to have them designed and set up.
The How is sometimes more important than the What.