As many as one and a half million UK businesses do not have a Web site. That's a situation that a new joint venture of large multinational companies and UK business organizations, endorsed by Lord Mandelson, wants to change.
Launched on Thursday 25 February 2010, Getting British Business Online offers free Web sites to UK SMEs. It’s an interesting initiative but closer scrutiny reveals a cynical misapprehension of the value of the Web to small businesses.
Led by Google, the GBBO coalition aims to get 100,000 UK businesses online with a free Web site by the end of 2010. Google’s partners include BT, PayPal, the Institute of Directors, e-skills UK and Enterprise UK, with a host of smaller partners providing training and holding events, all with the support of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Oh, and Claire Young of The Apprentice has leant her support, too.
“Encouraging more businesses to seize the opportunities the Internet offers is particularly important now that the economy is growing again,” said Lord Mandelson. Whatever you may think of Mandelson, it’s hard to disagree with that. But does GBBO do that, if multinational corporations like Google and BT have been chosen to offer the service over UK-based alternatives? I’m no fan of do-it-yourself Web site building software, and my Web hosting is not UK-based, but I sympathize with the objections to GBBO raised by Mr Site, Moonfruit and Webfusion.
Furthermore, a number of partners in GBBO are publicly-funded, including Business Link and Enterprise UK. I have no particular objections to public money being used to support the competitiveness of small businesses, but I’m less happy when that money may find its way into the coffers of extremely profitable multinationals. I wonder, like Paul Lloyd, whether GBBO “is in the business of helping promote the interests of Google, PayPal, BT et al, not those of small businesses.”
What price Web design?
There is also the issue of the perceived value of Web design. Many Web design agencies have fallen (and continue to fall) over themselves to offer Web sites for very small amounts of money. Web design is cheap, something anyone can do. It’s no bad thing that the barrier to publishing online is low: that’s part of the point of the Web and one of its great strengths. But to make even a straightforward Web site effectively support a business today requires professional expertise, sometimes in several different fields: user experience design; information architecture; usability testing; visual design; and online accessibility, as well as more technical skills in coding and programming. And that’s not the half of it.
More forward-thinking professional Web designers and developers, those who have adopted a standards-based approach supported by a thorough understanding of online user experience, have battled for several years to raise the perception of the value of good Web design. The profession is maturing and the sites that a dabbler can produce are no longer good enough. But with GBBO, cheap has now bottomed out to free. And it’s made by Google and PayPal’s on board, so it must be OK, right?
Tucked away at the end of the Help section, in answer to the question, ‘What if I want a more advanced Web site?’ is:
“Our step-by-step tool will help you publish a basic website for your business, and Google Sites will let you improve and expand upon this later. If you’d like something more advanced we recommend you speak to a professional website designer who may be able to create a more sophisticated home for your business.”
Is this statement a tacit acknowledgement that these free Web sites are really rather shabby? If it were made more prominent, perhaps. The overriding message of GBBO, however, is that a free site is enough to achieve objectives of your business and bring you success. Why pay a professional at the start of your online adventure? As Richard Rutter has said, GBBO “sends a poor message about the value of professional web design”.
A quick aside about markup
One of the distinguishing features of good Web design is well-structured markup that makes the most of a site’s content, accounting for interoperability and accessibility, as well as allowing search engines to provide relevant results. But Bruce Lawson’s quick and dirty example shows that a free site has worthless markup: excessive amounts of pointless, obtrusive JavaScript floating in a goat’s head soup of <div>s and layout <table>s. But this is Google Sites, so indexing is assured.
Missed opportunity
I understand that many small business can’t afford to spend a great deal of money setting up and sustaining an active online presence. But I also know the added value that I can offer to an organization by creating a high quality Web site. That’s why Full Cream Milk has an easily understood range of packages at reasonable prices.
The GBBO offer reveals a cynicism towards and misunderstanding of the importance of the Web to the UK’s small businesses by reducing it merely to a question of presence: as long as your business has a Web site, regardless of the content, you’re OK. Don’t worry about working out a content strategy or the effort of sustaining the site, providing value to your visitors or whether disabled people can use it (and that’s the law, remember) because, as the site says: “How much does it cost to maintain my website? You won’t be charged.”
Maybe a better service would be one that matches up small businesses with local Web development agencies and freelancers, coupled with solid information on what’s really involved in planning, setting up and maintaining an effective Web site. I wonder how many unloved, if not abandoned, GBBO-made Web sites we’ll see in 2011.
