Free lunches and websites: Why there’s still no such thing

You may have heard about the recent ‘free website to the first 50,000 businesses’ offer from household names MYOB and Google.

Under the banner of ‘Getting Aussie businesses online’ the two corporations are offering to the first 50,000 businesses to accept their offer what they describe as a free easy-to-update website for one year, free.com.au domain for two years, an AdWords $75 trial with expert phone support and ongoing tips and education.

This is not the first time that ‘free websites’ have been offered. For example, Microsoft have had their ‘Office Live’ website offer available for free for a few years now.

I’m all in favour of providing smaller businesses with the tools they need to get online, but why would two ‘profit-motive’ corporations be giving away something for nothing?

Is it possible that they are prepared to give you something at no cost and without any future obligation?

To find out, lets look at the pros and cons of the offer.

Pros

1. Savings on domain name, hosting and Content Management System

Up until now, there have been costs associated with most of these aspects of offering a website. Specifically you should be paying no more than $30 a year for a ‘.au’ domain name, $10 a month for 10MB of hosting. The CMS is a little harder to quantify as you can get them for free in some cases or up to $30 a month for limited features.

So taking all of that into consideration, this offer could save you anywhere up to $500 for each of the first two years, remembering that it is a very basic web presence.

2. Clever entry level website tools

The MYOB people have done well to come up with a website building ‘wizard’ and editing tools that make it comparatively easy for those with little skills to establish and maintain the website. Much of this benefit is due to a step-by-step procedure which ensures that your website fundamentals are in place.

3. Excellent resources

The beauty of being backed by some significant corporations is that they can afford to pay professionals to produce great support resources and facilities. This means that the beginner has a range of help options available to them for no cost. They really are very comprehensive – so a big tick there.

Cons

1. Not really a ‘website’

As we have outlined in this blog before, there are many organisations that confuse websites and website tools.

Websites aren’t websites until they are populated with well-written, structured, presented and optimised content. This is the reason people come to the website in the first place – to find out information, as provided by this all important content. Not to admire your template design and download speeds.

MYOB and Google aren’t the first to confuse people in this way but to new players it can be fundamentally misleading.

It is much more accurate and fair to say ‘website tools’.

2. No customisation

These solutions provide you with the tools to create a website header that is reasonably customised. However, the rest of the site is essentially a standard template. There appears to be no option to have the website fully customised – even at a cost.

3. Costs beyond offer period

To the credit of the providers, all the ongoing costs beyond the first year are clearly stated on their website. They state that you will be up for $30 a year for the domain name and $5 per month for the system license and hosting – a not unreasonable price for an offering of this nature.

4. Being locked into a technology that may not ‘scale’ to your future needs

When it comes to web technology, no two businesses are the same, so it’s unlikely to be able to come up with website tools that will be right for every business. Sooner or later you will need features that this is not able to provide without significant additional price. This will mean switching providers, which can be costly in both your time and of course money.

5. Time taken to learn and master techniques

While the content building tools and processes of this solution appear to be among the easiest out there, there is still time required to learn and master how to properly use tools like this and that’s time many small business operators simply don’t have.

This point remains a massive bone of contention when it comes to smaller business operators. I’ve found that few business operators have the fundamental skills to either build and maintain their website to a reasonably professional level.

The time taken to learn these skills (and they are changing all the time) has to be weighed up against hiring a professional who can do what required in a fraction of the time. In which time the business operator could be making more money out of what they do best.

What’s obvious about offers like this is that they act as both of a sampling and ‘locking in’ technique aimed at eventually upgrading you to a paid for solution, as well as taking advantage of the various switching costs of moving to another provider.

Don’t get me wrong, for those business operators who don’t yet have a web presence, this is an attractive offer from MYOB and Google and is certainly preferable to no web presence at all.

But for the reasons outlined above, you get what you pay for, so the ‘paid’ alternatives to this offer should also be weighed up against it.

It’s yet another reason to get genuine independent advice on your online presence.

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the smaller business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.