An Post, Blacknight and the County & City Enterprise Boards have teamed up with Google to target the 40% of Irish SMEs and sole traders that do not have a website or an online presence.
According to Google research, 40% of Irish commercial SMEs do not have a website and almost 60% do not have an entry in an online directory. This is despite the millions of euros being spent by Irish consumers shopping online every year. Over 75% of Irish customers use the Internet as their primary tool for researching new companies and products, and 68% believe that search engines help to find relevant sellers of products. But, with only 21% of Irish businesses e-commerce enabled, Ireland is effectively losing revenues to UK and US online businesses.
Google's research also found that common barriers to setting up online are a lack of skills, perceived high costs and time restrictions. The Getting Irish Business Online campaign will support businesses and sole traders to build a free website in under 30 minutes which is the first step to building an online business. Blacknight Solutions will provide participants with a free website, and hosting with a .ie, .eu or .com domain name which is free for one year from the set-up of their website. Google will also provide a trial of online advertising with a coupon worth €100, whilst the County & City Enterprise Boards will run nationwide seminars giving registered businesses additional support in setting up a website and learning how to attract new custom online. It is expected that these will be run in June - August and notification will go out to people.
An Post is supporting integration of a postage calculator into a full e-commerce solution, launching this Autumn and it will provide promotional offers, support and advice to businesses who sell online and have developed their website through Getting Irish Business Online.
WHAT TO EXPECT
- When you register your domain name on www.gettingbusinessonline.ie you can attend one of our Training Workshops (3.5 hours @ €25 per class) which will show you how to build edit and maintain your new website.
- You will have access to an online content management system which you will use to make any changes to your site as you go along.
- The Google site currently offers businesses a basic brochure site. Ecommerce Functionality is not yet built it but it is excpected that this will be offered by Blacknight and An Post in the Autumn.
- The design of the site is down to your own creativity. It might be useful to get a graphic designer to design a banner graphic for your website, for the top - with your name / logo etc.
- You are limited to about 12 images which should be optimised to suit the web. (ie 900 pixels and preferably about 100-250kb). Please refer to www.webresizer.com to optimise your pictures.
- You currently must load these to a site like Flickr as there is currently no option to upload these on the content management system. This would also include other documetns like pdfs, powerpoints, word docs.
- You can upload you Tube links which are embedded code.
- Your new email address can be an existing one. You can pay to upgrade this to an email address tied to your site through Blacknight. Additional costs may apply.
- In the second year after the free year expires, the costs for hosting domain name / web site will cost at least €55 - €75 epending on what domain name you have.
Examples of some local web sites that have been developed using the Google Initiative;
http://www.jasonburkecarpentry.com/
http://www.bearafreerangepigs.com/
http://valueaddedtraining.biz/