PRIME has teamed up with UK web site specialist Mr Site to offer a discount of up to 40 per cent on the company’s simple all-in-one web site creation packages.
With the discount a year’s use of the Beginner package will cost you £15 rather than £19.99, a year of the Standard package £22.74 rather than £34.99, and of the Pro package £59.9 rather than £99.99.
These prices include the registration of your own domain name (such as www.example.co.uk or www.example.com), the use of Mr Site online web site creation tools, templates and shopping cart, plus hosting for a year.
To get these prices go to the special PRIME discount link and enter the word “PRIME” into the offer code box. You can upgrade between the levels at any time, so you don’t have to worry too much about making the right choice now. If you want to continue using the Mr Site service after a year prices revert to the normal level - these are shown at the foot of the page. Currently they are £20.28 annually for Beginner, £34.88 for Standard and £95.88 for Pro.
The different levels differ mainly in the number of pages you can display and the amount of space you can use for your text and images. The Pro package has the best ecommerce support and features to help make the site more visible to search engines. But all come with a shopping facility with images and stock control, the ability to take payment from customers via Paypal, and with email box. You can use an existing domain name you have already registered.
We know from polling on the topic and what people tell us at events that setting up a web site has long been seen seen as a high priority by most business starters (see Olderpreneurs all want their own web sites) from 2007. But not everyone is confident about how to go about it. Setting up a web site can seem daunting if you have spent your life doing something other than keeping up with Internet technology.
Mr Site’s all-in-one approach keeps things very simple. To get a web site going you need to register a domain, find a host, design your site and upload all your content. With Mr Site you do all these things from the same place using your normal web browser, and you pay from them all at the same time with a single subscription you know in advance.
The firm is one of the leaders in easy web sites in the UK. We also like Mr Site because its product is well documented, so if you don’t know what you are doing it you can read an explanation which by web standards is relatively free of jargon.
Mr Site is more business-oriented than the blogging tools which are probably its main rivals when it comes to ease of use. Even the Beginner package comes with one shopping page, which can have up to 99 items on it, each with their own image. The standard package allows up to 49 shopping pages, the Pro 98.
The payment system for taking money from your customers is Paypal-based. Paypal is a large international electronic payment service owned by eBay. This means that you have to sign yourself up separately with Paypal for a Paypal account, and pay Paypal transaction charges. But the big plus is that you can get up and running fast and you don’t need to worry about processing credit card payment or getting credit card merchant status.
Customers can pay you straight off your web site (or by email) using a credit or debit card - they don’t themselves need to sign up with PayPal. Paypal can also handle cross-border payments and currency conversion, for an extra fee.
Of course Mr Site isn’t the only way of getting a web site up and running, but we reckon the all-in-one approach makes it very suitable for people new to creating web sites, and its business focus makes it appropriate for PRIME’s audience.
Of other options, there are many. We cover some of them in the site credits description of how this web site is done. For www.primebusinessclub.com we use a lot of Open Source software, which is cheap or free, but quite complicated. Since we have people who already understand these things it is rational to use their labour time, instead of spending money we don’t have.
But for a person starting out on their own without existing Internet skills the learning curve could be high, and the time spent could divert effort from other areas of the business that need it more urgently.
This means that only some of the blogging options are worth considering, especially those aimed at beginners with the hosting included, so there is much less of a technical nature to do. Some of these services are free, usually because they are advertising funded, and they can be good way of getting something up quickly and starting to learn about web publishing.
You can instantly set up a free blog at Blogger.com (owned by Google), and at Wordpress.com, to name two well-established and well supported ones, with huge communities of users. Typepad only has a 14-day free trial, and thereafter is quite expensive, but is also very beginner friendly and tends to appeal to people in the media or arts or who have visually-appealing products.
Social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter may be enough if all you require is an online presence that is mainly about yourself, and they are all free. But all three suffer from a trivial image, and Facebook in particular is still blocked by many traditional businesses that fear their employees will waste time on it. This means that though such sites can be very helpful to your business if it relies on word of mouth and personal contact, you may also need a conventional web site too where you can present your offer in a serious manner.
Another option worth investigating if you plan to start trading from your site and taking payments for goods is BT Tradespace. The basic service is free, and you get a shop and the ability to take payments using Paypal. This service also offers opportunities for networking to find customers and suppliers, and for some businesses may be a good place to start.
Disclosure: We are not taking any commission or affiliate fee on this offer to enable the maximum saving to be passed on to you. PRIME has asked Mr Site to hand all the available discount on to our clients in the form of a lower offer price.