CS169p278to280 7/1/02 3:55 pm Page 278

Business
Shopper If you want to get your business online,there
are plenty of services to help you do so.
Graeme Kidd rounds up the options

E-business opportunity
T
his is intended to be a quick-start guide to harnessing the
power of the internet for the benefit of your business. In
Business Shopper columns we’ll return to some of the topics
here and cover them in greater detail but for now, we’re creating a
basic route map that starts at the beginning and helps you travel
towards an internet-enhanced enterprise that will add to its bottom-
line profits by smart and appropriate use of the internet.
When it comes to getting your business online, sorting things out
yourself should reduce your initial cash outlay. On the other hand you’ll
need to spend quite a while getting to grips with new concepts. You
may choose to approach website authoring companies to see what
they can do for you and at what price. Either way, a basic
understanding of what’s involved is a good starting point. We suggest
you get online and look around at what other people, including your
competitors, are doing.
If you are a regular Shopper reader, the chances are that you
will already have made a start and gained some level of familiarity
with what the internet has to offer. But you may be new to this area
and anyway, there’s no harm in a recap, so we’ll start with a look
at the basics.

GETTING ONLINE
Even if you already have a dial-up account in
place, it’s far from rare to go through several
internet service providers (ISPs) before finally
settling on one that provides the service you
want at the price you want.
There is a list of UK ISPs with basic
information on their charges and services at
www.ispreview.co.uk/list.shtml. Of course if
you’re reading this before getting an internet
connection you won’t be able to visit this site
easily, although remember you can go to an
internet café or library to surf the web.
According to ISP Review – one of several
sites that keep an independent eye on the
market – there are around 700 ISPs selling
their services in the UK, despite recent
rationalisation that has seen smaller fry
gobbled up by bigger players or go bust.
You could spend hours trying to get the
smartest deal. The best thing to do is decide
how much you want to spend, ask friends
about their experiences and pick an ISP and
a service level that looks good. Check the
terms and conditions and take the plunge –
you can always change your mind later.
ISP Review is a good place to check out
details and users’ opinions of UK ISPs
When it comes to free ISPs, it’s important
to remember that free stuff doesn’t tend to
come with free support and advice. Often the
cheapest might not be the best. Try to think
about value as well as price.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with
free ISP accounts – they work well for many
people. If you’re not paying for something,
though, it can be difficult to complain about
levels of service. You could also find that the
kind of email address and website address
you get for free isn’t ideal for your business.
If you decide to pay for your internet
service, you have a couple of basic choices.
You can opt for services that don’t involve a
monthly subscription charge and pay between
1p and 4p a minute for the time you are
online, plus the cost of the phone call. This is
fine if you go online rarely, or if you want a
backup ISP account in case your main
account takes the afternoon off.
For business, we recommend you pay a
monthly subscription. There are different
types of subscription service. You can opt for
a lower subscription and pay local call rates
during the connections you make, or use an
‘unmetered’ service that allows you unlimited
use either all the time or during restricted
periods (typically evenings and weekends
only) without running up phone call charges.
All a novice needs is a basic dial-up
account for one machine that uses a modem
and a standard telephone line. Use that to get
the hang of how the internet works and then
you can make informed decisions about
online issues before you upgrade to an ISDN
or Business Highway connection that puts all
your networked PCs online through your own
hardware firewall and router.
TOP Remember that you get what you
TIP pay for. If you choose a free ISP,
there is usually no-one to turn to for help.

SOFTWARE virus protection, although it does offer

You’ll probably be tripping over CD-Roms
packed with all the software you need to sign
up to online services. All you need to begin
with is a browser to look at web pages:
Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape and
Opera are the main contenders. You’ll
probably want some email software to send,
receive, organise and file your emails,
although you can manage with just a browser.
We don’t recommend using Microsoft
Outlook, which comes free with Microsoft
Office, for email unless you have excellent
impressive facilities. Qualcomm’s Eudora Pro
(www. eudora.com) is easier to keep safe.
You can get free browser-based email
accounts such as Hotmail (www.hotmail.com)
but, again, free services give you little room
for manoeuvre if things go wrong. They are
OK for personal mail, but it’s best not to trust
your business to free services.
It is smart to take a few steps to protect
your PC against virus attacks. You might be
assured that your ISP sweeps all emails it
forwards to you for viruses, or you may prefer
to run your own virus protection using
software such as that from Norton or McAfee.
Just be sure to configure the options so that
emails and all removable disks are scanned
before you move or use files and keep the
virus definitions up to date, otherwise your
local virus protection will become vulnerable.
There are further software options for
those who write or maintain and update
their own site.
TOP Invest in virus protection such as
TIP Norton’s AntiVirus software – you’ll
be distraught if a virus wipes you out.

278 COMPUTER SHOPPER MAR 2002 www.computershopper.co.uk

CS169p278to280 7/1/02 3:55 pm Page 279
DOMAIN NAME
If you are going to use email and a
website in your business, it makes sense
to have your own domain. This makes
you look more serious and clued-up to
the people who visit your site or receive
your emails. We’d advise sticking with a
.co.uk or .com suffix, at least for a while
– internet users are familiar with them,
and might not remember that your
domain name ends in .biz or one of the Be careful where you look up domain names – you could
other new domains. prompt someone to register the name you want
Having your own domain usually
means you can use your company name or a
meaningful variant of it: while www.jones.co.uk .co.uk address.
went yonks ago, as you might expect,
www.jonesthebutchers.co.uk still hadn’t as of
1st January. If you’re very lucky you might find
a generic term that relates to what you do:
when we looked, www.theporkpiepeople.co.uk
was still available. This would certainly make a
memorable domain name for a company
selling pork pies to put on its letterheads and
in its advertising.
Do you go for .com or .co.uk or both?
There’s some sense in getting a matching set
if both are available and you don’t mind the
marginal extra outlay. If you own both, you can register domains for you online, and many
use both domains and have two versions of
your site on the web, or have a simple
forwarding facility implemented that redirects
SITE HOST
For your domain name to be useful it needs to
be ‘hosted’, which means that email and
website facilities are assigned to your domain
name on a server. A server is a machine that’s
permanently connected to the internet. Once
your domain has been set up on a server you
can put the files that make up your website
on that server’s hard drive so that people
tapping ‘www.yourdomain.co.uk’ into their
browsers get to see your website. Similarly,
when email postboxes are on the server, you
can set up addresses such as sales@your
domain.co.uk and jimjones@yourdomain.co.uk.
1&1 offers a selection of domain registration and website hosting
packages and gives you an idea of the questions you need to ask
www.computershopper.co.uk
anyone keying in your .com address to your
One trick for improving your website traffic who is going to host your domain before
involves registering a small bundle of relevant you register it.
domain names and pointing them at your
main site. So if you were a mail order butcher, you saying that someone else is about to
you might grab www.theporkpiepeople.co.uk,
www.thebaconpeople.co.uk and www.
thesausagepeople.co.uk and have them
forward all visitors to www.jonesthebutchers.
co.uk. Thus you have four open funnel
mouths directing web traffic to your products
and services.
There are plenty of companies happy to
charge almost nothing to do so. Be careful
what you sign up for, though; if you want to
move your domain to another service provider
You may find that your ISP not only offers
dial-up services but also offers domain
hosting, website facilities and email services
that use your domain name rather than the
default email addresses and web space
facilities it hands out to dial-up customers.
Your first move should be to check out your
provider’s facilities, but you are by no means
tied to using this service.
Alternatively, there are companies such as
1&1 (www.oneandone.co.uk) which specialise
in providing website creation and hosting
facilities; 1&1 has a set of standard packages
tailored to fit a variety of
pockets and needs. If you
deal with such a web-hosting
company for your business
website, it’s advisable to pay
extra for the version of the
service that doesn’t carry the
company’s advertising. That
way you keep your visitors
glued exclusively to your
commercial message.
If your online business
takes off in a big way, you
might want to have your own
dedicated server, but for
most businesses this isn’t a
Business
Shopper
in the future, you may find it is difficult
or expensive. Make sure you understand
all the charges for which you’ll be liable.
In some cases, someone has used
the domain availability search facilities
on a domain-seller’s site to check the
availability of a couple of names, only to
find a day or so later that someone has
‘coincidentally’ bought the domains, or
be contacted by someone offering to
sell them the domain they had their eye
on for an inflated price. If you want to
check domain name availability we
reckon the safest sites to use are
www.nominet.org.uk for UK domains and
www.netsol.com for others. Bear in mind
Remember, if someone phones or faxes
register a variant of a domain name you
already own (mycompanyname.net, perhaps)
they’re trying it on when they ask you if you’d
like them to register it for you. Go to your
usual supplier and register the domain variant
yourself if you want to.
TOP Your own domain name can be a
TIP useful asset: www.jonesmeats.co.uk
is more impressive than www.generic-
host.co.uk/foods/meats/jones.
pragmatic option. If you consider doing this,
www.demon.net is well worth a visit, if only to
get an overview of what’s on offer. This long-
established company offers everything from
basic dial-ups to full-on server hosting and
leased lines.
Once again, be sure to read the small print
and understand what you are getting for what
you are paying. Find out what you have to pay
extra for – whether it’s a setup fee, fees for
making changes, premium rate calls to help
lines or a cap on the amount of data your
website can deliver to visitors in a month. If
you decide to use a web authoring company
to sort this out for you, make sure you
understand exactly what it sets up for you and
how you will be charged, particularly if you
decide to move your site in the future.
If you decide to take the DIY route, try out
a couple of cheap services and build a
personal website first just to get the hang of
how it works before signing up with a
particular supplier for the long term with
your business site.
TOP Make sure you know what you have
TIP to pay before signing up – there are
all sorts of costs incurred by web hosting.
c
MAR 2002 COMPUTER SHOPPER 279
CS169p278to280 7/1/02 3:55 pm Page 280

Business
Shopper
YOUR WEBSITE
After you have spent a while surfing the web
to see how other businesses use websites
and email to attract and service customers,
you should have a basic idea of what’s
possible and what’s relevant for your
business. Assuming you are in business to
make a profit, you should be able to get a grip
on the real potential of a website.
Consider carefully your aims and
objectives and how much time and money is
available to devote to getting your business
online. You’ll need to work out who your
audience is and what you can give them in
terms of appealing or useful content as well
as your products and services. For your
website to deliver real benefits, it should be
integrated with your existing marketing and
sales strategies. E-commerce opens up plenty
of new possibilities, but you must think about
what your existing and potential customers
might want to see and do on your website.
If you do all the work yourself, you can set
up a basic website and run it for a year for a
cash outlay of less than £100. Sophisticated
sites will cost more, particularly if you use an
expert’s help. Expect to pay around £1,000
for a good-quality, comprehensive starter site
and around £2,500 for one that has effective
e-commerce facilities.
Most businesses seem to start their
websites as online brochures, which can be
very effective and far cheaper than printing
and posting traditional marketing material.
Indeed, setting up a ‘brochureware’ site allows
you to get a feel for how to present your
company’s products, services and identity
online, whether you work with a web design
company, do it yourself or use the facilities
provided by a service such as 1&1.
Once you have a good site – one that
downloads quickly, looks good and doesn’t
have any broken links or ‘under construction’
pages – you might like to preview it with a
couple of customers and colleagues so you
can make a few final adjustments before
taking it live.
Under development
The next phase in your website development
might involve adding some interactive
elements. For example, a postcode look-up
allows visitors to find their nearest supplier of
your goods; other interactive elements could
involve useful online calculators or software
tools relevant to what you do. You could
consider starting an email marketing list by
offering people the chance to register with
you to receive a regular email newsletter, or
you might want to get a forum, advice page or
discussion group rolling. If you get your full
product database online, people can search
for what they want. All this costs time and
money and you need to be fairly sure it will
pay you back in the long term, if only by
building up an image of your company that
helps you do business offline.
The third development phase of your site
could be some level of e-commerce. You
You can make your own website for free at
www.freeserve.com/sitebuilder
TOP Don’t overextend yourself. If you
TIP don’t have the time and resources
to maintain a complex site, keep it simple.
need to be pragmatic about what you sell and
consider whether existing and new customers
are likely to buy online. If you don’t already
sell by mail order, there will be a whole raft of
‘back office’ issues to get sorted, including
choosing a payment processing supplier to
deal with credit cards offline as well as online
and regulations to ponder including the
provisions of the Data Protection Act and
Distance Selling Directive. Never overlook the
learning curves involved in the offline
elements of the website.
If you want to go down the e-commerce
route, there are three choices. You can go for
a solution such as that provided by Actinic
(www.actinic.co.uk), where you pay a one-off
fee to buy e-commerce software that is used
to set up and run your e-commerce site on
the server that is hosting your website. You
can go to a service provider that offers an
end-to-end service which allows you to set up
e-commerce facilities and run them via its
servers for a monthly fee. Or you can go for
full-on, bespoke development that means
your e-commerce site can be made to do
exactly what you want it to do. With the first
two options you are, to an extent, at the mercy
of the tools being used, which will have been
developed to be as generic as possible.
E-business is the current buzzword that’s
being promoted like heck by the government.
It goes a little further than e-commerce,
encompassing ways of working collaboratively
with your suppliers, distributors and
customers as well as taking orders online and
marketing your business electronically.

Help and advice Coming soon

If you’re looking for general online business
advice, try your local Business Link (check
www.businesslink.co.uk or your phone book).
Business Link is funded by the government and
offers business support services and advice. The
UKOnline for Business website (see Online
Shopper, page 322) has lots of background
information and a raft of useful documents that
can be downloaded. Visit www.ukonlinefor
business.co.uk or call (0845) 715 2000.
Your local Business Link probably hosts the
local UK Online for Business adviser and you
may find that he or she would be happy to spend
time explaining what help and support is available
in your area for your kind of business. This might
include free or very cheap training/background
briefing sessions and possibly some grant
funding for projects. Ask about the possibility of
Diagnostic Consultancy Service (DCS) support.
You’ll find a good deal of specialist internet In future we will cover aspects
magazines on the newsstands and more books of online business in more
than you can shake a stick at. The free booklets detail. We’ll look at promoting
that UKOnline for Business offers give you good your website online as well as
independent background information. If you fancy through traditional methods, at
more detailed reading, we were impressed with e-commerce solutions including
Lindsay Percival-Straunik’s book E-Commerce software, services and payment
(Economist Books, ISBN 1861972830, £20). clearing systems and at the
While it’s mainly about large-scale corporate thorny issue of achieving search
approaches, it’s accessible and provides good all- engine rankings.
round context – and plenty of inspiration. If you’d like to offer your
You may be able to get a free copy of Making business up as a candidate for
It Through 2002 by Niki Chesworth from your a case study, know a few tips
local Business Link. If not, it was previously you’d like to pass on or have
published as The Recession Buster’s Handbook some topics you’d like to see
(Kogan Page, ISBN 0749429216, £8,99); covered, please get in touch. CS
although it is out of print, you may be able to
CONTACT
find it. In the current economic climate, it could
GRAEME KIDD
be a lifesaver. gkidd@shopperlabs.com

280 COMPUTER SHOPPER MAR 2002 www.computershopper.co.uk