Whilst I can justify my claim to be a techie of many years standing I know my limits. I am happy dissecting business information requirements and am in my element driving large scale technology implementations. However when it comes to web-site design and development I leave that to the experts.
Web design requires a great level of knowledge and creativity. Great web designers spend time understanding their audience and then design the interaction accordingly. I was lucky enough to work for HP when the Internet started to take off and it would be fair to say that back then web creation was deemed to be the jurisdiction of the 'Techie'. The upshot was we created the most amazing looking sites; the downside was that often they were tricky to navigate and labor intensive to maintain.
Things have moved on lot, I am pleased to say, since then. We have some amazing web designers who create sites that are a pleasure to use and view whilst delivering real business benefit for the companies that fund them. We have also seen a growth in technologies and initiatives the aim of which is to bring the possibility of a web presence to the smallest of businesses.
Which brings me to 'Get British Business Online', GBBO, and the point of this posting. A year ago I decided that I should really have ago at creating and maintaining my own web-site. My objective was to determine how easy it would be for a non-techie to create and maintain a web presence. I heard about the GBBO initiative at the Athena Women's Business Network International Conference. A 2-year hosting package, a domain name and a template driven development system seemed too good to be true, it wasn't; within 10 minutes I had a basic www up and running see Randombiz.com.
A year into the initiative the original partnership behind GBBO seems to have changed and no longer utilises Google Sites. From my recent experience this is not a positive move. Several hours of fiddling and I still haven't managed to create a web-site that runs consistently across all of the popular internet clients, in particular Windows Explorer. This is not good news and severely limits a business's reach.
The support also seems to be run out of the US which isn't much help for us in the UK given the time difference and does make me wonder about the 'Get British' bit of GBBO. What I am particularly disappointed about is the level of technology knowledge that seems to be required now - surely the whole point was to encourage small businesses not put them off? I have been unable to find anyone who actually represents GBBO in the UK, if you do please let me know and I would be happy to share my recent experiences. In the mean time the jury is out for me on GBBO, any alternative recommendations would be gratefully received?
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