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This week-end’s FT Money section carried a small piece on a company making it quick and easy - and cheap - for small businesses to get online. Mr Site sells ‘web site in a box’ packages, which come in three sizes or grades. If you visit their own site, you’ll see video testimonials of what are predominantly sole traders who’ve set up a site using one of the products. Levi Roots of Dragons’ Den fame - remember Reggae Reggae Sauce? - offers his own recommendation, too.

The testimonials work well and if I was a sole trader who felt it was time to get a web site but had little clue where to start, I think I would be motivated to shell out the necessary moolah to get hold of the basic version and give it a go. That most basic package comes with a blog, a PayPal cart, and a forum, as well as sufficient email addresses for the really small business. I won’t list the prices because I’m not really trying to run an advertisement for Mr Site. You can get the prices [here].

They make it pretty easy to upgrade to the next level and the added services as you move through the levels seem sensible. (Whenever I see functions that are turned ‘off’ in software, I’m reminded of Windows NT and the simple switch you needed to set to turn it into NT Server. But I digress.)

No More Newsagent’s Windows
What the existence of Mr Site products make clear is that the web site is now a commodity. These products make it almost as easy to get your web site up and running as it is to set up a blog on Blogger or the on-line incarnations of Wordpress or Typepad. It’s obviously answering a demand - and that demand is coming primarily from the late to the party crowd. Web sites are now as essential a part of setting up your new business as sticking a card in the local newsagent’s window used to be. That’s great and it’s great that it’s so easy to get on-line. Mr Site’s templates look good and it’s hard to see what they’re lacking for the price.
Mr Site appear to make no claims over and above providing a professional web site and that’s what their product does. The Daily Telegraph - according to a quotation on the ‘Press reviews’ page - describes it thus:

“Web designers will hate it; you’ll love it… All you need to build a professional site.”

So, it’s fair to assume that it does what it says on the box (with apologies to Ronseal).

Hello? Can You See Me?
Is that a problem? Not as such. When the web consisted of a few hundred web sites, adding a new one was a big deal. It got noticed. But when there are over a hundred million web sites, the appearance of a new one is not usually greeted with a fanfare and ribbon cutting. Or cake. That’s the issue: getting on-line is now quick, easy, and pretty cheap. And that’s great. But if you’re a business and you’re hoping for your web site to form part of your marketing strategy or if selling from your web site is your entire business model, getting on-line is only the first step. The first of many. Even with your web site on-line, you’re still going to be doing an impression of the invisible man until you learn how to drive traffic to your site.

The web is often touted as the solution to the problem of being invisible. And it can be. But it’s not about just having a web site and I worry that many of those small businesses and sole traders will wonder what the fuss was about when their site is up, looks good, and sits there unvisited except for its owner. It then becomes like any brick-based store in completely the wrong part of town or the wrong side of the street.

Of course, with the possibility of picking up a web site in a box for silly money, people become conditioned to expect all web solutions to cost next to nothing and are then unwilling to spend the money - or even the time, perhaps - that would actually make their whole investment start to pay for itself. The obvious solution, therefore, is a new product: on-line marketing in a box. Any suggestions for contents?

Tags: daily telegraph, FT, invisible, levi roots, mr site, reggae reggae sauce, ronseal