{"id":651,"date":"2011-07-20T06:31:14","date_gmt":"2011-07-20T11:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2011\/07\/20\/110720-googlefreewebsites\/"},"modified":"2022-03-09T12:13:15","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T18:13:15","slug":"110720-googlefreewebsites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/07\/20\/110720-googlefreewebsites\/","title":{"rendered":"Google’s free website program doesn’t help everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"

I posted brief rants about the Texas Get Your Business Online<\/a> (TGYBO) initiative yesterday on Facebook and Twitter, but that wasn’t particularly satisfying, so I want to continue the rant here. After all, anything worth doing is worth overdoing.<\/p>\n

Here’s a quick refresher. TGYBO provides free websites and hosting (for a year) to small businesses in Texas. It’s a joint initiative spearheaded by Google and software company Intuit, and a number of national and state business advocacy groups<\/a>. The FAQ on the above-linked website includes this blurb about why this is happening:<\/p>\n

Small businesses are vital to America’s economic future; the nation’s 27.5M small businesses comprise half the US GDP and create two-thirds of all new jobs. Although 97% of consumers look online for local products and services, 51% of Texan small businesses do not have a website or online presence. This makes them invisible to many potential customers.<\/p>\n

Sounds like a commendable program, doesn’t it? And it probably is, unless you’re a small business that’s trying to generate income by building websites for paying customers, in which case this initiative has the potential to, well, put you out of business.<\/p>\n

The reality is that small businesses and nonprofit organizations are the bread-and-butter of most web designers. I’ve never had a Fortune 500 client and never will. That’s not all bad, but it does mean that I generate income via volume: creating a lot of small websites that individually don’t amount to much money, but with luck might add up to a living wage (and even that goal remains elusive). So you can see why an initiative like this by a gazillion-dollar company like Google might cause a disturbance in the Web Design Force.<\/p>\n

I have a couple of suggestions for Google. If you’re so dead set on helping small businesses, why not just give each qualifying business a $300 (or $500 or whatever amount) voucher to be used to hire a local web designer to help get the business online? Not only do you not put a market segment out of business, but you also connect the client with someone local who understands and actually cares about the client’s business. What a concept!<\/p>\n

Or, Google, how about giving small businesses free advertising via your AdWords<\/a> program for a year? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Doesn’t feel so good, does it?<\/p>\n

I have no idea whether this program will actually affect my business. It’s not as if there aren’t a hundred different do-it-yourself website programs out there now; every large hosting company offers them. I still believe that most small businesses want to work with someone local, and also subscribe to the theory that you get what you pay for.<\/p>\n

If nothing else, this demonstrates that there are unintended consequences to almost any program that’s designed to give something for nothing. This one just hits a little closer to home than most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I posted brief rants about the Texas Get Your Business Online (TGYBO) initiative yesterday on Facebook and Twitter, but that wasn’t particularly satisfying, so I want to continue the rant here. After all, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Here’s a quick refresher. TGYBO provides free websites and hosting (for a year) to small businesses in… Continue reading Google’s free website program doesn’t help everyone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,21,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-internet","category-thinking-allowed","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8372,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions\/8372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}