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AllWorkstore.com Delivers Quick, Easy Site Building

If e-commerce and the Web are the wave of the future, here's your surfboard.

Alexandra Krasne, PC World

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Forrester Research projects that business-to-business e-commerce will amount to $850 billion in 2002--up from $150 billion in 1999. That statistic might strike fear in your heart if your business has yet to stake out its all-important place on the Web.

So what do you do if you're looking to establish a Web presence in a hurry, but you don't know HTML and don't want to pay a designer?

Web Site in a Box

Numerous Web-site-in-a-box products, including offerings from Yahoo, Trellix, and Lycos, can help you out. One of the newer options is AllWorkstore.com, a division of eSystems21. To build a site with the service, you go to its Web site, provide a bit of information, name your site, select a URL, and then follow the wizard through the creation process.

The service is free for the first 30 days; after that, your credit card will be billed $29 to $49 per month, depending on how many services you need and how much traffic you have.

Technical support and a host of other services are available, including a new build-your-own intranet service that costs $8 to $10 per user.

You can run your site using AllWorkstore.com's domain, or you can use your own domain. If you opt for AllWorkstore.com's domain, the company will display a large banner on top of all your pages.

The Good, the Bad, and the Unoriginal

There's an upside and a downside to creating your site with this software. The upside is ease of use--it takes only about an hour to build a site. The downside is lack of originality.

Your choices are limited to seven templates and a bunch of colors, and your page topics have to fall into one of nine categories: Home, Employment Opportunities, Products and Services, News, Contact Us, Upcoming Events, Important Links, Join Us, and Classified Ads. The only font choice is Courier. You can customize your home page, however, with any GIF or JPEG image, such as your logo or a picture.

In November, the company plans to launch an updated version of the software that will offer more templates and customizable fonts. The new version will also let you change the names of navigation bars, use additional fonts, and create your own template.

Should Web Design Be Left to Designers?

Web designers will tell you that the money you invest in building a site will determine its success.

Christopher Simmons of Mindset Communications, a Southern California-based firm that designs and markets Web sites, says the primary disadvantages of build-your-own site services are lack of customization and lack of marketing. He says that while sites can cost millions to create, most cost thousands. That money can buy you shopping carts, animation, and sound--and, Simmons says, he can send out press releases on new sites and submit them to thousands of online search engines and newsgroups.

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