bCentral Opens for (Small) Business

Microsoft launches Web site of resources to get small businesses online.

Alexandra Krasne, PC World

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Microsoft has its own theory, and serves it up online for fees that start at $19.95 a month. On Thursday it launched bCentral, a portal that helps businesses build their own Web sites, advertise, and get listed on search engines.

"We did a lot of research with small businesses," says Skye Ketonen, bCentral lead marketing communications manager. "We tried to figure out how they could leverage the Web, and what they liked and didn't."

Small businesses needed help deciphering what Ketonen calls a hodgepodge of information and services on the Web, Microsoft decided.

"What [small businesses] said was, 'Get us online; help us build a site; help us leverage the online marketplace. But we want it to be easy to use," Ketonen says.

The resulting portal, announced in September, provides access to a plethora of tools that help businesses get rolling online. You'll find resources to register a domain, find a host service, open an online store, create a privacy policy, get listed in search engines, place ads, order office supplies, send bulk e-mail to customers, and more. You can also track visitors to your site and collect e-mail addresses for an online customer database.

Many Options, Some Info

The site has three main sections: Start Your Website, Promote Your Website, and Manage Your Website. Fees for the Premium Business package start at $19.95. This service offers "traffic-building products that will help you bring customers to your site and keep them coming back."

One Premium feature, SubmitIt, lets you submit a URL to as many as 400 search engines and directories. But bCentral's description doesn't explain that your URL is automatically submitted to the top seven search engines; to get it listed in search engines of your choice, you'll need to pay an extra $59 at least.

Microsoft touts bCentral's services as easy to use, but some areas could use clarification. Terms like the "5000 ad impressions" promised with the Premium service may confuse someone who isn't familiar with online ad lingo. The site doesn't elaborate on this claim. But Ketonen explains an "impression" is counted each time someone downloads a page from your site--meaning that if someone downloads your banner ad, that's counted as one impression.

The LinkExchange program lets you place one free ad on another site if you allow two ads to appear on yours. But bCentral offers no guarantee about which sites your ad will appear on. According to bCentral, your ad is "in rotation and will be displayed at random either across the network (for general broadcast advertising) or within the content categories specified by your targeting criteria."

Microsoft announced bCentral along with other outreach services to small businesses, and will no doubt continue to refine the site.

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