Help for Small Firms Taking First Step Online

Setting up an e-commerce Web page can be a big step for a small business. It can be expensive, time-consuming and risky.

I don’t know any way to eliminate the time it takes to set up shop on the Web, but a new company, Bigstep.com, is making it easier, less risky and cheaper.

You don’t have to hire a professional Web designer or set up an account with a Web-hosting service. Instead, you go to Bigstep’s Web site and design your own site, which it will host, for free, on its server.

The site, according to co-founder Tim Roberts, is designed primarily for companies with 20 or fewer employees. It’s not the first site that lets small businesses create free Web pages, but it’s the most ambitious and full-featured.

The site has its own Web site building tool that you can use online without having to install any special software. With those tools you can create a basic home page as well as additional Web pages that you can use for a product catalog, to sell goods or services, or to initiate two-way communication with site visitors. Bigstep.com also offers tools to help you market your site on Internet search engines and via an e-mail newsletter.

When you sign on to the site, you’re asked to fill out a simple questionnaire that includes what you want to call your site. One nice thing about Bigstep is that you can pretty much pick any name you want, followed by “.Bigstep.com.” The name “www.video.com” was grabbed three years ago, but a small company, Premier Images, was recently able to get “www.video.Bigstep.com.”

You can also use your own unique domain name if you have registered one or, if you already have your own site, you can build special pages at Bigstep.com and link to them from your site.

Setting up and editing a page in Bigstep.com is quite different than doing so with a typical Web page editor such as FrontPage, PageMill or HomePage. Rather than allow you to see the pages as you edit them, you build them one step at a time by going through the paces on its Web site. In some ways it’s easier, but in other ways it’s more difficult, because you don’t have nearly the control you do with a standard Web page editor and you can’t see the changes as you make them. Yet, there is something to be said for the way it operates. Any changes you make anywhere on your site are automatically carried over to any relevant page.

What I like most about Bigstep.com is that it makes it easier to set up special services that can otherwise be difficult and expensive to create and maintain. You can, for example, create and conduct a survey on your site or create an e-mail newsletter with a page at which users can subscribe and unsubscribe.

You can also set up your own sales catalog and, for a fee of $14.95 a month plus usage, set up your own credit card merchant account from within the Web page. Bigstep takes care of helping to calculate shipping costs and sales tax and offers fraud protection and other merchant services.

Unlike some free Web-hosting services, Bigstep does not put advertising on your pages. The only thing it does add is a small banner across the top of each page that says “Powered by Bigstep.com” and links back to its home page. The company’s privacy policy pledges to never “sell, trade, rent, or otherwise transmit for consideration any personally identifiable information about you or your business to any third party without first receiving your permission,” which strikes me as a pretty good policy.

Any time I see a company offering a free service I have to ask what’s in it for them.

Bigstep.com, according to Roberts, plans to make money selling sponsorships to companies that want to reach its small-business audience. It also plans to offer value-added services to its small-business customers, including marketing tools, ad buying and certification assistance with agencies such as Truste, which certifies privacy policies, and the Better Business Bureau.

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”