Microsoft Bcentral Launches Easy Web Site Creation And Hosting Service For Small Businesses - Company Business and Marketing - Brief Article

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Feb 14, 2000

To make it easier for small businesses to establish a Web presence, Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Microsoft bCentral Site Manager, an innovative service that gives small- business owners everything they need to build, host and maintain a successful Web site and to sell products via the Internet. The service will be offered through bCentral (http://www.bcentral.com/), the Web-based small-business portal that Microsoft launched in September. Site Manager is a core component of the comprehensive suite of services from bCentral, created specifically to help small and growing businesses leverage the Internet. The offering is the latest in a series of online services, dubbed "megaservices," that Microsoft is delivering for businesses of all sizes.

"Taking a business online can be intimidating for small businesses, but it can also present amazing opportunities to find new customers worldwide," says Deborah Whitman, director of marketing for bCentral. "Site Manager makes it easy for small businesses to seize this opportunity by providing them with simple templates to build their sites. A business can be up and running on the Web in literally minutes."

Site Manager helps small-business owners build their own Web sites by providing straightforward templates, layouts and design guides. Aside from automatically hosting the site, Site Manager offers merchants a number of features at no additional charge to get their sites up and running. For example, Site Manager provides the built-up capability of a "shopping cart," making it easy for customers visiting small-business Web sites to make online purchases. The shopping cart feature simplifies complicated transactions by calculating totals, taxes and shipping charges. In addition, as an optional service, Microsoft and Cardservice International Inc. have teamed up to enable real- time credit card processing for merchants' Web sites.