BT to help SMBs build online presence

BT Group PLC is testing an online service to help small and medium-size businesses build an online presence with nifty features such as blogs, podcasts and click-to-call capabilities.

The service, called BT Tradespace, is free during its beta period. It is aimed at businesses with little or no technical knowledge.

Customers use templates to build Web pages for their company, which are listed by business category on the Tradespace Web site. The service also includes tools for creating a blog, podcasts and other features to attract visitors.

Eventually, BT will establish "community channels" for certain types of business, where visitors to the site can share content they find interesting. If a person likes a particular podcast, for example, they can alert other people in their community group to it.

Visitors can have the contact information for a merchant sent to their mobile phone or email account, and click to see a map with the location of the business. Tradespace also enables free calls to a merchant from a mobile or landline phone using a "click-to-call" button on the merchant's site.

Information about how much the service will cost and when it will be rolled out commercially was not available.

Malcolm Pankhurst, the director of Backchairs Direct Ltd. in Sevenoaks, England, registered on Tradespace on Tuesday night. He already has a Web site but was looking for a way to make his ergonomic chair business more visible.

"It's generally easy for people to find me, but I think more and more people are attaching themselves to specific communities," Pankhurst said.

Tradespace has full-featured tools to build a site, said Mark Rowatt Anderson, a product development consultant based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

"It makes it really easy for people to set up blogs and social networks for businesses that aren't used to that," said Anderson, who also created a page on Tuesday night.