I just created a new version of my business website, and it cost me nothing but time; and I don’t even have to pay a monthly fees. How did I do it? … Google. Heres a quick tour

1. The site itself (www.solutions4tech.com) is written  with Blogger. While blogger’s primary purpose is to blog (thus the name) its pretty flexible, and with some settings changes, it becomes a decent platform for a small  (less than 10 pages) website. You can tweak colors,layouts, and backgrounds. Even with your own domain the Blogger is still free.
2. My response form. I built this with the forms option in Google Docs. Each Submission writes to a spreadsheet that is also on Google Docs. There are a number of themes, so all I had to to was add the fields, and select a theme.  To publish it, I used the share option, chose to embed it, and pasted the html into my site.
3. The terms and conditions are hosted on Google Docs, its just a shared document. The reader even has the option of exporting to various formats like a PDF or Word  if she likes.
4. The Slide show is also also built with Google Docs. After I created it, I used the handy share option to embed it on my site just like the response form.
5. Behind the scenes, my email is through Google Apps Standard Edition. (Its free too!!)

Google isn’t the only company on the block that offers a suite of offerings for free that you can use to present and run your business. Check out Zoho, and Microsoft Office Live as well. The web is ripe with opportunities for you to put your best foot forward while spending  practically nothing. (You do have to pay for domain registration no matter who you use though.)

There are two major free Office Suite Zoho Office (zoho.com) and Google Documents (docs.google.com) that I am aware of.  Both are competent suites but they have limited functionality. Google Documents includes a word Processor, spreadsheet and presentation application.  Zoho has the same as well as a number of other applications including an organizer, invoices, and CRM. The office applications are free but some of their other applications are subscription based.

Having worked extensively with the Google Applications, my general feeling is that it is good for basic word processing and spreadsheets, but if you are interested in slightly more sophisticated formatting, you will be disappointed.   Google Does not allow you to create columns, and embedded table formatting is quite limited. 

I’ve looked at Zoho as well, and tried some basic formatting on it as well and came to the same conclusion. While the tables have more formatting options, it also doesn’t support columns. Overall, I think that Zoho has better features than google, and its worth a look.

While I don’t do the most sophisticated formatting on my documents, I do like to have a certain level of features,  and I don’t feel that either of these free suites will suite meet my needs. If you choose to use them for your primary office application make sure that they will do what you need before you throw away your PC based software. I think I’ll stick with OpenOffice for now.

If you know of any other suites, please feel free to let me know in the comments.