July has passed and we've only just managed to write this entry. Again, busy busy busy to the point that we've had to turn some work away. Nevertheless, we want to present a piece of wisdom for the month of July. So the topic of choice this month is FREE WEB SITES.

At the moment, there is a brand new 'Get British Business Online' scheme available for businesses to sign up to. The tagline: 20 minutes that will transform your company. Get a website from Google. For free.' There are also free hosting sites that feature a website builder that lets you build a site in minutes. Google sites, Webs, Wix.com and 110mb are but a few out there.

The beauty of these is the speed with which sites are built and the relative cost. One employee can spend an afternoon putting something together, and a few man hours later you have a functioning website.

Tread carefully! Your image on the web is being presented globally, so a site that looks very similar to another one does not reinforce your unique image or the validity of your USP. There is often a fairly limited set of available templates. Having a Web banner at the top of every page doesn't look professional. Flash is not yet searchable or iPad compatible. And to top it all off, when the scheme runs out and you have to pay to maintain a non-ads site, and want to move to a new provider all the money and time saved will be spent on the hassle of migrating the site or just doing a proper job.

Our advice – spend a little and get something decent done by someone who knows what they are doing. Website building is a 3 stage process - PLANNING, MAKING, PROMOTING. Often these free providers will do a superficial job on the first 2 (or all 3 if you're lucky) and will leave you with a few lines of code that less than represent the strong brand you wanted to bolster by building the site in the first place.

And if in doubt – start a blog. The free and paid blog facilities out there are much better alternatives to the free site builders. They enable you to establish a voice within your specialism and guarantee that when your major site is ready, you will have a following ready to promote it for you. You will also have lots of lovely content to populate your pages with.