hi there;
i got a call from "tourist information" today, who are giving out 'website grants' for small businesses. They basically pay for your website to be built etc and all you pay is web hosting fee (£5-8 per week). They also can create an e-commerce facility so that you can sell products online.
They gave me a website to look at HERE and another one, that i forgot the address of.
Has anyone heard of this?! Ive never heard of any grants for websites, and it doesnt look goverment funded either. There's bound to be a catch somewhere surely.

Thanks
Lou

There is a catch hun,
it costs up to £32 per month which is £384 per year, id call that a lot of money

my mistake, i have just been and checked out the costs, it comes to £547.51 per year which in my eyes is definitely a lot of money each year

oh yes, i didnt work out the maths! duh brain. I'll cancel it! my friend designs websites for a lot less.

Glad i saved you some money hun,
Ruth mills does some cracking sites at a fraction of that cost if that's any help

I had a call from them too (I am based in Hereford). I am not interested at all x

hey where do you work!?

In Hereford Town Centre. What about you?

I own The Boutique in Union St! Small world

Quite right - that is a shed load of money for a simple web site! It's only slightly more than what I pay for my business grade broadband! I'd expect the moon on a stick for that amount of money (or at least a fully featured salon management system where your clients can book online) - not a basic web site of 3 or 4 pages!

Hmm I have had another look on their page too - apparently they want you to sign up for a 5 year contract - although you can give them 6 months notice to cancel after 18 months - although after 2 years you would have ended up paying them £931.92 - which is several times more than either myself or Seanny would charge for a web site!

On their jobs page, the starting salary for a web designer is just 13K too, and that is assuming prior knowledge of HTML and CSS (with Javascript and Flash being advantageous).

Whereas if you want a job in management and sales with them, you can have a nice fat 45K.

So it would appear that this is all run by a private company (Tourist Information Centres Ltd) who do not appear to be affiliated with The official website for English tourism : Enjoy England - and I'm guessing that the "grants" are just a euphemistic way of saying that there are no up front charges for what will end up being a rather expensive way of running a web site in the long term; £38.83 per month does seem very expensive for hosting, especially when compared with the likes of Freewebs, 1and1, 123-reg etc.