Google’s free websites are great for the micro business out there who’s not online at all.

They’re going to hurt those digital firms who’ve built a consultancy around helping getting such SMEs online. Well, putting a positive spin on it, perhaps it’ll just put more fish in the digital pond and those newbies may get the tech for free but they’ll still need some advice. So perhaps it’s win-win there.

Regardless of the consultants’ living, anything that presses the reverse thrusters on the black hole of data that’s eking itself into Facebook is a good thing. Surely we want to keep the web as a web, not the web or Facebook’s version. Why so many brands are desperate to house themselves in this ecosystem is beyond me. Yes, they may increase the rate of ‘likes’ but, really, is it worth the wholehearted subjugation to FB to do so?

It’s neutering the offering. Its like selling your house and instead of creating a website or listing a dozen photos and descriptions with your local estate agents, you follow the (theoretical) trend of printing 100,000 flyers in A5. Handing those out on a busy high street means you’ve arguably touched more prospective buyers, but your quality, relevancy, flexibility and depth of content has plummeted.

If you’re a one-man-band-come-micro-business then by all means jump on Twitter and yes, get yourself a Facebook page. But get yourself a website too: it’ll be your hub, your touchstone for everything online. You own and control that completely. Your social media efforts can then compliment that – they DON’T replace it.

So if you’re starting from zero, get yourself over to Google’s free offering and you’ll be in the world of publishing your own content in no time.