• by Gavin O'Malley , March 10, 2005

Yahoo! Wednesday announced it was revamping its site for small business owners, Yahoo! Small Business, by adding editorial content addressing the legal, logistical, and marketing issues that establishing a business on the Web presents.

The content on offer is provided by Yahoo!'s in-house experts, a team of outside writers working with Yahoo! to develop and implement the site's editorial calendar, and a list of partners that include Inc. magazine, Entrepreneur.com, Fast Company, and Legalese-to-English translator Nolo.com.

Todd Townsend, Yahoo!'s vice president of sales and marketing, would not discuss the terms of the partnership agreements with content providers, or the likely premium that advertisers will have to pay for access to the concentration of small business dollars.

Greg Sterling, an analyst with The Kelsey Group, said the renovated site is an important step in providing a "comprehensive set of tools, information, and business solutions for the businesses it will attract."

"If the site is very successful, Yahoo! will definitely be able to monetize at a premium," said Sterling. "The greater the targeting, the greater the premium."

The Kelsey Group estimates that between 35 and 40 percent of small businesses in the United States now have Web sites, Sterling said, and that the number will exceed 50 percent in less than two years. "There's plenty of room for growth in this market, so Yahoo! should have no trouble selling its small business online services, such as hosting and e-commerce."

And, while Townsend does not deny the fact that Yahoo! would prefer small businesses to choose its services--domain name registration, site fabrication, and hosting--he insists that what is most important is the happiness of its members.

"We'd obviously like to be a key provider of services to the businesses coming to our site, but first, we have to give them a good reason to go there in the first place," Townsend said. "There are other resources out there--however, there's no other place to go for high-level theories, to best practices, to the nuts and bolts of running a business online."

Yahoo! also redesigned the site's layout, and added a search functionality.