NYC SBS Offers Little-Known Free Online Courses on Web Design to Small Business Owners

By Yehudit Garmaise

      After BoroPark24 told Mayor Bill de Blasio yesterday that many small businesses in Boro Park could use help with creating websites to stay competitive during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has increased customers' reliance on shopping online, the mayor responded enthusiastically.

    “I am going to take your point and run with it,” said the mayor, who has long been encouraging New Yorkers to support the stores in their neighborhoods. In fact, yesterday, Mayor de Blasio spoke at his press conference about the fun he had this week doing his holiday shopping in Brooklyn.

    Everyone wants to help local business owners, but many New Yorkers feel that shopping online, especially during a pandemic, is a hard habit to break. If local store owners all had websites, New Yorkers could both shop online and support their local businesses.

    “Small Business Services (SBS) is already [helping small business owners to build websites], but we should do more and go deeper into communities,” Mayor de Blasio told BoroPark24. 

    After the mayor said that SBS would reach out to BoroPark24 to see how to better help the small business owners of the neighborhood, a few hours later SBS's Director of Communications Julianne Cho, reached out to discuss everything New York City has to offer entrepreneurs “to start, operate, or grow their businesses." 

    Cho explained the SBS’s many resources, which are all online and all free of charge, could be quite helpful to Boro Park business owners who want to build websites, learn new skills, and increase their sales. 

    Before COVID-19, SBS had, throughout all five boroughs, physical spaces called Business Solutions Centers that advised business owners on many helpful topics. “Even before the pandemic, we saw at SBS that there was a need for businesses to offer e-commerce models,” said Cho who said that for a while, “Everyone had been seeing an increase in online shopping.”

    Once the pandemic hit, SBS wanted to provide the same services, but in a safe way, so the Business Solutions Centers’ services immediately “went virtual” and are now all available on nyc.gov/business. 

   Among the many helpful resources on the website are free business courses on designing websites, marketing, and using social media, and Google to increase sales. In addition to the free classes, business owners, also can reach one-on-one mentors though the SBS website, explained Cho, who added that nyc.gov/sbs, the official website for the NYC Department of Small Business Services, also offers many useful resources, including free virtual legal consultations. 

   SBS staffers personalize their advice to every business owner, who fills out intake forms, on the websites, that detail their businesses, their needs, their questions, and what kind of help they are looking for, Cho explained. “Staffers from the virtual Business Solutions Center then use the information on the personalized information forms throughout their conversations to best explain business owners' best strategies and options,” said Cho, who added that business owners should make sure to sign up at the websites to be one of the 240,000 small business in the city that receive emails with the latest information on what SBS has to offer. 

    Business owners who want to get help over the phone, can call the SBS’s hotline, which is: 1 (888) SBS-4-NYC.

   “In many different ways, the SBS wants to help small businesses to connect online and recover from this pandemic,” Cho explained.

Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.