The following information is provided by Jamie Hunt of Legal Clarity Ltd.

If you choose to form a company from which to operate your online business you will have greater maintenance and set-up costs than if you simply start trading as a ‘sole trader’. Sole traders do not usually have to register with any body other than the relevant tax authorities. However, there are key advantages of forming a company, as described below.

If you operate as a sole trader you will usually be liable for all debts and other liabilities of your business without limit. In other words, your personal assets as well as your business assets would be at risk. However, if you form a company (a limited liability company) you will in almost all circumstances benefit from limited liability. This usually means your personal liability will be limited to the amount you have agreed to invest in the share capital of the company. Companies also come with quite a degree of flexibility allowing for further investment by new shareholders and the recruitment of additional directors to bring management expertise to your venture.

Companies often have more status with the business community than sole traders/proprietors. Customers and suppliers often prefer to deal with an official company, rather than a more informal sole trader.

Forming a company is usually cheap and straightforward and can be undertaken entirely online. If your company is formed as a one shareholder, one director company then there is likely to be little else to do initially, although you will probably have a requirement to keep the relevant companies registry up to date and keep and file accounts annually. Forms to update the relevant registry are usually relatively simple, likely to be available online and the content you need to insert may not change much from year to year.

The country in which you operate may have specific rules regarding names. Two companies cannot share the same name so when forming a company you will need to search the relevant registry to ensure that your chosen name is available and that no one else is operating under the same or a similar name. Even if you choose to establish yourself as a sole trader you will want to choose the name for your business carefully and perform checks to ensure that no one else is operating under the same or a similar name (particularly for the goods or services you supply and in the geographical location you operate). Matching your chosen name with domain name availability is also obviously critical.

Whether you form a company or not, operating online means that you will probably want to prescribe terms and conditions that apply to people viewing your website, as well as the terms that will apply to an actual customer that goes on to buy the goods or services that you supply. Advice from local legal sources should be taken on these issues.

In summary, forming a company is a cheap and straightforward process and in most circumstances brings the advantage of limited liability over operating as a sole trader.

Jamie Hunt, Legal Clarity Ltd

The information provided in this article is intended as a general guide only. It is not exhaustive or tailored to your individual circumstances.

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This guest post is contributed by Barbara Williams, who writes on Becoming a Computer Technician. If you like her work, have comments or want to hire her, email her at: barbara.williams07@gmail.com

You have to hand it to the Internet – it has singlehandedly destroyed (or is in the process of destroying) all forms of paper-based communication, the kind we refer to now as snail mail. And now, Twitter seems to have taken the place of fan mail, what with many celebrities taking to tweeting to boost not just their online profile, but also to gain some free publicity as well.

Ashton Kutcher, John Mayer (he of the Jennifer Aniston tell-all fame), Kirstie Alley, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Tyra Banks, Cameron Diaz, Kelly Osbourne, and many others have taken to Twitter like a duck to water, and now they have hundreds of thousands of followers. But if you’re hoping for a personal tweet from them, then you may just have to depend a great deal on luck because with all the followers they have, celebs just don’t have the time or the motivation to reply to every tweet they receive. In short, to them, it’s similar to fan mail which they do acknowledge subtly, but which often gets a standardized reply.

The question most people are asking however is this – although there are many celebs on Twitter, how many of them send out tweets on their own? Or do they have assistants to take care of their tweeting needs? If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that 90 percent of celebrities use Twitter as a PR tool rather than as a social network which connects them to the masses. They promote themselves and their movies, and in a new and unprecedented move, they’re sensationalizing their own lives. We can now read the kind of news we earlier used to find in gossip rags and tabloids, direct from the Twitter feeds of celebrities who are apparently ready to kiss and tell.

Image courtesy Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing, click on the image to see source.

This is similar to celebrities selling the exclusive rights to their wedding and baby pictures to tabloids rather than be confronted with grainy shots taken by hidden cameras. Their new policy seems to be – if anyone is going to gain anything by exploiting me, it might as well be me. So we now have Twitter adding to the popularity (or notoriety, depending on how you look at it) of the stars, and making them seem like “one of us”. It’s basically a form of publicity for them, one that they can adopt without resorting to stunts or gaining negative reviews and criticism. And the best part is that it can be outsourced to their PR people, and no one is ever going to know the difference – the cloak of anonymity that the web provides is just what our celebs need to hide under even as they supposedly tweet about private lives.

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I’m a Latina – here, I said it. I was born in Romania, from Romanian parents, a Latin legacy that burns like a flame in my heart since the day I finally understood that poetry was first written by love…

I am, and I breathe passion, and I am blessed to have a soul to respond like a thunder. But before this… I was wearing a black shirt, I had a black heart. It feels good to have light now, but the past, well… sometimes the past, comes to haunt me. And I had to share this: we shall never forget what gave us roots, what thought us to be, what made us understand… We shall never forget that we once had a bleeding heart, and a black shirt. Thank God we can sometimes strip off the past.

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