In a much-needed effort to bolster the Czech Republic's online exposure to foreign business people and tourists, the Foreign Affairs Ministry is launching a comprehensive interactive portal at www.czech.cz July 13.

"I am really quite excited about it," said Martin Howlings, director of expats.cz, an English-language portal providing information about the Czech Republic. "We definitely need something like this."

The Web site, which will initially be in Czech, English and German, with Spanish, French and Russian versions to follow, will offer extensive information about the country's business environment, legal infrastructure, history and culture. It will have permanent content refreshed every three months and a current events section updated daily.

"These pages are intended for foreigners interested in the Czech Republic, including tourists, students and business people," said Marek Tupý of the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

The ministry would only provide basic information about the site for this story because it hadn't been launched by press time. The company that won the tender to build the 1,200-page portal, online marketing firm Advertures, said the government allocated more than 30 million Kč ($1.4 million) to create what is effectively intended to be the country's business card.

Up to now, the government has done a poor job using the Internet to present the country abroad, according to information technology experts. The primary ramification of this is that foreigners, including investors and business people, have a very difficult time finding accurate information about the Czech Republic.

To give a little perspective on how the country stacks up in terms of e-governance, it ranked 32nd in the World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology Report 2005–06, which evaluated 115 countries based on how much emphasis their governments place on IT development. This ranking is up from 40th place a year before, but still puts the Czech Republic behind many countries in Western Europe and, in this region, behind Estonia.

"The Czech Republic is badly represented by government bodies," Howlings said. "There are lots of different online facilities, but they don't give the best impression of the country."

Several Web sites designed to perform the role, such as www.domavcr.cz, contain incomplete information and are written in broken English. Moreover, much of the information the government provides online isn't up to date.

"There are some Web sites that seem good when you open them, but they only seem good for the first five minutes," Howlings said.

"The terrible thing is that people think it is up to date and in reality it is outdated."

This, for example, can be a major problem for foreign investors looking for current, accurate information about the country's business environment.

Questionable track record

The new portal will be updated by an editorial team of three people, according to Josef Novák, editor-in-chief of the group assigned this task at Advertures.

Novák said it will provide information about major current events but will not compete with existing news portals such as idnes.cz and aktualne.cz.

"This is an information and presentation portal," he said. "We don't want to compete with news sites."

While hopes are high that the portal will fill a critical information gap, IT experts are skeptical the government will pull it off.

"I hope this will turn out good and will not be a disgrace," said Jan Starčevič, executive director of NetGroup, a Web-hosting company. "In most cases, Web sites like this emerge based on some donation as an ambitious project but nothing comes out of it in the end."

Indeed, one of the government's latest attempt to sponsor a Web site targeted at informing foreigners cannot be described as a success.

The portal domavcr.cz, created and operated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), was launched in 2004 thanks to a grant from the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry to help integrate immigrants into Czech society.

The Web site, which boasts the ministry's logo and an ambitious slogan in bad English: "helping foreigners to find here a second home," contains out-of-date information concerning key issues related to visas, residency and work permits and is written in poor English and Russian.

Marie Říhová, a project manager at IOM, said the organization ran out of money to continue supporting the site.

When questioned about why the English version of the portal provides erroneous information about residency permits, Říhová said the Russian and Ukrainian versions are given priority over the English one.

"Foreigners from Eastern Europe have a harder time integrating in the Czech Republic due to cultural differences," she said.