As a small business owner, it often feels like everyone is trying to sell you something. But sometimes, companies give stuff away.

That’s the case with the online resource offered by Hewlett Packard Small Business.

Granted, they hope you’ll eventually buy something when the need arises, but the information and services can be a boon to business owners—and all of it’s free.

Hewlett-Packard Small Business has a wealth of free tools, tutorials and templates on its site geared toward small business customers.

One of the main attractions of the site is the Business Templates area (not surprising for a printer company), which offers about 700 pre-built designs for Microsoft Office, CorelDRAW, QuarkXPress and more. Most interesting to small business owners is the collection of agency-quality graphic design templates from StockLayouts, where you’ll find great-looking brochures, letterhead, flyers and so on.

But templates are just part of the story. Beneath the Learn & Use banner is a link to free online classes in HP’s learning center. These have the feel of genuine online college or post-graduate courses — complete with lesson breakdowns and even recommended prerequisites — and are taught by well-qualified instructors. You need to register and enroll for a given course, but all are free of charge.

HP offers a few dozen courses in all, broken down into specific areas such as Software & Technology, Business Skills and In-house Marketing. Recent additions include an introduction to using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and understanding Microsoft Vista Business Edition.

You’ll want to bookmark the page and check back often, as HP conveniently flags which lessons are new or updated and shows which new courses are coming soon.

Small Business Computing