E-services have significantly changed the way of doing business in recent years. However, the implementation of these services remains poor. There is a significant gap between supply and actual e-service usage. This is why we started a project to provide an environment that will encourage the use of e-services. We believe that merely providing e-services does not automatically translate into consumers using them. This paper shows the origins of our project and its current position. We discuss the decision of using semantic web technologies and their potential to improve e-services usage. In this paper, we will present an e-services platform. Ontologies and semantic web technologies are used heavily in the platform. They enable the platform to be used as a basis for intelligent components, such as an e-service proposing component.