Many organizations and individuals are increasingly establishing a presence on the Internet to distribute information and conduct business. Over 150,000 World Wide Web servers were active in 1995. With the deployment of more Web sites on the Internet and intranets, this number is estimated to be as high as two million by 1998. Although many Web sites are being deployed on the Internet each day, some Web sites fail to use the Web to its fullest potential. Before establishing a presence on the Internet, it's worthwhile to explore how you can use a Web site to your advantage by exploiting various characteristics of the World Wide Web.
Understanding the audience of a Web site is crucial to its success. Unlike traditional information distribution mediums, the audience of a Web site is quite different in terms of personal factors such as nationality, education, language, and geographical location, as well as technical factors such as software, Internet bandwidth, and capabilities of hardware and software the audience uses. When designing a Web site, you should take all these factors into consideration. The success of a Web site depends on understanding its audience and providing content to meet various information needs of users browsing the Web site. When developing contents of a Web site, you should also take into consideration technical expertise of users and software used to browse a Web site. No matter how interesting a Web site might look when viewed with the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, if most users use a different Web browser, they won't be able to appreciate various Netscape and Internet Explorer enhancements of a Web site.
The World Wide Web offers a number of advantages not found in traditional mediums of information distribution. These features enable content developers to use the Web for a variety of tasks. Understanding various advantages of using the World Wide Web enable you to make the best use of your Web site.
In order to use the World Wide Web to your advantage, you should explore various ways you can use the Web for business purposes. Setting up a Web site and adding a few HTML files to it is just the tip of the iceberg. The World Wide Web offers a medium to publish information that is both richly interactive and extensible via new and innovative applications. For example, in Chapter 31, "Setting Up a Web Conferencing System," you learn how to set up online discussion forums on the World Wide Web by using a CGI application called WebBoard. You will be able to use the World Wide Web to its maximum potential by using similar applications presented throughout the remainder of this book.
The Internet consists of a global audience of users. These users have different resources and technical capabilities. When designing a Web site, you should first determine its audience. Due to its global nature, it's not always easy to determine the audience of a Web site. However, the following list of factors will help you understand your audience better.
When designing Web content, by far the most important thing you should be concerned about is the bandwidth available to users when they access your Web site. No matter how well a Web site is put together, if it takes a few minutes for a page to load over a relatively slow modem link, that Web page is of little use to you or your users.
Depending on the kind of content published at a Web site, the operating system used by site users should also be taken into account. For example, when making files stored in common Windows formats such as .WRI (Windows Write) that are available to Internet users, you should think of Macintosh and UNIX users. Due to lack of helper applications, these users might be unable to view the contents of files stored in special file formats such as Windows Write.
Although there are estimated to be around 150 million Windows users, most of these users are still using a version of Windows 3.x. Therefore, when adding new technologies such as Java to a Web site, you should be aware that some users are unable to view Java applets. At the time of this writing, no Java-capable browsers were available for Windows 3.x. In addition to that, Windows 3.x versions of Internet Explorer are usually not as feature rich as Windows NT and Windows 95 versions of Internet Explorer.
The browser software used by Web site visitors is an important factor that you should take into account when developing content for a Web site. A Web site that looks attractive when viewed with the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer can look less than appealing when viewed with a technologically challenged Web browser. Therefore, it's important to keep an eye on various Web browsers used to access your Web site. You can do this by examining the Web server's access log file as shown in Chapter 24, "Utility Applications for Your Server." You need to make sure that content at your Web site is still legible when viewed with a less advanced Web browser.
You should also be aware of the technical sophistication of your audience when developing content for your Web site. For example, if most users browsing your Web site barely know how to type in a URL to their Web browser, you should not expect them to know how to download a helper application and install it into their Web browser so they will be able see various text at your Web site rotate in different colors.
Information needs of users greatly differ from one user to the other. For example, the information needs of a user browsing Coca Cola's Web site (http://www.cocacola.com/) differ greatly from those of someone browsing CNN's Web site (http://www.cnn.com/). A person browsing CNN's Web site is interested in accurate, up-to-date news. On the other hand, a person browsing Coca Cola's Web site is probably browsing it for entertainment purposes.
There are many advantages of using the World Wide Web to distribute information. The following sections list some of these advantages.
Content published on the World Wide Web is immediately available to a global audience of users. This makes the World Wide Web a very cost-effective medium to publish information to a large audience at a very low cost.
When information is added to a Web site, it's immediately available for browsing by millions of Internet users. The World Wide Web is an ideal medium of information distribution because it takes away the time lag associated with publishing content and actually making it available to users.
It is relatively inexpensive to publish information on the Internet. At a fraction of the cost to publish information by traditional methods, various organizations and individuals can now distribute information to millions of users. It costs only a few thousand dollars to establish an Internet presence and publish content on the Internet.
Internet information systems deployed on the Internet with Windows NT can be easily integrated with internal information systems managed with office productivity applications such as Microsoft Office. Because Windows is the native operating system for most productivity applications, internal information repositories can easily be made available for browsing through a Windows NT Web server. There are estimated to be over 10 million office and productivity application users. Virtually all major application and office software vendors have made plans to make their applications more Internet aware. For example, using Internet Assistant for Microsoft Word, it's possible to publish MS Word documents on the World Wide Web in HTML. These documents can then be viewed by Internet users through Web browsers.
A new breed of Internet-aware applications will start emerging in software stores by the time you read this. These applications will enable users to develop content for the World Wide Web in an environment they are familiar with and publish it to the World Wide Web by simply saving the content as an HTML file. In addition to software developers making existing applications Internet aware, various new, powerful, and easy-to-use Internet content publishing applications are also being developed. These applications will make the task of publishing content on the Internet even easier. Most of these applications are developed for Windows users. Because you will be using Windows NT, you will be able to take advantage of these applications when developing content for your Web site.
The capability to incorporate multimedia into Web pages is a major advantage of using the World Wide Web to publish information. For example, many Web sites use sounds and video clips to make the content easier and more interesting to browse.
Content published on the World Wide Web can be richly formatted by using various HTML tags and graphic formats. The capability to do this is a major reason for the success of the World Wide Web. In addition to using HTML tags and various multimedia formats in Web pages, various interactive controls can also be added to a Web page. This capability allows Web site content developers to create "active" Web sites. For example, before a user sends some information to a Web server for processing, a VBScript or JavaScript subroutine can be used to verify information typed in by the user. Various formatting capabilities, along with technologies such as Java and VBScript, make the World Wide Web a richly interactive medium that you can use to distribute information to millions of users.
Various new technologies have been created to provide Internet content developers more control over the content they publish on the Internet. These technologies include new programming languages such as VBScript, Java, and JavaScript, as well as various additions to standard HTML 2.0 such as tables and frames. Web site content developers can make use of these new technologies to develop informative Web sites that are easy to navigate.
According to Microsoft, there are approximately three million Visual Basic developers. These developers will be able to immediately make use of various Microsoft technologies such as ActiveX and VBScript and create applications for the Internet. Most of these developers will be able to leverage their skills to the Internet by exploiting capabilities of VBScript and other Internet application development languages such as Java. Many software developers are increasingly embracing the Internet and developing applications for it. Various applications developed by these developers will make the Internet an even more powerful medium of information distribution.
You can use the World Wide Web for a number of business applications. Although many organizations have set up Web sites on the Internet, they fail to use the Internet to its maximum potential. The following sections list a few business applications for which you can use the World Wide Web.
You can use the World Wide Web to advertise various products. Before purchasing a product, customers will be able to look up various product specification sheets and find out additional information. You can use the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web to make available not only various product specification sheets but also audio files, images, and even video clips of products in action.
The World Wide Web is a very effective medium for distributing product catalogs. In the old days, putting together a product catalog used to be very costly in terms of time and money needed to publish and distribute it. The World Wide Web changes all this by allowing content developers to put together a sales catalog and make it available to millions of users immediately. Furthermore, unlike printed product catalogs that are usually updated around once a month, product catalogs on the World Wide Web can be updated as needed to respond to various changing market conditions.
Traditional methods of performing surveys are often relatively slow and expensive compared to online surveys conducted on the Internet. For example, in order to find out various needs of customers or what they would like to see in a future product, it's often necessary to compile a list of addresses and mail a questionnaire to many customers. The success of such an attempt is not always guaranteed and can be very costly in terms of mailing the questionnaires and entering responses to a database and analyzing it. On the other hand, you can use the World Wide Web to automate the whole process. For example, you can set up a CGI script to conduct online surveys. Results of such a survey can be automatically updated to a database. This database can then be used to keep a pulse on various opinions and needs of customers. Publishing databases on the World Wide Web is covered in Chapter 18, "Publishing Databases on the Web."
With the World Wide Web, you can distribute various announcements to millions of users in a timely manner. Because there is virtually no time lag from the time it takes to publish information to making the information available to users, the Web is an ideal medium to publicize announcements. As more people discover the virtues of the Web and get connected to the Internet, the Web will become the medium of choice for many organizations and individuals to publicize various announcements.
You can also use a Web site to provide technical support to users. Because Web pages can be updated immediately with new information, various technical support literature can be immediately modified in light of new findings and developments. This can be accomplished without having to distribute changes to all users affected by any changes using traditional mediums of information distribution, which are often quite costly compared to the World Wide Web.
By using applications such as WebBoard, it's possible to set up online discussion forums on the Web. You will learn how to set up WebBoard at your Web site in Chapter 31, "Setting Up a Web Conferencing System."
The interactive nature of the World Wide Web is ideal for obtaining customer feedback. You can easily set up a CGI script to obtain customer feedback about a product or service. Because customer feedback submitted by customers can be read immediately, it's possible to respond to various customer concerns in a timely manner, increasing customer satisfaction and quality of customer service.
Before setting up a Web site, it's important to understand how to use the Internet to your advantage. You can accomplish this by exploring how you can use the World Wide Web for various business applications. The tips and ideas presented in earlier sections will help you make the best use of your Web site to effectively distribute information on the Internet.
The next chapter will help you determine and fulfill various requirements related to setting up a Web site on the Internet. The chapter begins with an introduction to various Internet connection types outlining their capabilities and drawbacks. Depending on your needs, budget, and various Internet links available in your area, you will be able to select an Internet link that best suits your needs after learning about the different Internet connection types. Due to budget limitations, if you can't afford a high-speed Internet link, you will be shown how to utilize a secondary Web server to get the maximum use out of a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) link. You're introduced to the various Internet connection types, their suitability, and other issues related to choosing the right Internet connection to meet your needs. Hardware requirements for setting up an Internet server with Windows NT will also be covered. After discussing various hardware options, the chapter concludes with an overview of the software needed to set up a Windows NT-based site.