Web Site Design and Setup - Holistic Business Web Sites

In the more mature e-commerce environment of the early 2000s, Web sites needed more than a pleasing look and convenient layout. As Web sites were positioned as integral aspects of firms' strategies, they were increasingly retooled to create a seamless overall network, integrating the Web site with the rest of the companies' information technology architectures. Thus, Web sites were increasingly built to work alongside company databases and systems designed to handle ordering, procurement, inventory management, payment processing, billing, customer relations, and intra-firm communications, among others. In this way, Web sites were beginning to reflect the broader promise of the World Wide Web and the Internet by creating value and harnessing the power of contemporary information technology to form more efficient business practices.

The last step in setting up a Web site is promotion. Depending on the size and stature of the business, site promotion can take many different forms. If a firm is well established, with several advertising means at its disposal, it can simply utilize its existing promotion channels to alert people to its Web site. Smaller and upstart firms need to establish links with sites already proven to draw traffic—particularly traffic from the firms' desired customer base—in the hopes of generating links to their new sites. Large and small businesses alike also invariably try to establish a presence on the major search engines, which often entails various applications or referrals. There were a range of search engine strategies, but the primary goal of any such strategy was to position a site to appear toward the top of user Internet searches.