Web Site Design and Setup - Site Layout, Page Layout, Markup Tools, Holistic Business Web Sites, Customer-centered Design

As many businesses found, to their dismay, in the early days of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, the design of a Web site can make or break a firm's attempts to establish a Web presence. Poor aesthetic design, weak technological backbones, inconsistent data integration, and illogical site organization and structure can discourage users and potential clients, causing them to give up on a site and take their business elsewhere. As competition for Web-based hegemony heated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, companies invested increasing time and money into the design and set-up of their Web sites—both the back-end architecture and the visual presentation of their information. The result was an ever-evolving Web of greater sophistication, enhanced aesthetic consideration, and more options for the average user.

In the early days of the Web, companies typically set up Web sites with little consideration to aesthetics or to efficient or user-friendly e-commerce architectures. Rather, the competitive pressures at the time spurred companies to simply get their sites out there to stake out a place on the Web. This process led to the phenomenon of the brochure site: a Web site that did little more than announce a firm's presence and explain their business, but with little capability of handling e-commerce orders, customer service, or sophisticated interaction. Sites such as these were often built with generic brochure-ware, software set up as a basic template into which companies could enter their own information.

As e-commerce intensified, however, it became increasingly apparent that such a cookie-cutter and half-hearted approach to the Web wouldn't suffice. Firms began looking to the Web as more than just a prerequisite of doing business; they saw in their Web sites the potential for generating new revenue streams and adding value to their offerings. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, Web site design and structure grew to reflect and propel larger business plans, integrating technical expertise and aesthetic design with sophisticated market research and broader company concerns, ranging from customer service and transaction issues to inventory management and procurement processes. Thus, corporate Web sites came to reflect the corporate culture and processes as a whole at the same time that the culture and processes were transformed to reflect the focus on Web-based e-commerce. In the process, Web sites were transformed from company-centered to customer-centered commercial outlets.