Competition on the Web

Web page publishers revel in logging as many visits to their sites as possible. Regardless of the questionable accuracy of Web page hit counts, a site consistently logging 10,000 dubious hits per week is clearly far more popular than one with 1,000 dubious hits per week. Even if the precise number is unknown, relative popularity is a valuable measure. Encouraging people to visit a site frequently is the Holy Grail of Web publishing.

Competition for viewers is enormous. Not only is the Web like a ten million-channel television, but the Web competes for viewers’ attention with all kinds of computergenerated information. That includes anything that appears onscreen as interactive multimedia. Users of entertainment programs, multimedia encyclopedias, and other colorful, engaging, and mouse finger-numbing actions are accustomed to high-quality presentations. Frequently, these programs sport first-rate graphics, animation, liveaction video, and synchronized sound. In contrast, the lowest common denominator Web page has little in the way of razzle-dazzle. Even with the help of recent advances in Dynamic HTML and style sheets, the layout of pictures and text is highly constrained compared with the kinds of desktop publishing documents you see all the time. Regardless of the quality of its content, a vanilla HTML document is flat. At best, interaction is limited to whatever navigation the author offers in the way of hypertext links or forms whose filled-in content magically disappears into the Web site’s server.

With so many ways to spice up Web sites and pages, you can count on competitors for your site’s visitors to do their darndest to make their sites more engaging than yours. Unless you are the sole purveyor of information that is in high demand, you continually must devise ways to keep your visitors coming back and entice new ones. If you design an intranet, your competition is the drive for improved productivity by the colleagues who use the internal Web sites for getting their jobs done. These are all excellent reasons why you should care about using one or more Web technologies to raise your pages above the noise. Let’s look at the major technologies you should know about.