Marketing on the World Wide Web

The media are filled with headlines about the World Wide Web. It is proclaimed as the most important phenomenon since the personal computer that will transform business.

Marketing on the World Wide Web is currently a grand experiment. The Web's potential has drawn tens of thousands of companies on-line.

The Web presents a couple of major opportunities for marketers. First, a large and growing number of individuals and businesses access the Web. Web users also represent an attractive target market, and individuals are beginning to buy products.

The business-to-business market opportunity appears to be even greater than the consumer one.

In fact, the World Wide Web is a well-known offspring of the Internet. It is a multimedia (text, sound, and graphics) subset of the Internet as a whole. After the Internet was first established, it spread to universities where scientists used it to exchange data and messages.

In 1989 a scientist at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, put forward a proposal to establish a single standard across all computer platforms that would allow users to easily view and exchange data. Sites that adopted this standard became part of the World Wide Web.

A Web site is a set of multimedia materials that computer users can access electronically.

A Web page is a single document at a Web site.

A link is a selection of highlighted text or an image on a page that, when the visitor clicks on it with a mouse, it gives the visitor access to another page. Virtually all Web pages contain links that connect visitors to different pages on the site and to interesting pages on other Web sites.

Browsers are programs that automatically read and display information from a Web site. They also allow a visitor to move from one Web page to another by pointing and clicking on a link to access a new page.

A search engine is a computer program that searches for information on the Web. Although the term "browser" evokes images of a leisurely stroll through a familiar library, in reality the Web is much too large and disorganized to make browsing an attractive way to find information. To solve this problem, several sites have sprung up that feature search engines (e.g. Yahoo). An individual visits one of these engines and types in a keyword or phrase. The engine then displays titles and brief descriptions of all Web sites that contain this word or phrase in its text.

Vocabulary