World Wide Web Marketing

According to CERN, traffic on the WWWeb is more than doubling every year, and the majority of the increase recently has come from the creation of commercial sites. Jim Sterne's manual of advice is aimed at entrepreneurs, but it will be useful for non-commercial site construction, as well as for those hoping to be the next George Soros of the Internet.

His basic message is that Web sites should be very carefully designed, both in terms of content and navigational aids - otherwise people will not bother visiting them. He spells out the rules quite clearly. Put the readers of your pages first, let them interact, and give them the chance to provide feedback. He warns against the lure of flashy graphics. And he's very much in favour of well-designed navigational aids, although he delivers a lot of his advice in Marketing-Speak.


The text sometimes reads as if someone were addressing a sales convention in three and five word sentences ["Multimedia is good"] and at its worst, it descends into statements of the obvious, such as "magazines...must constantly provide fun, interesting or useful information, and activities to keep people coming back". There is very little technical advice: it is assumed that you will know how to implement the strategies he proposes.

The best parts of the book are his detailed analyses of Web sites. He doesn't shy away from criticising companies such as Hewlett-Packard and even Microsoft, and his highest praise is reserved for Sun Microsystems, whose site he proposes as a model for us all. There is also a good section on the design of questions to elicit useful information from users without boring or irritating them.

He also deals with companies which are grappling with the problem of what he calls the 'gift economy'. How do you sell things via an Internet culture in which users have come to expect things for free? The answer seems to be that you must be prepared to give people a sample of your product where possible, invite them to seek further information, give them all the directions they need - and make it easy for them to come back. That's the theory anyway. Now go to your HTML editor and get cracking!