The Good, the Bad,. and the Insipid

The Good, the Bad, and the Insipid
EasyCom president offers tips for creating a Web site that wows
By Lynn G. Coleman|

From its humble beginnings as "electronic footnotes," the World Wide Web is now "attracting all the media to itself," according Ron Solberg, president of EasyCom Inc. in Downers Grove, Ill., the featured speaker at the IWPA’s Sept. 19 meeting, "Communications Issues for the Internet-Savvy Professional."

Music, TV, books, magazines, newspapers, and telephony all are converging on the Internet, he said, but all Web sites aren’t created equal. Poor sites are stagnant and read like the company’s annual report. Good sites engage and fascinate visitors so they’ll be sure to return for more. The best Web sites use (1) hyperlinks, (2) multimedia components, (3) interactive features, (4) pull marketing strategies, and (5) video.

Hyperlinks: Southwest Airlines’ Web site (www.iflyswa.com) has numerous hyperlinks to other sites. So does Crayola (www.crayola.com). Solberg says the latter is a "colorful, well-designed, creative site that runs contests for kids.

Multimedia: Some of the best multimedia sites include Map Blaster (www.esc3.net/mnt/blast), a travel site that enables visitors to create hyperlinks to their locations; Cyberhomes (www.cyberhomes.com), a real estate site that takes visitors on a multimedia tour of houses for sale; and iPrint (www.iPrint.com), a printer that enables visitors to create their own currency (using their own photographs).

Interactive: One of the best sites for travel planning is Travelocity (www.travelocity.com), says Solberg, but he also cited a college site that gives campus tours, a cityscape of St. Louis in which all the buildings are links, and the latest innovation in brokerage services—E-trade—as excellent interactive examples.

Marketing: Go to the state of Virginia’s site (www.virginia.org) and send someone a valentine. The message is a tie in with the state’s current marketing campaign, "Virginia is for Lovers." When you send the valentine, Virginia gets a plug, too. Solberg also cited Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) as a top-notch pull marketer. As part of its Associates Program, the bookseller will place ads on your Web site and pay you15% of the sales it generates.

Video: The first time a computer was used to view actual events as they happen was in 1989, says Solberg. Known as the Trojan Room Coffee Machine, it was the forerunner of AT&T’s live videolink during the Olympics’ Centennial Park bombing and the (perhaps) more shocking Peeping Tom Web site (www.csd.uu.se/~s96fst).

Solberg advises anyone seeking to become Internet-savvy to start with the search engines. Some of the most well-known sites—Yahoo, Webcrawler, Lycos, and Alta Vista—are not necessarily the best. To hit multiple search sites at once, check out Mamma (www.mamma.com), Dog Pile (www.dogpile.com), Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com), and Internet Sleuth (www.isleuth.com).

Yahoo has an electronic clipping service that everyone in the media can appreciate, Solberg says. First type in http://search.main.yahoo.com/search/news?p=, and then insert the topic you want to find after the equal sign. If you bookmark the results, it will update itself for the next visit.

Before designing your own Web site, it helps to see examples of good ones. Through its Point Review site (http://point.lycos.com/categories), Lycos rates sites based on presentation, experience, and content criteria. Finally, once you’ve designed the perfect site, you might want to visit The Postmaster (www.netcreations.com/postmaster), a service that distributes linking information about your new site to several hundred search and directory sites for a fee.

The Internet is "the future of communications," says Solberg. "We should use it, not abuse it."

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