Who is using the .co.uk domain? Professional and media adoption of the web

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Abstract

This paper reports on a survey of 221 web sites chosen at random from a subset of the .co.uk area of the Internet. A breakdown of the types of business represented shows that whilst computing companies continue to have a sizeable presence on the web, certain other types of business now also have a relatively large number of sites. The survey found many media-related businesses and professional-based companies and practices, reflecting the increasing use of Information Technology in these areas but also the increasing knowledge about the Internet that is needed or helpful in many types of job. The results are consistent with general business use of the web in the UK still being in an experimental phase of web site creation by those who can rather than by those who should.

Introduction

The World Wide Web is continuing to expand at a rapid rate, providing a huge source of information for users and a huge potential client base for businesses who have a web presence. A recent study estimated that there were about 800 million publicly indexable web pages, with about 83% of servers containing commercial content in February 1999 (Lawrence & Giles, 1999). With the relative newness of the web, it is to be expected that some types of businesses and commercial sectors would have made more use of it than others. Some surveys of business use of the Internet have been conducted, but these have tended to concentrate on commercial sector rather than business type. A problem with most has been the method of randomly selecting sites to survey (if a random selection was claimed). This has often been a selection method based upon search engine directory classifications, in a search engine such as Yahoo!. But web sites in the Yahoo! Directory structure, and to a lesser extent in other search engines, represent in a sense the elite of web pages. At most 16% of web pages are indexed in any search engine (Lawrence & Giles, 1999) and considerably less will be in the directory structure of any of them. Since search engine indexing is not random, but to a large degree under the control of the web site designer through manual registration and the use of HTML META tags, for example Laursen (1998), it is to be expected that samples from search engines are not representative, precluding an accurate assessment of the number of companies with web sites. The survey in this paper avoids this problem by finding web sites directly instead of through any kind of intermediary.

Business web sites can have a number of very different design goals and can be of vital importance or only of peripheral interest. An example of a web site that is key to a business is one that is the main entry port to an Internet-based store such as an online bookshop where books can be bought online with secure credit card payments. For most businesses their site will not be the principal entry port for customers, it is rather an extra place to promote their company and perhaps give details of its products and services, or online customer support. Electronic commerce is now a possibility even for small businesses through using third-party online merchants to process credit card orders at low cost. Costs have come down and flexibility has increased, but Nath, Akmanligil, Hjelm, Sakaguchi and Schultz (1998) have identified many other organisational barriers to this, primarily security concerns but also personnel issues and a lack of information, so the extent of e-commerce take-up may remain variable.

The surveys of Ng, Pan and Wilson (1998), which are taken from Yahoo! Directory companies, have shown an ‘increasing diversity of business sectors’ away from the early domination of computing. They also spotted a trend to increasing sophistication of web sites in terms of a rapid growth in multimedia content. It would be interesting to know, however, whether there are types of companies, not necessarily based upon standard classifications of industry sector, that are more likely to use the web than others. Moreover, are sections of business using it particularly successfully and are they using it differently? Angelides’ analysis of the use of the Internet for marketing (Angelides, 1997) concludes that it will not replace traditional advertising, but that there are certain types that are particularly suited, such as niche marketing. As a corollary to this, it is likely that some commercial activities may be particularly suited to the Internet and others not. Companies are likely to benefit from having a web presence if many potential customers are already online and there is an additional incentive such as one of the following:

  • Customers would have difficulty in finding them in other ways. An example of this is a record company with products appealing to students internationally (www.subpop.com).

  • Some customers would find it more convenient to deal with them online, one reason why some banks are offering online accounts and financial institutions are allowing online applications for products (www.egg.com).

  • There are efficiency savings from going online, perhaps through streamlined advertising or avoiding the need for a chain of staffed retail outlets (www.amazon.com).

  • The Internet can be used to showcase relevant products or skills (www.sitedesigner.com, www.mtv.com).

  • It would be embarrassing not to have a web site, given the industry sector of the company (www.netscape.com, computing companies).

Web sites can be a comparatively cheap marketing tool and so, although guidelines for assessing the viability of web development have been published (Lu & Yeung, 1998), it is to be expected that there will be many experiments and failures on the web. Callaghan and Pie (1998) pointed to the fact that less than 50% of sites in their survey (sampling method not stated) provide useful product information as an obvious widespread failing. The Ng et al. (1998) study found that a majority (56%) of sites surveyed had not noticed any effect on their turnover, supporting the hypothesis that many web sites are not commercially successful. It would clearly be highly desirable to know which factors can contribute to a successful business web site, successful in terms of aiding business goals. O’Keefe, O’Connor and Kung (1998) suggest that the degree of interactivity is a key aspect of success, with more static sites tending to be less effective (sample of known early users). They also point to the need to adapt to the new medium by learning new tasks as a key issue. A reason for many unsuccessful sites may simply be, however, that an Internet presence is not currently viable for the business concerned, no matter how well it is designed, because potential customers will not be looking for relevant products or services online.

Section snippets

The survey

For the survey a method was needed to choose websites at random from the collection of sites ending in .co.uk, the main UK commercial area. A search engine could not be used for this process because not all web sites are registered in search engines, and an analysis of search engine registration was to be part of the study. For this study, in order to capture successes with equal likelihood as failures, questionnaires were rejected because of the self-selection component. It was believed that

Results

Most of the 221 sites surveyed were company web sites: probably the main web presence of individual companies in each case. There were also web sites for groups of companies, for individual products or initiatives, and for other types of organisations.

In Table 1 it can be seen that over three-quarters of sites were the main web sites of businesses. This description covers web sites designed to promote a commercial organisation such as a company, group of companies, partnership, or

Types of activity

Table 4 shows a breakdown of the types of business captured in the survey. A different table was initially compiled using standard industrial classification scheme but this was found to be obscuring useful underlying information. Instead, the sites were subjectively placed into categories representing common factors: either the type of business or the area of commerce. This is, therefore, an analysis designed to explore the data rather than one aiming to arrive at scientifically valid

Conclusions

The web is still relatively young and dominated by small companies, and so it is to be expected that there will still be many mistakes being made. The number of malfunctioning sites in the survey suggests that many businesses are not making successful interventions for one reason or another. Indeed for many the Internet has little to offer: particularly if all of their potential customers will use other means of identifying and locating them. For others, it may be that inclusion in a database

Mike Thelwall is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing and IT at Wolverhampton University, specialising in Internet technology and applications to business. He currently moderates SMEforum, an industry and university sponsored discussion group for local small businesses seeking advice on Internet related problems.

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    Mike Thelwall is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing and IT at Wolverhampton University, specialising in Internet technology and applications to business. He currently moderates SMEforum, an industry and university sponsored discussion group for local small businesses seeking advice on Internet related problems.

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