It wouldn’t be a website without at least one made up word. Webvolution is a little exploration of the evolution of the web and may help you figure out where your organization is within that framework.
The web is both new and old. It is very new when we remember that it is a little over a decade old. Yet it is old when you consider that most of us have a hard time remembering when it came into our lives. In many ways, the web has impacted our lives in deeply profound ways.
Take away my phone, my fax, my TV and radio, my magazines and newspapers, my car… just leave me my connection to the web. So powerful is this medium that it can replace almost everything else in our lives. So pervasive and powerful, we can’t imagine how we ever functioned without it. It has changed everyday life for individuals and businesses, and this is just the beginning.
In the beginning, there was the Internet
Government and research focused, the Internet goes back to the days of the Cold War, yet most never even knew it existed. Essentially a textual-based means of exchanging information and collaboration of research.
Then there was the web.
And with that, everything changed. Suddenly commercial application sprung to life and the tools, such as HTML and browsers, which had been part of the Internet began evolving, barely able to keep up with the demands of developers and users. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a web graphic must be worth a million websites.
Do we need a website? At this point, large corporations, especially within the technology sector, benefited from creating websites. Many other organizations were probably fine without.
And the web spread.
Even before Y2K came and went, the web became an integral part of nearly everyone’s life. And post-2000, the growth, demand, and innovation of everything web-related continues to increase in leaps and bounds. What does the future hold… it may be easier to imagine what the web won’t impact than the alternative.
Do we need a website? Now the answer is yes, without qualifier… social organization, non-profit group, research group, independent professional, small business, or multi-national corporate entity. The challenge now is to determine scope and extent: single page, 4 to 5 key content pages, medium sized site to large multi-sites, standard website, intranet, or extranet.
And where are you?
While not the only path, below is a fairly common one for you to get a feel for where you are at:
- Starting at zero.
- We registered a name, but nothing more.
- We have a site… we took existing literature and had someone put it on the web.
- We realized that the print medium is very different than the web, so we’ve built our first real site.
- Static content worked well, but now we have information that is more time sensitive or visitor specific, so we are moving to a dynamic content site.
- We realized the power of information access and sharing that the web has offered could be just as valuable within our organization, so we’ve added an intranet.
- Timely access to critical information has become just as important to our clients, customers, and outside staff, so we’ve added an extranet.
- Hard to believe we once asked the question “Do we need a website?” Now we have more than one, each capable of standing on its own, but also working together as a complete unit, maintaining our overall identity and image.
Wherever you are with your own webvolution, let Identity Developments help you maximize your position or help you move to the next level.