Pictures In Motion

Do You Really Need a Website?

A recent Harris Poll reported that fully 2/3 of all adults use the Internet with most spending an average of 7- 8 hours a week online. According other surveys, this usage has been instrumental in helping small businesses to operate, while also contributing to their individual success. According to a recent poll conducted by American Express, 66 percent of small business owners/managers with less than 100 employees revealed that they have integrated the Internet as a tool to help them run their businesses.

According to Dun & Bradstreet's 20th Annual Small Business Survey, which measures attitudes, behaviors and trends in the U.S. small business market, two-thirds of all small businesses and approximately 85 percent of small business computer owners report having Internet access, and more than half of those now have a web site. Among those companies that currently access the Internet, 60 percent say they increased their use of the Internet in 2001.

The Medium is the Message

Just as you wouldn't use the same format or language to write a business letter that you would use to e-mail a friend, nor should you feel that you can just reuse material from other marketing efforts like brochures or pamphlets on your website. Brevity, font style, effective use of links are just some ways that will help to get your message across in the medium of the Internet. Don't let old ways of communicating stand between you and your audience. We are all being affected by media - the Internet in particular. The Internet is an interactive medium - so allow an avenue for interaction when designing your website.

Almost forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan wrote Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He understood the impact that technology would have on the planet in terms of communicating and bringing us closer together and coined the phrase "the medium is the message.". As McLuhan wrote in 1964:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.