The Internet is rewiring the economy. Suddenly, geographic independence is possible for many new types of people and organizations. The money flow can be separated from the people flow. You can reach people directly, even if they're thousands of miles away.

All this places new demands on the organization. Most organizations are not prepared to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with 99.99% uptime. But that is the net - you get email on Saturday morning at 1 am, you respond, and you get a response back, all in 15 minutes. A satisfied visitor. If, on the other hand, you don't respond to email for three days, you have a frustrated visitor.

The Internet is not a mall. It's never ?done.? Anyone can publish whatever they want. You are suddenly competing with everyone in the world for attention. Some of the best material on the Internet is raw and unrefined. Some of the most polished material is exceptionally boring. Boring content does not generate an interested audience.

What is content?
Typically, a client's first words at a web site strategy meeting are: ?I want it to look like this.? The client's first drawing: ?Here's our organizational chart.? The client's first attempt at content: ?Here's what we offer for sale.?

None of this is content.

Web sites start and end with great content. Engaging prose, quality photographs, informative diagrams or illustrations, helpful checklists - even with great style and visual design, web sites will fail without good content. Often this is confusing for web publishers. They think they have content, when what they have is advertising. Advertising is not content.

What's the difference between advertising and content? Advertising is about knowing your customer. Content is about knowing yourself.

Chris Worth is an advertising writer in Paris with the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather. Here's what he has to say about content and advertising:

Advertising tells you how to buy tickets on the web. Content is a travel agent putting her travel diary on the web. Advertising tells you the benefits your family will get when you die. Content is a broker's story about rowing to someone's house to assess water damage. Advertising is a house campaign for an ad agency. Content is an art director showing you his etchings. Content tells me who you are. And, if I like you, I'll buy from you. But if you ever shove your logo in my face, I'll walk away.

Of course, after reading the travel diary you still need to know how to buy tickets. After seeing the broker's sub-aqua photos you still need to order the policy. But when those tickets and policies are available from a million places, how do you differentiate your offering? By wrapping your slivers of advertising in tasty rolls of compelling content. By being an interesting place to hang out. - http://www.chrisworth.com

To this we would add: Content is something you give away and people clamor for it. Advertising is something you pay to develop and people run away from it. When's the last time your organizational chart was compelling?

Who are we designing for?
The web can be simple and beautiful or complex and wild. The choice stems from a match between your company image and your customers emotions. Complex sites can load fast, and simple sites can be hard to use. This is the challenge of the web designer and builder.

You can break design rules if you know what you're doing. That doesn't mean that you can take your print layout from Quark XPress or Adobe PageMaker and output HTML code and call it a day. It means that if you know HTML like the back of your hand you can make it look like great print design. But when print designers first start designing web sites it is very difficult for them to make great web sites unless they give up everything they know about print and learn something about software engineering, the HTML markup language, and browser layout rendering engines.

Sync to the audience. Great web sites serve their audiences, not their creators. If you need something to stroke your ego an expensive new car might be a good way to go, but this is web site design - not a mid-life crisis. Figure out what your audience wants and give it to them. They want something for free, even if they buy your product or service later in your relationship. At the start, they ask, ?What's in it for me?? If you're not careful, they'll say, ?This web site is slow to download - I'm outta here.?

So if your audience is crazy snowboarders from New York, go nuts on the graphics - they'll eat it up. They'll log in at lunch from the 17th floor of the Chrysler Building over a really fast T1 line, and your site will rock and they'll leave work early and drive to Vermont for the weekend and stay in a condo and eat out every meal and end up spending $2,000 on impulse.

If your audience tends to log in from home in the evening on an old modem your flashy site will drive them mad and they won't ever consider you in the future. If, however, you know your audience then you can design appropriately and even over that slow modem your site will be great and they'll get what they need and they'll come back again and again. And in this way the design can earn their trust, instead of their frustration.

Website structure and information architecture
Great web sites require structure. Web site architecture and structure has nothing to do with great visual and graphic design. You have to build a foundation before you decide what color to paint the walls. You have to erect the steel before you can choose the carpet. Information architecture and usability engineering are the two domains of study and applications that affect web site structure. Large sites designed without structure end up as very pretty, hard-to-use affairs. Sites that have great structure repay their creators with return visitors and email compliments.

People ?live? inside web sites. It's not a one-off event like a brochure or an advertisement. A brochure is designed to guide your eye across the page, convey a message, and then get passed on, filed, or recycled. A good web site however, is a repeat experience. People return for another look. Visitors come back to find something new. Regular users use it as a launching pad for their Internet experience.

Even seemingly simple functions require thinking. The subtle manner in which your eye is guided across the page is the art of graphic design. The subtle manner in which one web site is more useful than another is the art of information architecture. A building is not built of facade alone. There's much more to the web than great visual design and color-corrected photographs. Web site functionality

At some point, you want more than a brochure. At some point you'll want your web site to do something. Receive and process some email, maybe, or calculate the cost of a loan, or recommend a book based on what other people bought. Perhaps you'd like the text of your commencement speech or your most recent sports scores to be automatically uploaded, formatted, approved, and put live on the web. At this point we call it software engineering, and you're not in Kansas anymore.

Eventually, you're going to want to link a database to your web site. Databases are what give you the capability to deliver personalize service, supply vast amounts of frequently changing information, or execute transactions like charging someone's credit card. This type of development isn't going to happen overnight or for free. If you want your web site to do anything other than sit there, you will be investing in technology and engineering resources.

Website maintenance
When you think about managing content on a web site, realize that maintenance on web sites is continuous. Determine your maintenance schedule prior to designing the site. Determine the skill set of the maintainors, accounting for learning time and disruption of their usual work. Determine the tool set they will use. Build or buy the appropriate tools. Confused? That's why your web site developer and hosting provider are critical team members in delivering your vision. You are not hiring someone to knock out a quick web site - you are choosing a partner that you will work with for several months or years.

One person can manage a large web site. It requires an investment in learning tools. It requires an investment in people. You know what a geek is, and now you're paying one to operate and maintain your web service. Welcome to a successful web site. Unsuccessful web sites don't require maintenance because nobody visits, and nobody has any suggestions or complaints, so nobody has to do any ongoing work.

Successful web sites are built with a formal structure that allows for a consistent look and easy ongoing maintenance. In order to do that, we need to have a process to define the structure, design and build the site, and integrate it into the organization.