Use demographic terms to segment it. The audience for the website may or may not be the same as the market for the product. If you visit AdKnowledge's site, you can look closely at the Market Match demo. This is proprietary software that you would use if you were one of their clients. But you can read it well enough to apply it to the market segmentation part of your own project.

Examples: If the Angel Guidance is primarily a gift, the audience for the Website is the giftgivers. The Website needs to be designed for them as carefully as the Angel Board is designed for its audience of gameplayers.

Green Wallets, however, has no atom-based product to sell. Is it going to preach to the choir or to the sinners? If the latter, is it the executive making the decisions or the union guy with his hands on the valves? This fundamental decision will affect every other decision you make.

Allbrite Cleaning is going to have some interesting challenges here because it's a service and it's local. Is it better as a sales site, a market research site, a lead-generation site, or a customer service site? Is it for new customers or old customers? Will its effectiveness be measured by new business or by repeat business? How will it integrate with voice and video?

Here's how to read that. "In March 1998, 7.6% of Americans who surfed the Web visited amazon.com at least once." Amazon's 1997 revenue in excess of a billion dollars roughly corroborates that.

Source   Media Metrix. (Click on "top new media results" on top nav bar.) While you're there, you might want to read their counting methodology --  adviews vs pageviews -- and their positive view of cookies. Science magazine also has a positive view of cookies in their policy statement,

Sell as well as build and maintain marketing relationships by facilitating customer communities. Microsoft does it with their developers' network (access to specialized information and news). Amazon.com does it with on-line book clubs (chat rooms).

The bandwagon

It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As overall online usage increases, the site becomes a more effective marketing, advertising, and public relations connection to current and potential customers and suppliers.

It's also chicken and egg. Until you all had access, a paperless course wouldn't have been fair. But then, until it is paperless, why bother to get access?

Economies of scale

If the product can't be digitized, the information about it can. Since you need only one copy on a server, you can provide immediate, 24-hour access to a limitless but user-friendly hypertext of specs and catalogs and advice and resources. Done well, this form of publication will lower administrative costs, publication and distribution costs, fax usage and long-distance phone calls, etc. To the extent that it is interactive and timely, it may well increase employment.

Trade-offs

Those three needs drove me: be a better teacher (customer service), stay current in my field (the bandwagon), be a more effective employee (economies of scale). The first restraint I encountered was no stranger. It's well-expressed on countless office plaques. It applies to web development. Choose any two:

I felt as though I had to choose the first, so it really came down to a balance of the other two: making the full contents immediately accessible on the first page you see or including as many potentially helpful resources as possible.

I clearly chose the lots of content option. The next step will be choose the access option for a while. At the moment, I can see two ways to break this course web into four smaller webs:

marketing, digital culture, digital development, technology

marketing, information design, visual literacy, hypertext

How much content will you provide on-site and how much in off-site links? What balance will you design for visual and verbal information? For example, Green Wallets may have documents on it that are long wordy scrolls like the page you're reading now. Straight Shooter shouldn't go more than a screen's length without some graphic element and not more than two without an image.

Think ahead to how you will measure the effectiveness of the content. I have your learning to help me improve the site. The course is, in a sense, its own usability study.

What brings people back to web sites? Think interactivity. That's what the Web is best at. That's what distinguishes new media from traditional media. Here's that I try to do when I work on this course web.

Sorry, your browser doesn't suppor Java.

For $20, Fabio will send me the magic number to insert into my page's .htm file. Then any of the applets will run in the little theater to the left.

But should they?

Most webs that include movement and sound don't use it well. It's a gimmick. It's for show-offs. As the medium matures, we'll develop a vocabulary to read and write active pages and parts of pages like Fabio's. Until then, you're pretty much free to experiment and apply your aesthetic judgment.

To understand something like Fabio's hue rotator or lake effect, separate an object from its attributes and its behaviors. The object is the image. Its attributes include its size (100 X 175 pixels) and its colors (hue, brightness, saturation). Add a third idea: its behavior. We aren't used to inanimate objects behaving, but this one does -- according to a prearranged script.

My Italian friend Fabio Ciucci wrote the behavior applet in a programming language called Java. He saved it as a class file, for example, huerot.class. I can set the parameters, such as the speed of the rotation. This behavior is independent from the object. In fact, it can be applied to any object. Check out all three jargon words at whatis.com.

If you want to see some other special effects, a site out in California will let you type in the URL of any image then select from a variety of special effects. For starters, type in toLearn.net/marketing/demog.htm.

In whatever medium, marketing must be a consistent, repetitive, and sustained campaign with unambiguous goals and measurable objectives. With new media, you have opportunities for market research that it would be wasteful to neglect.

In Webonomics (1997), Evan Schwartz notes that only a quarter of the consumer brand web sites at the time had been produced by ad agencies. Check out what some of the top firms offer, both for a high price and as free info on their sites. How much of this can you think through for yourself?

As you can see, many of the traditional media rules apply or can adapt. Announce your site to the traditional media via press release. Put your url on print ads and physical objects such as mugs and mouse pads. Use contests, coupons, givaways. The closest match in traditional media is special events marketing. Here are some other techniques that are common as of Spring 1998. Note them on other sites and consider them for your campaign. I'm listing them according to my best judgment of decreasing effectiveness. Some would take far more of you time than others. The terms in the middle column are the ones you want to search for.

search engines

You'll find instructions on each site and at other places on the Web

metasites

directories, announcement services, classified ad sites

When was the last time you used one? So many, so little time.

Links

trade with other sites

join a cyber mall or web ring or start one

sponsor a not-for-profit's site

apply to award sites

promote yourself via newsgroups, mailing lists, and sigs

host discussions on chat sites

targeted email service

banner ad placement on other sites

To test these keywords, go to the popular search sites and enter your keywords in various combinations. Taking the top results, click on View | Page Source and check the page titles, the filenames, the text headers, the body text, and the Meta tags.

Use the keywords in your page titles and file names so that they're in the URLs. The search engine robots look for them and they are easy to recognize in bookmarks.

Use the H1 to H6 Heading tags instead of Bold and Increase Text Size.

Use as many of the keywords as possible to write a 50-word and a 20-word summary of your site mentioning audience and purpose. Get it as close to the top of the page as possible.

Make sure that the body text is sprinkled with some of your keywords.

Should you use Meta tags? Probably. On every page? Why not? Some search engines will read them, some won't.

The relevant Meta tags are Description and Keywords. Keep the description under 200 characters including spaces and the keywords under a thousand. Put the keywords in priority order. Separate them by commas; it doesn't matter whether you use spaces (marketing,community = marketing, community) but include them in the thousand if you do. If appropriate, each page can have its own Description and Keyword tags.

More on Meta tags

For a step by step guide, try Dr. Clue. The folks at Digital Cafe have a search engine tutorial that looks closely at Meta tags.