Adaptive Web sites

D esigning a complex Web site so that it readily yields its information is a difficult task. The designer must anticipate the users' needs and structure the site accordingly. Yet users may have vastly differing views of the site's information, their needs may change over time, and their usage patterns may violate the designer's initial expectations. As a result, Web sites are all too often fossils cast in HTML, while user navigation is idiosyncratic and evolving. Understanding user needs requires understanding how users view the data available and how they actually use the site. For a complex site this can be difficult since user tests are expensive and time-consuming, and the site's server logs contain massive amounts of data. We propose a Web management assistant: a system that can process massive amounts of data about site usage Examining the potential use of automated adaptation to improve Web sites for visitors.