Business use of the World-Wide Web

This article introduces the issue of business activity on the World-Wide Web and reports on two surveys of business organizations with World-Wide Web pages. The first survey examined the WWW pages and categorized them by industry sector and by the nature of the use of the Web. The second survey used a brief e-mail questionnaire to those companies in the first survey that provided an e-mail contact address. The companies made use of the Web for publicity, advertising, customer support, and online selling. The major problems holding back further development were said to be: development of secure sites and suitable payment systems, faster connection times and wider access. The main future developments were seen to be: more interaction with users, more general content to be added, the addition of more products and services and increased use of multi-media.