Before people visit your site, there is only one thing on the Internet that states who you are - your URL. URLs are the address system used on the Web. For instance, our URL is "http://www.altervisitor.com". With most of the currently available accounts from ISPs (Internet Service Providers), you will be given some web-space, and a URL of your own. Your URL, however, will more than likely be of the form "http://users.ourinternetservice.co.uk/~yourcompany". This isn't very memorable for potential visitors, and it doesn't really show that you're commited to a presence on the Internet.

To get a shorter URL, you must register that domain with InterNic; the Internet registration authority. Once you've registered the domain name, (among other things) you also need a server to forward all of the visitors of your site to your actual webpages. There are companies out whose sole business is to do this forwarding, and to provide DNS lookups, etc. Here at AlterVisitor, we are capable of taking care of all of these needs for you, dealing with these companies directly for you.

Even if you're not ready to have a website yet, you might want to consider registering a domain name now. Not only will this help to spread the costs, but as hundreds of thousands of domain names are registered, there is a chance that someone else will take the name you want whilst you are pondering over it. Many search engines, such as http://www.domainregister.com/ exist, and can help you by finding similar sounding domains, etc.

Once you have decided on a domain name, we will gladly register it on your behalf as part of our service. If it seems that all of the domain names related to your company have already been taken, we can also advise on alternative names.

As well as a more memorable address, there are several other advantages to having your own domain name. You can change where your website is hosted whenever you want without changing the address that visitors go to. Doing this can help save you money or get you a better quality of service. You also get more memorable e-mail addresses to give to your clients/customers, such as 'sales@yourcompany.com'. Similarly, these do not change when you change your ISP.

This section is more of a description of the current state of play of logos than it is advice to you as a company thinking of advertising yourself on the web. There is information of use as well as interest, of course.

When it comes to giving people a first impression about your company on the Internet, logos gain second spot to URLs. Logos in general fall into very clear pigeonholes. The logo of a company can tell you what the company produces without even having told you their name. There are two prime examples that we can cite to prove a point.

1. Car manufacturers:The logos used by car companies are becoming almost as uniform as the colours the cars themselves are available in. Spotting the logo of a car company is very simple - you just look for a circle or ellipse. The trend towards this is frightening, going through the list of top car manufacturers shows this: Ford, Vauxhall, Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, Land Rover, Subara, the list goes on. An interesting case that could also have been included in the list is Toyota. Up until the late 1980s, they didn't even have a company logo. The designers must have had a field day when asked to come up with one for them; rather than just sticking with one ellipse, they interlocked two, and placed them inside a third. If you look at that logo even when it's not on a car, it still screams the word "CAR!" at you.

It's all very well making these observations - but what about the consequences? For instance, what happens if you don't follow the formula? The answer's simple - Rover. They went their own way with the logo, and just look at all of the difficulties they got themselves into. Now, this isn't to say that Rover could solve all of their problems by a change of logo, but their problem has been because of their image, and what better way to create a new image than with a new logo?

2. Computer Manufacturers:The situation here is almost the same as that with cars, with the ellipses being replaced with the company name written in a sans-serif font, (often, all of the letters are in the same case). There is usually one slight modification to the logo as well. The Microsoft and Intel logos could almost have been designed by the same person - same font, similar weight. The Microsoft font has a notch taken out of the "o", whereas the Intel logo has a dropped "e". Other prime examples of this uniform logo design include Toshiba, Iiyama, Epson, Brother, Sharp. Again, the list goes on.

So, if your company currently has no logo, then you might think about taking a look at the logos of all of the larger companies in the same industry as you. And if you do have a logo, it might be worth checking to see if it suits the company it represents. If you are going to advertise your website on other sites across the Internet, you'll usually only get to display your logo with a link to your site on it. If that logo doesn't catch peoples eye, then it might as well not be there. Now, we're not suggesting that you redesigning your company logo for the sake of Internet marketing, but the way in which it's presented on the Internet (whether it's animated, whether it has a border, etc) should be looked at carefully.

Once you've decided where people are going to have to go to find your website, you're going to have to consider what kind of people you are aiming the site at. Again, like the logos section, this will be more of a description of the current state of affairs than a set of rules for you to follow.

There are two main types of site; Information based and Interest based. There is a lot overlap between the two, but you can still place almost every site into either one or both of the categories. This site is mainly information based, you come here not because you like spending time reading about website design companies, but because you want a website designing. There are interest based sections of this site too, the "worlds worst websites" section and the "website makeovers", for instance. The main purpose is still to inform. Other sites which are intended to inform include on-line newspapers, on-line catalogues, etc.

A good example of sites which cross right over the two categories are specialist on-line "magazines". For instance computer emulation sites such as VintageGaming. By providing daily news on a leisure interest of a lot of Internet users, this site manages to notch up 10s of millions of hits.

Purely interest based sites tend not to get nearly as many hits as this. This is for one main reason - they're not updated often enough. If they were updated daily then people would come back daily. If they were updated daily then they'd become both interest & information based.

This gives a valuable piece of information to you before you commit to having a site designed - you get more visitors the more you give them. Whilst a repeat visitor is not necessarily a customer, it's one big step closer. If you start offering incentives for visiting your site, or incentives for recommending your site to others then you could really start making use of the Internet as a marketing tool.

As well as the two different types of site, there are two different types of people browsing the Internet. The first, and most important to you as a business is the browser who knows what they're looking for. They might be looking for your site in particular, or for any company that does the same business as you. To get their attention is quite easy - you submit your site details to search engines (or we do it for you), and you make sure other related sites include links to yours. Unfortunately, there aren't that many people out there who know what they want. They're surfing through sites, waiting to be told what they want. Around 80% of time spent "surfing the 'net" is just aimless rambling. That's why you need to have a well designed site - to convince these people that their time has been well spent - that they've finally found what they've been looking for.

There is one other clear divide in the area of browsing - the type of software being used. Until recently, the only concern in this area was on the behalf of the website designer. S/he would ask her/himself "Does it work with Netscape 2.0?" If it did, then anything else that could be added was a bonus. Having a page that worked without frames should always have been implemented as well (but regularly wasn't).

This situation has changed now, with the widespread uptake of portable browsing on handheld devices based on Windows CE and EPOC. The web-browsing features offered by these devices are much more limited, as are the technical limitations of the machines themselves. The screens on them are regularly black-on-grey, which means that any site with a dark coloured background will be (nearly) illegible on many of them. There are also "micro-browsers" being implemented in the latest mobile phones; with these the presentation of information clearly and concisely is quintessential. The type of person who uses this portable browsing is the businessman/woman who uses the Internet as a tool; they know what they want, and they want it now. These are the kind of people who are likely to find your telephone number on the Web, and they'll be talking to you within seconds. These are the kind of people we believe company and corporate websites should be initially designed for.

The other type of browsing software that has evolved is the high powered application such as "Netscape 4.5" and "Internet Explorer 5". With these, it is possible to include sound, animation, video clips, applications within applications, etc. Gizmos like these (and they are gizmos) may convince the casual end user that you have put a little more money into your website. Such things might give enjoyment to the person browsing, and might make them come back time and again. But such things as JavaScript which enable you to do this not only don't work on certain browsers, but crash some of them.

So, before you settle on a given website design (and design company), you should know who you want to find your site the most interesting and informative, and which of these matters most to you.

For the final few words, I'm going to state what I think will happen to the Web over the next few years - Jakob Nielsen can do it, so I can too...

One of the most important, yet overlooked, facts about business on the Internet is that there is no new money. There is only ever a finite amount of money and a finite amount of consumer purchasing. The key issue is this - for every pound/dollar that is spent on the Web, one will be lost from traditional bricks- and-mortar companies. This is where the problem exists - it is very difficult to prise a loyal, existing customer base away from an established company to a start-up without a decent incentive. The main incentive that Internet based companies try to offer is price due to lower overheads. However, this is easier said than done, because the start-ups don't have the economies of scale that large, existing companies have.

The second problem is that existing companies will quickly notice if they are losing market share to start-ups - they will create e-commerce sites themselves. These sites may well be able to offer lower prices due to the volumes they are purchasing in. Having said this, there will be successful businesses on the Web - Amazon for example should, eventually, become a profitable company because they appear to have the whole package: Good service, large product range, good prices, and a good reputation.

On the other hand, many high-profile companies will probably not succeed. A great example of this is LastMinute.com - they only exist to offload under-subscribed holidays, etc. onto the public. Once the airline and tour operators realise that there is profit here, they will incorporate such deals into their own online booking systems (which most of them are currently working on). LastMinute will find itself competing with its own suppliers for business - with the disadvantage that they have to add mark-up to make a profit.

For thes reason, the glut of Venture Captial that is being thrown at .COM ideas is sooner or later going to stop - these new-economy companies don't make a profit then ideas will stop being funded. Valuing these companies at greater than the standard 10x earnings is acceptable if it can be shown that they have a viable business model. The majority of these companies don't as they are not making profit even when there is little competition. Once the big-guns get their new-media storefronts set up, and the world realises it isn't as rich and wise as it thought, the bottom will fall out of the new economy. This may take 2 or 3 years, but it will happen. I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly won't have my money invested in half-baked ideas when this happens!