end of the web as we knew it 22 august, 1999 by johnmichael patrick monty monteith

One of the many things that differentiates the Internet from everything else has been its' likeness to buying a Coke. At the Coca-Cola store in Las Vegas they have this large quote on a wall from Andy Warhol:

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Code, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

What does this have to do with the Internet? Well, on the Internet the playing field is leveled. An eight year old setting up a web site for her baseball card collection can have as impressive and professional a web site as Coca-Cola. And that same eight year old could get as many people visiting her web site as Coca-Cola, Netscape, or any of them. That has been touted as the 'best' thing about the Internet. It is not like setting up a store that requires amazing amounts of money to make a presence on a downtown block. The Internet can be conquered by anyone for virtually no money. Or, that is what we were told. Unfortunately, if you have not noticed, those days are coming to an end.

In the early days of the world wide web there were, of course, comparatively few web sites. Back in 1995, when the web wave first started catching speed, major corporations had not yet set up web sites or even attained a domain name for their company. The legal battles about those domain names, and whether Coca-Cola had the copyright on that domain name, or needed to purchase it from the person that beat them to the punch were still being fought. Web search engines were doing a good job of keeping up with most of the web sites out there, and the major way people surfed was through these search engines. People were generally searching for whatever interested them, and visiting just about every web site under the sun.

If you had started a web site back in 1995, as I had, you might remember that even if you had the worst site on the Information Superhighway, you would probably get some traffic. A web site set up about how 'I hate doughnut holes' could generate quite a little bit of traffic back then. If you happened to have your site listed on the four (yes, four) major search engines at the time, 'I hate doughnut holes' could have been one of the hottest sites on the web.

Speeding up to 1999 we will find the amount of Internet traffic and the number of people surfing has grown enormously. So, one could assume that 'I hate doughnut holes' would be more popular than ever.

Instead, today a site called 'I hate doughnut holes' will probably generate less traffic than it did in 1995. Even if you are listed on all five billion of the major search engines. Why? Because the days of the anybody-can-build-a-web-site-and-get-traffic has started to erode if not completely disappear.

Just in the past couple of years we have seen a major transformation happen on how web sites are generated, how they look, and how people surf to the sites. Lets look at the changes to each:

How Web Sites Are Generated:
Previously all one had to do to create a web site was to know a few basic HTML commands, and you could have a web site up in minutes. Very few people actually had domain names, so the expense and hassle of getting the site www.ihatedoughnuteholes.com was really unnecessary. There were only a few major search engines, so registering your site was as simple as visiting four sites and typing in your URL. After accomplishing these tasks in a few minutes, you could have a site that looks nearly as good if not better than the big sites of the day. Sure, you might have to spend a few minutes coming up with some nice GIF files to make the site look pretty, but even a text only site was comparable to many of the big sites at the time.

Today to be even close to the same league as the major web sites knowing a few HTML commands is not going to cut it. A seasoned HTML programmer might be able to set up a nice looking site with animation, JAVAscript codes, frames, a search engine, and some entry pages. But these days that is almost not enough. Having pop down windows, shockwave scripts, fully interactive pages, and real-time sound and video is where the real action is at. Start getting yourself into these high-tech web gizmos, and chances are that you will be spending some major bucks on software and perhaps hardware. In fact, setting up your own server with a static IP address to host your own site and domain name may be necessary to compete.

One thing is certain, if you want to be taken seriously at all and generate any amount of traffic, you absolutely must have your own domain name. Admit it. How many times have you passed up surfing to a site simply because their URL address was a maze of slashes? (Have you even visited a web site that you did not know that had a bunch of slashes? Many of today's web surfers have not.) So, you will have to browse over to www.networksolutions.com and set up your domain name of www.ihatedoghnutholes.com .

Then there is the issue of registering your site with search engines. There are an extraordinary number of these things today. Thousands of them. And going to each one to type in your site name, contents and so on is simply not an option. Therefore, if you want to get www.ihatedoghnutholes.com known, you will have to pay a company to submit your site, or purchase a piece of software to submit it yourself.

Essentially, with a significant amount of time and money, you could generate a site like the major web sites. Of course, I have not even broached the fact that major web sites update their site on a daily basis. Unless you are unemployed, you will be unable to compete on that front. But, hey, at least you have the possibility of keeping up with the corporate sites. After a lot of work and money. For one day.

How Web Sites Look:
No matter how much money you spend, or how much time you spend, it is unlikely that you will keep your site looking as good (or anywhere near as good) as the major web sites today. The technology changes on a daily basis, and there is so much money being pumped into these corporate sites that the little guys can not keep up. The things that seem rare today will be common place on the major sites tomorrow. And to continue to push the envelope, these sites will continue to pump major financial resources into their web pages.

Admittedly, even today a personal web page can look nice. With a lot of effort and time, one could even have a site that looks nearly as good as some of the corporate sites out there. But I have been watching the appearance gap between small sites and corporate sites continue to grow as the days have progressed. In a year from now, it will be considerably more difficult for a small site operator to keep a good appearance on the web without spending some major sheckles on web software.

To further add to this difficult are companies that make Internet web page software. These companies are purposefully making HTML code more complicated than it needs to be with the goal of making writing a web page straight from HTML a thing of the past.

This week I decided to do some HTML editing using Microsoft Word 2000 (Word version 9). I loaded in a 1.5K web site that had a couple of frames and a few HTML links into Word. Simple stuff. I made zero changes and saved the document from Word just to see what changes would happen to the code. For fun. The document was nearly 12K in length after Word was done with it. When launched into Internet Explorer and Navigator both the 12K and 1.5K documents looked exactly the same. I mean EXACTLY. In fact, I went and edited the Word code, and best I can tell it added a bunch of crap that was completely unnecessary. I understood a lot of it to be font coding and setting up things for if I were to do something more complicated than I was. But a lot of it looked to be filler that just tried to confuse the person reading the HTML code into thinking it was more complicated than it was.

As much as I would love to blame Microsoft, I have used products from other companies that do this same thing. They take a very simple HTML document and add code that is completely unnecessary, and much of it is filler. In fact, both Word and these other documents also have a nasty habit of removing the formatting that I have added to the code that makes it easy to read and change the code. Gee, I wonder why they do that? Maybe because they do not want people editing their own web sites?

Bottom line, it is difficult today to have a corporate level looking web site. Tomorrow it is going to be nearly impossible.

How People Surf:
This is the biggest change in the Internet. I hit on it slightly before when I asked if you had ever not gone to a web site because it had too many slashes in the URL. The truth is that most web browsers these days are savvy enough to realize that if the web site is not www.mycompanyname.com that visiting the site is probably a waste of time.

However, the biggest change I have found is that users on the web today are not the surfers they were. People go to the web sites they hear advertised on the radio or television. We are bombarded today with ads telling people to go to .com this and .com that. Why the heck would anyone need to go to a search engine to look up a site when they probably know all of their favourites by heart?

Those that do occasionally go to a search engine will not find what was there in 1995. Today search engines cannot keep up with the amazing changes in Internet traffic. As a result, I have found as the days have progressed that more and more often the only things popping up when I do a search are corporate sites. Is that because the little web sites have gone away? No. It is because the search engines are mapping mainly corporate sites these days. Partially because the corporate sites bombard search engines with their domain names, but also because they have to focus somewhere since they cannot keep up with every web site, so they keep up with the money sites.

My little web site, The Sanity Pages (www.sanitypages.com for a quick bit of shameless advertising) probably hit it's peak of visitors in late 1996. When I would visit search engines to see what key words would bring up my site, I was surprised that a number of key phrases and such would eventually hit my site. Today very little besides typing in the domain name will bring up my web site at major search engines, despite the fact that I do have and use software for submitting my web site. This is no fault of the search engines or the software I use to submit my web site. They simply cannot keep up with demand. But, if I want people to visit my site, virtually the only way it is going to happen is spending bucks on advertising.

This transformation of the Internet is not a surprise. In fact, it is very American. Despite Andy Warhol's great quote, like Coca-Cola, making the Internet available to everyone may be American, but commercializing it and making it a success to those that already have money is also very American. The web is changing to a place where we do our shopping. Where we browse major company web sites. On occasion we might visit a family member or friend web site much like we occasionally might give them a call on the phone. But, the days of a little web site called www.ihatedoughnutholes.com making a presence on the Net have gone away. That is not necessarily bad. It just is.