The beginning
Despite the fact that the concept of the Internet dates back to the 1960’s, the Internet as we know and use it today is still very much in its infancy.

First introduced at the height of the cold war the Internet started life as a technological project launched by the US Department of Defence. After the USSR launched Sputnik the US response was to develop a military research network and take the lead in technological advancement.

Over the next decade research agencies and universities such as UCLA, MIT, Stanford and Harvard joined the network. In 1973 it spread to England when University College London joined the US institutions.

Non technical people use internet
The gold rush really began in the 1990’s with the development of the first ‘point & click’ style internet browser called Mosaic in 1993, closely followed by Netscape in 1994. This was the first time that non-technical people could use and navigate the World Wide Web. Online traffic increased massively in 1994 when commercial organisations jumped on the band wagon adopting the .com domain name until both email and web addresses became common-place on business cards.

Internet milestones
To get an idea of just how new the internet as a tool for business is the Internet society was only set up as recently as 1992 and 1993 saw the United Nations and the White House go online enabling the US president to have an email address.

It was not until 1999 that online banking became a technical reality and this triggered the realization among small and medium size business that there was a real need to be online. There was also no shortage of fresh web-design graduates or people willing to have a go at building websites, making this is a realistic opportunity for smaller enterprises.

The gold rush reaction
The graph below shows the amount of internet sites increasing rapidly in the years between 1999 and 2002. These years are the ones when many businesses felt the need to ‘keep-up’ and get online, although at this stage it was early days for the internet.

The sudden increase in web sites from 2000 up until mid 2002 illustrates the expectation for more and more businesses to get online. From 2000 onwards it was enough for business to just make sure there were online, however not a lot of thought went into the creation of what is effectively a marketing and promotional tool.

The graph also shows the amount of websites (registered domains) does tend to level out slightly after 2002. The conclusion is simply that the majority of established businesses have a website. The trend in 2003/4 is to begin using our knowledge of website marketing and user trends to simply re-vamp and improve existing sites.

Where we are now
The Internet is now accessible to nearly a third of the UK population and in the last 3-4 years a real change in user expectations has occurred. Small and medium sized businesses can certainly be forgiven for not exploiting the power of the web because the online phenomenon has only just started to level out. The real necessity now is to get in-line with internet user expectation and get websites working with business developments.