Local corporate Web sites start to cook

For years, the divide between media sites and corporate sites in terms of unique visitors or page impressions has been dramatic. Even excluding the main South African portal sites such as 24.com or iafrica.com - which command page impressions in the millions - media sites such as Business Day, MoneyWeb or Bizcommunity, with around 100 000 unique visitors a month, have overshadowed their corporate cousins.

2006 may prove to be the year that trend changes. And along with this change, the incentive to build world-class, service-oriented corporate Web applications finally reaches a critical level.

One local content management supplier has noticed a fourfold increase in traffic to the corporate Web sites it hosts. But that's not due to its or its clients' efforts. Perhaps it is true that one swallow does not a summer make but in this case it is indicative of a trend.

So what is the reason for this, and what implications does it have?

SA is in the throes of a minor bandwidth revolution. Minor because compared with the rest of the world, as the old story goes, we're still outrageously expensive and appallingly slow. Nevertheless, even we in the past year or two have started to catch a collective digital wake-up.

The number of Internet users in South Africa is sitting somewhere in the region of three million to five million, depending on who you believe and how the numbers are calculated. This excludes the de facto users who have access via GPRS on their cellphones, many of whom don't know how to use it, or find it clumsy on current devices.

This number is unlikely to increase dramatically any time soon in a country where 14 million people still don't have access to running water. The only caveat to this is if a mobile device emerges which is easy enough and cheap enough to put Internet access in the hands of the majority of cellphone users. Software such as Opera Mini (a browser specifically designed for older cellphones) holds out some promise in this regard, though the input mechanism of a simplistic numerical keypad is a major problem.

All that said, simply looking at number of Internet users is missing the most important dimension: frequency and depth of use. And that has everything to do with how users are connected, not if.

That's where broadband, even the limited capped ADSL option that is most common here, has changed the shape of access to corporate Web sites.

Internet access to corporate information is highly discretionary. There's a tipping point on the amount of effort it takes to get to a piece of corporate information. If it's easier to use the phone or telephone book, or if it's slow or hard enough to use the Web, people stay away. But when Internet access speeds up, this balance shifts and suddenly it's a simple matter of punching in a corporate Web address and a few seconds (rather than minutes) later the information required is there.

While interactivity and other Internet-specific functions are also in greater demand, many visits to corporate sites are about finding information.

Jarred Cinman, product director at Cambrient

Media is different, and always has been. Like Internet banking or online travel reservations, media sites offer something that there is no offline counterpart for: immediacy. Corporate Web sites, needless to say, have a harder time selling the importance of this.

This is starting to happen. The corporate access statistics prove it. What are the implications for content management?

If not only more people are going to be seeing the site, but they're going to be using it more intensely, more often and seeing it as authoritative, the demands on that site also change.

While interactivity and other Internet-specific functions are also in greater demand, many visits to corporate sites are about finding information. Contact details, maps, branch lists, product specifications and investor information. And if the site is becoming the primary reference point, the burden on content managers and content management systems is to ensure this content is always accurate, up to date and available.

Never has this been a more serious job. While many people in my industry have been trying to emphasise this for years, it's always been with the knowledge that visitors in the hundreds or low thousands would see the site each month. If that number (as it now seems) is in the tens of thousands, and growing fast, the Web becomes at least as important as any traditional contact point.

There is a general sense (again, anecdotal) that South African companies are waking up slowly to the real power of the Internet. This may seem like a tired remark, but like so many things we expected to break years ago when they were happening in the US and Western Europe, our time is now, not then. The time of taking the Web for granted in the household is circa 2007 for SA, not 2001.

It makes stories like this feel like old news. And the jadedness in the technology business is palpable. We've waited so long it almost feels like a booby prize now we're getting it.

But for corporates, and technologists alike, we ought to embrace the excitement, and take technology investments seriously. Web sites need to shape up, content needs to be brushed up, and Internet service (for example, dealing with customer e-mails) needs to be perfected.

South African companies have had years and years to get ready for it. Many are. The Web, at last, has arrived in the Republic.