Let's face it, IT guys are known as back room, socially inept misfits! Why would they want to come into the light of the 21st Century internet, other than gloat in their technical nouse?

Well, we can't change the image of the profession, but maybe we can build a useful web site for us and our customers; an online brochure and hopefully some useful content. It's a 'busman's holiday' of course, which is one of the reasons we have been so slow to improve this site, but maybe we can integrate our web site into some of our business processes.

Back in the 1990's, the glorious Marks & Spencer changed their approach to advertising and, having shunned all advertising for most of the 20th Century, they launched billboards and even television campaigns. So, what's good for M&S.... we won't be launching a TV campaign, but even small companies like ours really should improve our web site. But what does it mean to integrate it into some of our "business processes"?

Simply put, it means we want to make this site more useful. A static web page is one that is written manually (like this article) and then saved as a fixed file on the web server - it doesn't change. A dynamic web page is one that draws its content from a database every time someone looks at it, so if the database has changed the web page will be updated automatically. This makes the web page more current and hopefully useful. What parts of your web site could you update with live/current information from within your company?

We can't pretend that we have at the forefront our web marketing activity, in fact, we've been very slow to get involved (despite its obvious value), but maybe we can actually make our site useful - and then it takes on a different priority level.

Thanks to everyone involved in developing this web site, including Paul Smith for his hosting expertise. We'll continue to develop it now and we'd like to hear your comments (to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )