The Fortune 500 Web

The dramatic speed of new developments in Web technology often makes designing large, corporate Web pages a difficult task. The life cycle of standards used in Web design is very short, with features introduced in one version sometimes dropped in the next. The evolution of client software for the Web also proceeds quickly, but the distribution of this software doesn´t keep pace, which leaves designers with three options: confine development efforts to a core set of features, use the latest technology and exclude clients using old software, or use new technologies but provide alternative pages to achieve a high degree of compatibility. In order to understand better how corporations are using the Web, in June 1998 we analyzed 400 home pages of US Fortune 500 companies. (Many corporations did not have a Web site or an available URL at the time of the study.) The analysis didn´t focus primarily on the use of HTML and other Web publishing techniques, but on design techniques in relation to search engine accessibility