Many home pages are today merely ads with a "groovy" design, produced by young "grungies" wearing woollen caps who regard the pages as their own little toys. It certainly is good for business to have nice looking pages, but the problem is that they far too seldom function in a practical manner as flexible and easy-to-use trading places and business instruments.

The product range and mix is often meager, and the product information slow and "clumsy". Search capabilities are lacking. The pages are often inaccurate and static. Online order placement forms are terrible. And worst of all: the pages are often down; simply inaccessible.

The problem is that many companies are reluctant to make adequate investments in their home pages as long as they fail to generate revenues, which they naturally enough cannot do until they become more customer- and trading friendly. This becomes a kind of "catch 22" where, as always, the most foreseeing and risktaking companies are the future winners.

In order to function as trading places, e-companies must put content, performance and uptime first, ahead of design. Overloading must be eliminated and performance should be monitored continuously. With the whole world as potential customers the pages must be analyzed with regard to performance, and both hardware and software should be carefully planned.

Especially database capacity will be of utmost importance for successful e-business. How are revenues affected if the web pages are inaccessible for two days due to DBMS instability, or perhaps because of too many customer hits? To be able to handle the enormous amount of data that the e-traffic generates, and to analyse the data and use it as a tool for improving business, a sound investment in database administration is required.

And purchasing a well-known database administrative program is not enough; competent staff is needed for running operations, maintenance and maintenance routines must be worked out for backup, analysis and documentation, and the databases must be secured using different types of maintenance software (my own business) since none of todays database managers can handle the enormous volumes of data that successful e-trade will generate without proper administration.

All of the above should go without saying but it actually seems like many companies, despite the gigantic potential in global e-commerce, still have not understood what it takes to have the whole world as their customer base. My advice is simple: Shift your focus and make the necessary investments!