Business-to-business marketing and the World Wide Web: Planning, managing, and assessing web sites

Despite the enormous growth of the World Wide Web and the media attention to it, little has appeared in the literature with regard to the role of marketing in developing and administering business-to-business Web sites. This article examines the opportunities and obstacles inherent with business-to-business Web sites and discusses the process for devising, overseeing, and evaluating such sites. A detailed original Web Site Assessment Tool is introduced, which focuses on five categories: the home page, overall site design and performance, text content, audio-visual elements, and interaction and involvement. The scoring mechanism is explained, as is the percentile score per category. Two case studies are used to apply this tool to the PC industry-one to show how various audiences would weight Web site elements differently based on their particular characteristics and needs and the other to show how the Web sites of 10 leading PC makers could be comparatively evaluated. The article ends with a series of managerial implications. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.