The World Wide Web is where the action is on the Internet and opportunities are widespread. Using the Internet as its backbone, this electronic communication medium is becoming the tool of choice for many companies and organizations to go on-line. The potential market for those participating in the Web is as large as the Internet, which currently has about 75+ million users. With its unrestricted global reach and support for text, audio, multimedia, graphics, and video, the WWW is an attractive mechanism for supporting many marketing, sales, public relations, commercial, academic, research, entertainment, and publishing activities.

Business is rapidly adopting the Internet as the means through which it can efficiently and economically conduct marketing, sales, research, public relations and support. With the number of users growing monthly at an estimated rate of between five and ten percent, the Internet is the fastest growing global telecommunications network. Nearly 65% of that growth was derived from new users within the business community.

The Internet provides commercial enterprises with the means to sell and promote products on a global basis. It also provides the means to enhance many aspects of a company’s market development and support activities without incurring the high costs typically associated with local-dependent sales and support staffs.

Forrester Research Inc. predicts that on-line direct sales will grow to $4.8 billion by the year 2000 as a result of the dramatically increasing number of on-line consumers and sellers. Conservative estimates place over 1 million businesses on the Internet by the year 2000.