Larger Fortune 500 firms now have handed most of responsibility for web work to their internal Information Technology (IT) depts. While marketing continues to have a say, IT will make most of vendor decisions. This is a shift which could be problematic for web design shops or individual consultants if they have traditionally dealt with marketing departments and maintained those relationships. Marketing and IT departments have traditionally been at odds within most companies. Many web design firms may not have technical breadth and depth to be IT consultants; therefore they have never really built strong ties with IT. Since they have not built these ties, it becomes more difficult to gain business from IT departments. However, many independent consultants who moved into web space do have an IT background, and therefore they can easily make transition to becoming a consultant to an IT dept.

As web moves beyond brochureware stage for these clients, as they provide more functionality; they are more and more intertwined with their legacy systems. As they become more connected to business systems, standard bearer of business systems, IT, becomes more involved. As IT becomes more involved, they will tend to turn to contractors they have been using: usually independent IT consultants or larger consulting firms which they may already have on board to do other IT consulting work.

The web is moving from medium to application. As it moves from medium to application, user experience becomes part of an application, as opposed to user experience being application. For example, when web was young, web was more of a medium: similar to TV and radio, it was not that interactive, and while there was some interactivity, this interactivity was usually not interconnected to core business practices. The look and feel, interface, ultimate user experience was goal to hit. In a few cases, there was a defined task flow which user could follow, but in early days, users were more expected to explore than to be guided.

What do you do if your hosting service doesn't provide "unique visitor" statistics? According to Jim Wilson, owner of one of most useful sites on web, www.jimtools.com, your "best bet is page views when dealing with your server logs. Another way to go is to use a service like WebTrends Live www.webtrends.com which does a pretty good job of figuring out total visitors and first time visitors." Jim has written an excellent article on web traffic www.jimworld.com rafficreports.html