ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602120046
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
Virginia Tech, which last fall posted state tourism facts on the world's largest computer network, will create another "electronic brochure" to advance industrial growth.
What's planned is a new World Wide Web site offering information on doing business in the state. A Web site is a collection of pages of text, pictures and other data that is available free to anyone connected to the Web, a global computer network.
Tech was chosen for the job by the state Department of Economic Development, whose director, Wayne Sterling, was so pleased with a Web site containing tourist information launched last October that he wants Tech to design a separate site about industrial opportunities.
The project will have a $75,000 budget to buy hardware and pay about seven graduate students and three faculty members from four colleges. The team includes some of the same people involved in the tourism project and is shooting to put the state industrial marketing effort on-line July 1.
The economic development industry is replete with organizations that have or are trying to establish a presence on the World Wide Web, said Joe Rogers, a spokesman for PHH Fantus Corp., a corporate relocation consulting company in Hunt Valley, Md.
"They're all going that way," he said.
Some companies look at the sites for the reason economic developers hope they will - to spot opportunities to do business - but the audience is limited, Rogers said.
"We're not in a situation where the Fortune 200 CEOs are cruising the Web each night, but the people who are in the Inc. 100 are doing it, and those may be the companies you are excited about getting," Rogers said, because the Inc. 100 firms represent "a lot of potential employment growth."
The Inc. 100 lists newer, small, high-growth companies dubbed as industry leaders by Inc. magazine of Boston. Fortune magazine's 200 list contains the 200 largest corporations in the United States.
Several Web experts agreed with state officials that the team at Tech has shown skill in creating Web pages.
Tech's first effort for the state is VISIT Virginia, which includes facts such as admission fees for 6,000 attractions as well as directions to them. There are also 600 pictures, descriptions of 540 events and electronic pathways to 121 other Virginia-related Web sites.
More than 3,000 people have used the system, including people in Romania, Norway and Brazil, according to Andy Honaker, an architecture and urban studies instructor who directed the project with Charlotte Reed, an economic development specialist at Tech.
Ogden Forbes, a researcher at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., who focuses on the Web and evaluated the tourism site at The Roanoke Times' request, said it is packed with information and is easy to use.
"Virginia Tech is obviously clued in" to the trend toward more on-line information resources, Forbes said. "I'd give them an A-minus."
Some of the thousands of Web sites that exist have been criticized for being hard to navigate. With the one that Tech built, "VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS" remains at the top of the screen along with buttons for backing up.
"Wherever you are, you can always get back, sort of, to the beginning or a point you are familiar with," said Nick Weaver, new media specialist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. "I was very impressed."
Andy Hagedon, a Web page consultant at GCI/Atlanta, a public relations firm, liked other buttons that flip the electronic pages. But he said he waited up to several minutes for information to reach his computer. He blamed the problem on either design factors or the possibility that a crowd of other people were also trying to use the site.
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