Promotional

Though it could be argued that any business site is a promotional site, there is a certain brand of site that does nothing more than extol the wonders of a company, offering no real online business activity. These sites have often been called “brochureware” sites, and rightly so. Many of them are simple repurposing of public relations content (text and pictures) that have previously been used in printed brochures.

Such sites are often lengthy and boring, because their writing style is that of the print world and not that of the online world. These styles are vastly different, owing to online reading habits and the need to target pages to search engine “spiders” or “robots.”

Most of these promotional sites grew out the rush to get corporate presence online, and as Marshal McLuhan noted in The Medium is the Message, when a new medium comes into vogue, it is the natural tendency to begin to use it by simply putting the contents of the old medium into the new. Of course, this was certainly a reasonable way to make an entrance into cyberspace, but the time has passed that such sites should remain online as they began. Much has been learned about the habits of the online reader, and sites must adapt to account for these discoveries.