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Catching the biggest wave of all: a business joins the WebStanding in the office of a Melbourne Web design company, Darren Minns stares at the computer screen uncertain, a little unconvinced by the bright Web page staring back at him. He has never spent time on the Internet. Now he is about to put his business there. If you took the clean-cut ironman out of an Uncle Toby's ad and crossed him with a junior Nike marketing executive, pony-tailed 29-year-old Darren Minns is the sort of businessman you might create. He can look you in the eye and tell you of the excitement of surfing the point breaks at Byron Bay - and in the same breath discuss the cash flow created by a well-subscribed trip there. He talks of a day in the near future when he might can use satellite technology to connect a touring school group in central Australia to their classmates in Boston or Phoenix. And his five-year-old company, Southern Horizon Travel, organises camps, tours and adventures for students and young people, especially in the huge US market. Selling Australia's sun, sand and sport to the States is a serious business. Southern Horizon's 29-day Australian Summer Adventure, including travel from Los Angeles, costs $US4990 - over $6000 of local currency. Its newest product is a no-drink, no-drugs surfing camp where customers get professional coaching and take home a video of their efforts. The company's marketing must appeal to teenagers and young adults, but reassure their parents about the safety and value of a month-long trip to the other side of the world. Minns has toured the US three times, presenting his tours to audiences of as many as 600 people in the quest for a slice of the huge and lucrative US summer camp market. He has targeted college students and their families with brochures containing talk of boomerangs and Ayers Rock, and featuring parents' testimonials to the "maturation and development" the trips brought in their children. He has bought US database information to send 10,000 post-cards to selected market groups, and sent videos to travel agents. All he wants is a sliver of the world's biggest industry, tourism. But his current time-consuming techniques hit only a relatively small segment of the giant US market. Southern Horizon needs to find a place where affluent young Americans in their millions are looking for diversion. Perhaps as much as any small business in the country, Southern Horizon needs the Web. Business Reality on the WebThat's why earlier this year, Darren Minns looked at an ad for Computer Age's web site competition, and with his customary confidence decided Southern Horizon could win. And why he finds himself one autumn afternoon in the brightly-painted St Kilda Road boardroom of a company called Reality Mechanics, looking at the World Wide Web on a 14-inch screen and wondering just a little whether it might help turn his business from a goer into a boomer. Reality Mechanics is the sort of business you might get if you took a giant multinational ad agency and crossed it with a two-person multimedia start-up run by a former landscape architect and a Collins Street accountant. In fact, that's pretty much what happened. The architect is Rob Raulings, the accountant is Daniel Zuzek and the giant multinational is Saatchi & Saatchi, who decided in 1996 that some of their clients would need Web sites. Reality Mechanics (http://www.realmech.com.au) has since worked for David Jones, BHP Steel and Hahn Brewing. When client and Web designer come face to face in the RealMech boardroom, they do much what any outside marketing group and its client do at a first meeting: talk about the business, its market, its sales strategies. Raulings and Zuzek want to know who they are selling to, see the company's current print advertising, hear their clients's hopes. Southern Horizon's material, in part because of the artistic talent of Minns' wife Liza, already has a distinctive, relaxed corporate look. Raulings moves on to the basics of a Web site: a Web "address" called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for each page; a home page to summarise the site; separate site areas for different tour products, with perhaps a page for travel agents; clickable links which bring up more detailed information. Mark Delaney, whose Internet access firm Mira Networking works regularly with RealMech and whose Web server will host the Southern Horizon site, explains that Southern Horizon will need to choose a "domain name". This will be the site's effective business name, just like www.microsoft.com or www.theage.com.au. Minns and his fellow director and business mentor, former law firm manager Graeme Stevens, nod their understanding. But they don't understand, not really, not yet. Here lies the central challenge in putting businesses on the Web. As Rob Raulings observes, many of his clients have never really experienced the medium into which they want to send their company. They don't know what it can do; worse, they don't know what it can't do. Like the marketing managers of an earlier era, commissioning television ads without ever seeing a program, they have some strange ideas and some peculiar gaps in their knowledge. Learning the limitsRaulings struggles, for instance, as he tries to explain to his new clients one of the key challenges of a Web designer. RealMech needs to subtly tailor the site so that it will appear prominently on all the major search engines which catalogue the Web. Raulings and Zuzek want to ensure that if you type "Australia", "travel" and "surf" into AltaVista or Yahoo!, the words "Southern Horizon Travel" appear as a clickable link in your Web browser. It's a black art, and a great deal harder than just programming a 30-second radio spot. Without it, Southern Horizon's Web site might as well be invisible. But how do you explain search engines to people who've never been on the Web? Mira's Mark Delaney, watching from his spot around the boardroom table, has seen this problem many times before. "Site construction can take a lot of time precisely because people don't understand the Web," he says. "Often you need a long refining process, explaining why there are no graphics on the front page, just for instance". (Graphics download slowly; few Web businesses should want to take the risk that impatient Web surfers will click away because they tire of waiting for a site to appear in front of them.) Darren Minns - young, open-minded, technologically literate - is in some ways the ideal client. But Minns' surfing experience is all on seven-foot boards. "I was really excited about all of these high-tech ideas," he notes with a slight smile a few weeks later. "Let's put this on it, and this on it - bits of video footage and so on". Commercial Web site design doesn't work that way in early 1997, not when the best-connected homes in Australia and the US access the Web through a 33kbps modem. Before the first meeting is over, the RealMech team will advise him as they advise almost every client: before you commit yourself, get on the Web; immerse yourself in the medium for a while; get a feel for it. Not unexpectedly, Southern Horizon's domain name excites plenty of discussion. A domain name is a sort of alternate business name, hard to change and vitally important to get right. It should be memorable, and short. But wwww.horizon.com is taken. www.aussieadventure.com? www.gohorizon.com? Or one of about 20 other offered alternatives? Minns agrees to write a list. Catching the right waveBut it's not all hard slog and learning curves. Sitting watching the presentation screen in the RealMech boardroom, Web novice Minns points to something he likes: a Shockwave interactive game running on RealMech's Hahn Brewing site. Shockwave, a widely distributed Web browser "plug-in", allows Web surfers to run tiny versions of the multimedia presentations and games you might see on a CD-ROM. Compressed for the Web, these Shockwave files can be downloaded in reasonable time by viewers using today's Web technology. The Hahn Brewing site's Shockwave game challenges visitors to guide a drunken animated character called Chuckie Hahn to the safety of his home. Featuring noises of varying crudity which Hahn felt would appeal to its target market, this isn't what Darren Minns wants US parents to see. But he and Rob Raulings find instant agreement that the broad game concept would appeal to Southern Horizon's potential customers. "You've got me going on that", he grins at Raulings. For all Chuckie Hahn's light relief, it's not the easiest 90 minutes Minns has ever spent - and not just because he's entering new technological territory. "Until now I have been a real control freak," he tells the design team candidly as the meeting draws to a close. "Every little aspect of the business up until now has been us alone. It's a new experience for us, putting something in your hands." Rob Raulings smiles, just a little embarrassed. Now he has to turn a pile of brochures and artwork and photos and scribbled notes into a Web site that will knock the socks off thousands of kids and their parents 10,000 kilometres away. Perhaps he would rather not know just how much trust is being placed in him.
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