Web-site Strategies and Performance in Smes: Performance Indicators and Regional Challenges

A key issue for strategic ICT use concerns the levels of awareness within firms of the value and opportunities created by the use of this technology. With the Internet offering access to global flows of information, it is often argued that buyers have an increased opportunity to compare firms and products, and that even small firms are now operating in a global marketplace. However, the uneven diffusion and the use of ICTs might deepen the already existing gap between regions and populations regarding job opportunity and business development. This paper is concerned with territorial differentiation in the obstacles to utilise ICT by focusing our analysis on the web strategies of SMEs. We explore the different ways web strategies have developed from being a technology matter to questions of business process and business strategy. The paper includes an analysis of the content of SMEwebsites including, the regional (urban/rural), temporal, and cross-country comparisons (including linguistic questions). By including the territorial dimension, the paper seeks to move beyond the limits of the individual firm and discuss how business performance related to web-strategies is tied to the presence and absence of appropriate culture and spatial conditions in general, and to rural location in particular. The empirical evidence is drawn from a longitudinal study containing 36 cases based on firm interviews and analysis of websites including both manufacturing and service firms in urban and rural locations in the UK and Norway. Differences in the course and intensity of the ICT diffusion cycle, in combination with differences of scale, urban/rural contrasts and economic setting, makes a comparison between the two countries interesting. The firm interviews took place in autumn 2000 and spring 2001, including the first phase of web-site analysis, whereas the second web-site analysis took place in the second half of 2002 until the beginning of 2003. The research has been funded under The Norwegian Research Councils REGUT-programme.