That propelled us into looking for a Web solution as a more efficient way to communicate with our agents. The companies that we compete with locally had at least some sort of a brochure-ware site. We felt that since we established a Web site later than our competitors, we wanted to take it a step further. We needed to find a company that could Web-extend the information that was already sitting on our system. The agents are really our customers and they know their clients.
Agents can also access company newsletters and commission and production reports on-line.
Plans to continue expanding services are already in development. The site had to be easy to use, very easy to navigate, and load very quickly. We sacrificed heavy color graphics to reduce load time. The difficulty comes in developing an event driven application for the Internet. You have to be concerned with the way that browsers function and the way that users can interact with your application.