A two-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is perched on top of an old metal filing cabinet behind him. He had put together a dissertation prospectus on the Elizabethan honor code as a major theme in Shakespeare's plays and was headed for a career in academia when he discovered there was a dearth of professorships to be had, and he detoured into a career in marketing. There are many factors that determine the overall quality of a Web site, Laporte says, including overall appearance, ease of navigation, and how quickly the material downloads. DISC's clients in the area include, among others, Hannoush Jewelers, Fly by Night Futon furniture store in Northampton, R. Michelson Galleries, Kleen-Bore Inc. in Easthampton, GBI Marketing in Bernardston and Hardigg Industries in South Deerfield. Some of his customers found him through free seminars he's given in the area.
Search engines are huge indexes of thousands of Web sites.
The engines deliver their selections usually in a ranked order on the users' screen, usually with remarkable speed. Search engines are not the only means by which people find Web sites. But Laporte cites various studies, including one done at the Georgia Institute of Technology, that show that search engines and links are the two most frequently used methods. After the 10th entry or the first page, there tends to be rapid drop off of users, who are notoriously short on patience, having come, rightly or wrongly, to expect instant results from their queries on the Internet. DISC does not guarantee these results, but the company does offer its customers tools by which to measure actual results.