I have been thinking a lot lately about the Internet and World Wide Web. Would it make sense for our small enterprise to have a page on the Web? How would anyone know to look for us there? What are the potential sales? What is the downside? A lot of questions that I'd like answered before I tried it.

Certainly access providers and home page designers will tell you it's the thing to do. They are trying to make a sale. Many times the reason given for getting into cyberspace is that "everyone's doing it". It seems like every company of any size has a presence on the WWW -- but how many micro-companies are out there and have they found it worthwhile?

I'm sure many of you reading this are frequent visitors to the WWW. I recently got back on-line and have spent a few hours looking around. What a bunch of stuff? An absolutely incredible amount of information and advertisements. Easy to see the fascination of just looking around for hours on end.

The few times that I needed information from a vendor and knew their website, it was great to be able to visit the site and get what I needed so easily. If I was just doing a search, then I found it easy to get bogged down or distracted. I need to learn to specify searches precisely to avoid wasting time.

I would like to hear from anyone who has a small company and has tried to sell their product on the WWW. My new email address is eltury@worldnet.att.net. Better yet, perhaps someone could write an article for this newsletter describing their experience.

Our company does business with several catalog companies and at least one of them has sent us information about getting into their on-line catalog. It didn't seem cheap. After all, can't they just scan in the catalog photo and make it part of the cyber-catalog very easily? What is really involved? I don't know, but I'd like to.

But mainly, I'd like to know if it makes sense for a small manufacturer of a niche product to have a home page on the ever-expanding World Wide Web.