The article focuses on the usage of Web home pages as means of online advertisement by organizations. Viewing an organization's home Web page as its most important online advertisement has profound implications for how home pages are designed, tested and evaluated. Thinking of a home page in advertising terms not only makes sense; it has far-reaching and profound implications for the design and evaluation of Web sites. In this article, details of the home page-as-an-ad proposition are presented and implications of this communications view is described. By definition, an advertisement is a paid form of non personal presentation of ideas, goods or services, by an identified sponsor, with predominant use made of the media of mass communication, and indeed, a home page meets these conceptual criteria. It is paid for by a sponsoring institution/company, it is designed with large audiences in mind and hence is impersonal. It is an entry point to a Web site that promotes one or more ideas, goods, or service, it has an identified sponsor and the Web, with its hundreds of millions of users, is a mass medium.
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Singh et al. (1999) studied this question.
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