Of the two, bandwidth is usually the more important constraint. "Lots of people think you need a massive Unix box for a 56K line, but why spend $15,000 for that when you can serve (and saturate) a 56K line with an SE/30," said Chuck Shotton, author of MacHTTP and WebStar.

Still, there are different ways to fill up a T1. "One hundred 14.4 users will fill a T1 line differently than 10 T1 users. Sometimes the sheer number of connections can max out a site before you run out of bandwidth," Shotton said. "In that case, you may be better off getting a more powerful server - but remember, anything more than 30 to 40 simultaneous connections will max out a T1 line."

Shotton said that if you are going to add machines, "it's better to add like to like." (Users can find a white paper describing how to scale at http://louvx.biap.com/performance/.)

For some users, though, sites are a mix not only of Macs, but of Macs, Windows and Unix boxes. The American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., for example, is running its site on an Apple Workgroup Server 9150 and using a Unix server to host its Science magazine. "If you can serve pages faster you are less likely to saturate the line," said Clifton Martin, an AAAS computer specialist. "Sure, 30 users can saturate a line, but if you can serve pages faster, it's a lot less likely."

While Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator is clearly the dominant browser, it's not the only one out there. Make sure users with other browsers can also read every page. "Offering Netscape-only pages is like having a store that says, 'Sorry, we only serve blondes here,' " said Rick Tracewell, a partner in Scotts Valley, Calif.-based TNT Media Inc., which produces the Internet Mall.

Serving every browser is getting harder because the HTML standard is fragmenting. That's unfortunate, but proprietary extensions to Web standards aren't going to disappear, and different browsers will continue to present the same page in different ways. "It started with tables, which first raised the question of whether you build a second set of pages for people who don't have Netscape or just decide you won't serve them," Tracewell said.

"We haven't avoided tables, but we also try to have a version of each table that is straight text, and that second set of pages can be a pain," Tracewell added. "I check our sites with as many browsers as possible and, in fact, I keep an America Online account specifically to check how our sites look with their browser."

The other aspect of building to suit the audience is bandwidth, which determines the appropriate page size. Users on 28.8-Kbps links, for example, need about one second per kilobyte to download a page, which means that large graphics aren't appropriate. "We design for 28.8 and figure people with faster modems will like our sites all the more," Tracewell said.

On the other hand, some sites operate under the assumption that the end users are on high-speed links. "We have also worked on pieces of an intranet for Silicon Graphics [Inc.], and since everyone there is on a T1 or T3, I don't worry about bandwidth as much," Tracewell said.

"You have to attack the problem from the top down and get upper management involved, because at a company this size you can't brief every senior manager with a piece of information that should be on the server," Neal said. "If you say to people, 'We need information for the corporate Web server,' they just look at you strangely. You have to get to the division managers and get them to change their reporting structure."

Shotton suggested that managers create systems that make it easy to publish data on the Web. "The best thing is to have content development tools that people can use as part of their normal work process," he said. "For example, some people just take their Microsoft Word documents, put them in a folder, index them with AppleSearch and put them up on the Web."

Other tools can help keep a site looking fresh without consuming a lot of time. "The trick is to make it easy and to automate the changing of the content," Shotton said. "NetCloak (from Maxum Development Corp.) has lots of utilities for randomizing content with pictures and messages depending on the time of day or day of the week or browser, so it lets you change the appearance of your site without a lot of manual labor."

Another approach is to forge links to external sites with rapidly changing databases. "We have a script that checks the stock market, and there are lots of things like that you can set up one time to provide variable content you don't have to maintain," Shotton said.

Server logs can help identify user populations, spot performance problems and even adjust the structure of a Web site to put popular resources on top.

Statistics are also needed to develop advertising revenue. "We use [Kitchen Sink Software Inc.'s] ServerStat to analyze the logs, and that's useful because we do some advertising and charge people to be on our site," said AAAS' Martin. "We are also looking at [EveryWare Development Corp.'s] Bolero, which seems to track everything you might want to know."

Finding the right measurement scheme is very much an individual matter. Shotton, for example, is using a script to count how many demo copies of his software are downloaded every day. New measurement software should help. "One of the coolest new tools is Bolero, which is complementary to [Kitchen Sink's] WebStat and gives you a full-blown click-trail analysis," Shotton said. "It is a really impressive piece of software that does real-time statistics gathering for marketing and sales."

One of the most important reasons to keep stats, according to Shotton, is that "people further up the food chain want to see them."

"If you can't measure your site on the basis of fulfilling business results, you are probably not doing the right thing," said Greg Stuart, senior vice president and director of interactive communications at Wunderman, Cato & Johnson, a New York-based marketing firm. "With the Web and on-line services, we know exactly how much it costs us to acquire new customers or maintain existing relationships."

Again, good server logs can help. Charles Mokotoff, a Webmaster at the Division of Computer Research and Technology at The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., said, "We have to justify our existence to upper management, and we've used the WebStar logs to show we're not just playing around.

"We use WebStat to analyze our WebStar log so we get a good idea of which pages are being hit most often and from where," Mokotoff added. "We have also talked about using the statistics to adjust the structure of the Web site."

Three page-creation and site-management products are particularly worth watching: Microsoft Corp.'s FrontPage, Netscape's Navigator Gold (both soon to be released for the Mac), and Adobe Systems Inc.'s PageMill and SiteMill.

Navigator Gold and PageMill are designed for the creation of individual pages, and they shield users from the complexity of HTML. FrontPage and SiteMill go a little further, helping to manage collections of pages, maintaining consistency through a site and checking link integrity.

There is also a growing number of special-purpose utilities to convert file formats to HTML from text, RTF and PostScript. You'll also find tools for creating Web pages in programs such as QuarkXPress; Adobe PageMaker, Illustrator and FrameMaker; Qualcomm Inc.'s Eudora; and Microsoft Excel. For users who simply want to make their existing desktop published documents available on the Web, Adobe Acrobat is worth a look.

There are two basic approaches: clips and streams. For applications that require high quality, clips, which are essentially large files, are the way to go because they can be created at any level of resolution.

Though they can't compete with clips in terms of sound or image quality, streams transform the Internet into a broadcast medium. It may sound like bad short-wave, but for users who want to reach audiences on high-speed links or broadcast an event, streams are the way to go.

For now, Progressive Networks' RealAudio is the dominant player for streams, and to some extent for clips, too. "When the audio stuff first started there were probably 30 formats, but, like it or not, RealAudio won out for the moment, and now we give users a choice between RealAudio, .au and .WAV files," Tracewell said.

Large sites can be improved dramatically with search engines, and sites that attract a loyal following of users may benefit from discussion groups and mailing lists.

While transactions on the Web aren't that important yet, it may be worth studying the options.

"It's a no-brainer to get WebStar to work with SSL [Secure Sockets Layer], but for just doing credit cards, it may not be necessary," Shotton said. "Using a credit card number over the Net, even when it's unencrypted, is probably safer than using it in a mall.

"SSL is more compelling for privacy issues, such as medical records; for companies sending proprietary information between sites; and for things like stock trading, where you don't have recourse if something goes wrong," Shotton said.

That means internal databases, catalogs, inventory and shipping records can be made accessible with a mouse click. Federal Express Corp., for example, lets customers track package delivery at its Web site.

"We are using the Web to deliver information within our company, and the Web gives everyone, whether a Mac, PC or Unix user, access to the system," said Steve Holden, a systems analyst with Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, a research and engineering company in San Diego. "People can use whatever client they want, and from a security standpoint, the Mac ensures that there are no hacks or break-ins. The security is a real win and the reason why we don't use a Unix server."

New tools to help integrate Web sites with SQL databases are becoming widely available. "There are some very good interfaces to SQL databases," Shotton said. "EveryWare did the Tango product for the Butler database, but it now talks to any ODBC-compliant database."

There is usually some overlap between information on public and internal Web servers. To set different permissions, Mokotoff and his colleagues, for example, have elected to run multiple copies of WebStar. "Setting different privileges is a problem, so what we have is the publicly accessible Web stuff in one folder and intranet materials in another."

Intranets may one day replace a range of groupware programs now on the market. "Web-based intranets are a competitor to Lotus Notes, and it is easier to get them to work," Shotton said.

"They are not quite as sexy or integrated, but you don't need 10 programmers to create something useful."