A preliminary study of the evolution of SMEs Web sites in the UK

There have been some attempts to study the dynamic nature of Web sites, but there is still little research evidence to explain why and how organizations, especially SMEs, continually evolve their Web presence. It has been suggested that the adoption of Internet technologies by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) follows a sequence of stages. These models imply a development of their Web sites from the most basic to the most advanced level of sophistication and integration. However, these staged models have been discredited in the literature and are now accepted as being flawed and inadequate to describe the actual adoption of Internet technologies by SMEs. A model distinguishing three dimensions of change (process, content, and drivers) has been developed to study and classify this evolution. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to undertake a preliminary empirical study of the evolution of a sample of SMEs' Web sites from the UK.