Electronic brochures were the first business-oriented sites to appear in the e-marketplace. These basic sites had an extremely narrow focus. Essentially, they created a visual Internet presence for a company that described its goods, its services, and perhaps its corporate history and philosophy (In some cases the purpose might not have been much more than demonstrating that the company was on the "cutting edge" and had entered the Internet age). While these sites represented an important first step for commerce on the Web, they were little more than electronic signage backed up with a limited amount of more or less static information. Since they were not central to the hosting organization's business objectives, they required little attention from business managers and certainly did not require strategic management.

Although fine for their time, the architecture underlying these sites severely restricted their functionality, expansion opportunities, and the ease with which they could be modified. Since the content was coded into the Web page HTML code, any changes to content required that the Web site code itself be updated. And since content and format were coded together one viewable page at a time, any change to site design, content or code, required that one or more developers be involved in a mini (or sometimes major) development project.

If changes were small and infrequent, the company's IT resources could handle them within the constraints of page-at-a-time publishing. However, this publishing process resulted in a labor-intensive and time-consuming bottleneck when it was necessary to change or add substantial amounts of information and especially if frequent updates were required. Businesses using the page at a time publishing process soon discovered that it was entirely unsuitable for the fast pace of the Internet with its ever-increasing demand for content, frequent updates and additional functionality. The "Site Under Construction" notices that were once so prevalent are a reminder of the inadequacies of this architecture and the processes used to manage it.

In the final analysis, brochure sites just couldn't do very much! Restrained by the limitations of their architecture, they could not respond to the market's demand for additional functionality. Since sites of this type were cumbersome to modify, lacking the ability to transact business, and unable to produce site differentiation or personalized content, they quickly became technically and functionally obsolete.