ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603150098
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Home Pages
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON
Hey, what was that, you ask? Cruising the World Wide Web the other night looking for hiking spots in Western Virginia and you spotted a guide to Botetourt County's industrial parks?
Yep, cyberspace is the newest platform for dueling economic developers. For years communities have competed for corporate expansions by pushing incentives and taking executives on highly orchestrated site visits. The latest wrinkle is that economic developers are exploring the Internet, or information highway, with the same fervor that tourists spill onto the Blue Ridge Parkway when the rhododendron bloom.
These developers are doing more than looking, however. They are pulling over and planting electronic billboards that feature color pictures of industrial parks and glowing statistical portraits of the economy in their communities. The information is instantly available to the 20 or 30 million users of the Internet, a worldwide computer network, and the World Wide Web, its primary collection of text and pictures.
They hope a company that is looking for an expansion site or a new address all together will use a desktop computer to cruise the electronic highway and will see the information and want to visit for real.
Suppose a manufacturer in Los Angeles decides to move the company to the East. If Virginia is under consideration, the company's executives could take a desktop tour of this area's industrial parks. Better yet, they could do that without tipping off Virginia authorities to the company's interest and triggering a barrage of mailings and phone calls from the Old Dominion.
For you and me, these electronic advertisements make for dull viewing. A profile of a Floyd County industrial park found at http://www.bev.net/blacksburg/pdc/ is peppered with facts such as the sewer line flow rate. For my cyber-dime, I would rather look up lost friends on my recent favorite site, Switchboard, which at
http://www2.switchboard.com/bin/cgiqa.dll? provides access to a 90-million listing phone and address directory.
Or call up
http://uptown.turnpike.net/L/lang/hoth2o.html and gaze at pictures of natural hot springs.
But in final analysis, the success of these relatively low-cost ventures by chambers of commerce, industrial development organizations and government agencies would mean more jobs in our area. The launch of a respectable page may cost a few thousand dollars, although schoolchildren have designed crude ones. There are ongoing costs to rent space on host computers and to service and update information.
At this point, results are few. This new-age advertising by computer has generated a few leads for certain organizations, such as the New River Economic Development Alliance in Dublin, whose page is at http://www.bev.net/blacksburg/pdc/alliance/alliance.html but so far it hasn't lured any new companies or jobs here.
Still, one expert thinks communities with an on-line presence create a favorable image for themselves that bodes well for economic development.
"There's a perception that the community is modern and up to date," said Dean Whittaker, a computer consultant based in Holland, Mich., who is advising the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs about on-line issues and teaches computers to economic developers.
In this climate of tight budgets, corporations will be more inclined to use a computer for information if it simplifies the search for expansion sites, he said. But he doesn't expect computers to become the main search tool for drawing up a list of choices for some time. Most of what economic developers are making available is too primitive, he said.
This month, Botetourt County launched its home page, the term used for a contribution to the offerings on the Web. Located at http://www.infi.net/~botco/ it sets forth a promise to companies that are considering doing business in the county: "We make things simple. That's not just our claim. It's our bottom line."
The Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership will be next, hoping to have its site up and running by the end of April. The Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce has a target date for its offering a few months down the road. Roanoke County's economic developers hope to follow suit, but aren't sure when.
It's perhaps no surprise that home pages are in vogue in these parts. Virginia Tech is a recognized page designer, having been chosen by the state Department of Economic Development to design its page, which is scheduled to appear in July.
But the tiny Alleghany Highlands Chamber of Commerce was ahead of them all. Since November, it published a page at http://www.comet.chv.va.us/AlleghanyHighland/ that describes ``a lush mountain playground'' with lots to do. The site isn't at all sophisticated, but it creates a presence that even some much larger chambers lack.
Beth Doughty, the partnership's executive director, isn't fully convinced economic developers with home pages will be more successful, "but everybody's doing it so you kind of have to have it." Doughty became convinced her group needed a page after a representative of a company that is considered a prospective new employer in the area used The Roanoke Times' home page at http://www.infi.net/roatimes/ to look up facts while preparing for a visit to see a site here.
Botetourt County's budget director and in-house computer expert, Karen Rutschman, could hardly believe that 20 people sent electronic messages and another dozen called to say they had seen the county's new page. "I didn't realize how many people are surfing the Net," she said.
Showing that these home pages stimulate the tourist business as well, a Florida couple sent the Alleghany folks an electronic message saying they had visited Alleghany once before, recently stumbled across the chamber's home page and now feel enticed to visit again.
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