User involvement in development of web based publishing

The theme of this paper is development of Web applications used by an organization to publish information to groups of users outside the organization. The paper focus on the challenge for the Web development organizations to help organizations finding and characterizing target groups for web sites and to create Web applications that can be used to communicate certain information and values to these specific target groups. The paper reports from a field study of a project developing a Web application to be used for information publishing to a number of target groups. The field study showed that such a project is different from other types of software development with respect to the point in time the different groups of users are identified and to what extend these groups are involved in the development process. The conclusion is that development of Web based information publishing is characterized by the importance of branding instead of selling products, a characterization of the user of the information system instead of involvement in the development process, that there is no work to be supported be the Web application, and finally that the task of "branding" includes more than usability issues.