Look back a few years and a website was mostly static text, links and a few graphical images cranked out by crafty technicians in HTML code. Mistakes were common, but it didn't matter too much. Not many people were looking, and those who were were so excited by the new medium that its design didn't seem all that important.

Fast forward a few years and the internet is exploding. Yet corporates are applying the same process that had been used to produce a few pages of online marketing material to a fully interactive internet system on which people do everything from buying washing machines to keeping track of time-sensitive share price movements. These days, an out-of-date price, broken link, or missing graphic is not just embarrassing, it hits companies on their bottom line.

It was this transition to e-business that Mediasurface was set up to tackle when it was established in 1996. As a consultant to blue chip companies in the early 1990s, Ben Hayman, the company's founder, had first-hand experience of the struggle by organisations to cope with the new technology.

"I realised that every company I went to thought their internet problems were unique. But in fact they all had the same troubles. They were struggling to get to grips with the huge amount of online information and what to do with it."

The solution was a business software application that would help companies take control of their websites and integrate them fully with the rest of their businesses.

"We saw that in the rush to gain first-mover advantage and get onto the web, businesses had often failed to take content seriously," he says.

"First-mover advantage is only ever any good if you know where you're going. What had happened was that the role of the internet had expanded, yet companies didn't have the expertise to deal with it."

European expansion

Venture capital funding was found from 3i at first, with later sources including Goldman Sachs, GE Capital and Reuters Greenhouse Fund. The company has since expanded to become the biggest content management software specialist in Europe, with four offices in the UK and bases in The Netherlands, France, Germany and Sweden.

Last year it expanded to the US, opening offices in San Francisco and New York. Clients include banks and financial services companies, such as Scottish Amicable, Nomura and Britannia Building Society, and media companies including CNN and News International. The company is tipped to float on the London Stock Exchange later this year.

Mediasurface's strength is a package that separates the technology from the content, giving non-technical employees more control and letting technical staff concentrate on the overall function of the site.

"The key is the separation of business content, graphical design and technical coding so that any one of these three key aspects can be changed in parallel, at the same time. This avoids creating the bottlenecks all too frequently found in web-based publishing," says Mr Hayman.

What this means in practice is that the web content software prompts individuals for their contributions, converts them into web pages using the correct styles and templates, then routes them through to the right people for authorisation before publishing them online.

The number of staff who need HTML coding experience is cut drastically, because the software encodes the text automatically. Writers, designers, webmasters, security specialists and system managers can all work at full speed, unhampered by the need to finish logically unrelated tasks.

Alertnet, for example, an internet news and communications service for organisations involved in international disaster relief, uses the package to enable charity workers around the world to publish up to date information online. They enter the content management system via a password, and can then submit text, graphics and pictures onto a template that then goes directly onto the site. By having charity workers enter the content directly, the process of online publishing is speeded up considerably.

Carlton New Media, another client, uses the package to draw in and re-present information from other content sources, such as the news service Reuters. The system makes it easier for sites to refresh their editorial content, either using their own stable of writers and multimedia producers or by striking deals with other sites that can provide that material.

Rather than displaying the same set of pages to every visitor, the website can present different information to each customer based on the person's data profile. So a person who has shown online interest in the Manic Street Preachers, say, could be offered Radiohead CDs at a discounted price, while those who are interested in Mozart would be given a special price on Bach.

But if content is king, then content management doesn't just stop with websites. The idea is also that the same content can be seamlessly deployed for publication on everything from television, to mobile handsets to personal digital assistants to the PC.

Effective management

"We can provide a 'media neutral' content management product line where content can be effectively managed and delivered to a wide range of end user touch points, such as the web, TV, personal digital assistants and the phone," says Mr Hayman.

It is this type of application that will help Mediasurface and rival content management specialists' growth in the next few years. The worldwide market for content management is expected to grow from its 1999 levels of $475m to $5.3bn by 2004, according to market analysts at Ovum.

And the downturn that has hit dotcom stocks?

"That just makes the need for a robust infrastructure to keep e-businesses going forward more compelling," says Mr Hayman.