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You can further fine-tune your site by including a useful search tool that will help users find information on your site.

Content discussion capabilities, meanwhile, give site visitors a way to express and exchange the ideas which your Web page content generates.

Personalization Needs to Be A+ Recognizing visitors to your Web site and treating each one uniquely is a friendly gesture. The people visiting your Web site have varying preferences, skill levels and attitudes--all of which your Web site can take into consideration as it displays content.

There are several ways to uncover the preferences and interests of the person using your Web site. You could ask for information through a sign-up registration process that consists of one or more Common Gateway Interface (CGI)-based forms. You may already have information about your site visitors in an in-house database.

Although potentially tricky if carried t o extremes, an alternative is to program the Web server to monitor a person's page visits and determine--perhaps through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based inference engine--the visitor's interests. For example, you browse a car deale rship's Web page, register your name and address and then spend several minutes examining the specifications, options and pricing for a particular car. A smart Web server will note which pages you visited, how far you drilled down for further details and how much time you spent at each page. It can then send you additional information--via e-mail or regular mail--about a car or put you in touch with a sales representative.

On a corporate intranet, you can personalize a Web site with links to an employee database. When users log on, information specific to their jobs could be made available.

Delphi (www.delphi.com), an online service whose popularity waned in the shadow of Ameri ca Online and CompuServe, is making a comeback by using personalization to make its Web presence more attractive. Delphi software tracks the discussions you follow and adds them to your "agenda," a user-specific, dynamic hot list of forums.

Delphi's software mechanism for recognizing users relies on a logon cookie. For each session, Delphi generates a specific ID based on the logon ID, and stores it in your browser's cookie file. The new ID participates in browser requests for Web pages. Delphi computers store information about customers' preferences and viewing habits, tying the information to a customer via the specific ID. If the cookie file is deleted, the system cannot associate you with your personal information.

In another service, Business Factory, which is run by Delphi and geared toward business users, server-based software flags news items with keywords and company names. On a preferences screen, Business Factory customers indicate their areas of interest. The software then ensures that the customer sees news items relevant to the stored preferences.

Testing is critical when you're personalizing your Web site. I recently visited the Web site of the Wall Street brokerage firm Deloitte and Touche (www.peerscape.com). The site wanted to personalize itself for me, but I never got beyond the initial sign-up registration form. The CGI-based registration form contained about 25 questions, some of which were list boxes. For example, choosing a list-box entry produced this message: