Currently there are over 1 billion websites on the Internet with many more being uploaded everyday. This has widened the number of people who are online to hundreds of millions. In the past 10 years, we have witnessed an explosion of the World Wide Web users with the opening of large population areas such as India and China. The rise of China as a manufacturing power has also flooded the world with affordable digital goods among them computers meaning that more and more people are now able to access the Internet. With an influx of web surfers now reaching well into the hundreds of millions world wide. Businesses are awakening to the fact that a without a web presence they could be losing the cutting edge that could translate into their demise.

Despite the many reports of identity theft online, websites and web transactions are actually getting safer. With companies such as PayPal setting the trend in secure Internet transactions, more people are becoming more confident to shop online. This means that the number of people that are searching the web for goods and services with the view of spending money is increasing exponentially. Without a website therefore, businesses find themselves unable to compete in today's digital marketplace.

As we've just mentioned, Internet commerce is getting more secure. In the initial stages of e-commerce, only major companies used to have the ability to deliver quality products from via the Internet by promising secure transactions. Today technology has revolutionized security. It is now common place for billions of dollars to exchange hands daily online through secure websites.

Another factor to consider that is causing small businesses to make the transition to online business is faster Internet. When the Internet first moved from commercial into people's homes, digital signals used to be transmitted via the phone line. This was called dial-up Internet and was characterized by the presence of a noise modem that was also costly and cumbersome. As websites became more and more sophisticated with premium graphics and animations not to mention movies and streaming video, dial-up was clearly unable to cope with the bandwidth and there was the need for faster Internet. Broadband Internet or High-speed Internet was born. Pioneered by such companies as AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon and EarthLink, high-speed Internet radically transformed the way we view websites. It is now easy to perform multiple tasks online including stream data such as video and audio with relative ease.

High speed Internet has also transformed the way we do business online making transactions faster and more secure. A recent study shows that people with high-speed Internet tend to spend more money online that their counterparts possessing a dial-up connection. This has resulted in a mad rush to transition to high-speed with some countries such as Singapore now being 100% broadband.

With this kind of digital environment, small business have been forced to adapt an online presence in order to service. With more people online now, small businesses can no longer rely on walk-in customers and convectional advertising.