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COMPANIES ARE sensing an urgent need to move more--or all-of their businesses online, making Web site development a more complicated and expensive endeavor.
Stepping up to the challenge is a variety of new or repositioned Web developers, presenting marketers with more choices about what type of company should provide their Web presence.
Internet services firms have sprouted like daisies to soak up the demand for advice. Traditional management consulting firms such as Andersen Consulting and advertising agencies such as Young & Rubicam have parlayed their prestigious client rosters into powerful Internet consultancies within their firms.
And hundreds of smaller creative and systems engineering firms have been acquired by the likes of Agency.com, one of the growing breed of Internet consulting agencies, or rolled up to form new conglomerates with thousands of employees, such as Luminant Worldwide and iXL Enterprises.
"Most of these (Internet consulting] companies didn't even exist five years ago," said Tom Rodenhauser, founder and president of Consultinginfo.com. But with the explosion in demand for their services, Rodenhauser said, "none of them has to go looking for clients."
The size of Luminant, a giant, eight-company roll-up formed last fall, was overshadowed within months by the $6 billion merger of Whittman Hart and USWeb/CKS into an 8,000-person...