(FORTUNE Magazine) – SANTA CLARA, CA. Founded 1995 Revenues: none employees: 46 Private www.usweb.com

"Welcome to our CORPORATE WEB SITE! To see a letter from our CEO, click HERE. If you want to see his photograph, click HERE. If you want to see our 1994 annual report, click HERE. Thank you for visiting! COME AGAIN!"

That's about it for your average company Website: Poorly organized, poorly designed, downright dull. Businesses end up with shabby digs in cyberspace for two reasons: cost and confusion. Hiring a topnotch professional designer seems an iffy proposition when few Websites generate revenue. and even if a business wants to burn money on a spiffy site, deciding where to turn is not easy. Of the hundreds of design boutiques, some are OK, some incompetent, and most are completely unknown to the average business.

USWeb is looking to change all that by creating a worldwide chain of Web design firms. CEO Joe Firmage, 25, thinks that a global set of affiliates can eventually cut the price of Website creation and maintenance in half.

Web designers, who tend to be creative iconoclasts, hardly seem franchise fodder. But unlike, say, McDonald's, USWeb doesn't expect its franchises to be clones; instead, it encourages the firms to be as individual and distinctive as they like--just so long as they're good. Franchises will return 7% of their revenues to the parent; in exchange, they get access to USWeb's design technologies and the use of a globally advertised brand name. The company has signed up eight franchisees and is racing to sift through more than 1,200 applications.

Firmage, with four partners, started USWeb last December, and has been working overtime to meld a team of experts in software, network hardware, marketing, and finance. Think it's easy? Think again. "This is brain surgery," he sighs.

--Tim Carvell