(FORTUNE Magazine) – In the tiny republic of Slovenija, a single Microsoft employee keeps his country's Internet surfers abreast of developments at the giant software company. He is just one of 400 editors, speaking 24 languages in 47 countries, devoted to navigating the fast-flowing river of information through Microsoft's 300,000 pages on the World Wide Web.

In New York City, a talented hot-shop of graphic artists, writers, and programmers called Rare Medium spins out some of the liveliest corporate sites on the Web, from Betty Crocker's recipes and menus for General Mills to a Pampers diapers page for Procter & Gamble, with advice on how to raise a baby.

The pace of development of the Web as a tool of information, selling, and research is so fast it is as if Gutenberg had gone from hand-set type to high-speed offset in a dozen years. Unlike information technologies of the past, the Internet is chaotic in its development because it truly belongs to anyone who cares to post a personal Web page. The speed of "innovation, lawlessness, and creativity," says Seattle designer Bob Boiko, is in proportion to the huge number of individuals creating the Web.

And yet a certain structure and method, even order, is slowly emerging at the hands of corporations, the wealthiest exploiters of the Web. Their motivation for spending between $200,000 to $1 million to create a site can range from hoisting a virtual corporate image to selling a product online. And the quality of the resulting sites varies just as much.

We've selected more than two dozen of the best corporate sites of various size, longevity, and description. Although the choices were entirely subjective, all these sites meet the criteria issued by those who closely monitor the development of the Web. They have a simplicity, even elegance, of design, the text is spare, the navigation from page to page is clearly directed, and they are encyclopedic in their detail. And all are fast to download. Sun Microsystems designer Jakob Nielsen says the short attention span of Internet surfers means that if a Web page takes longer than ten seconds to fully appear on the screen, it can be considered a failure.

The top sites range across the Web's wide canvas--selling sporting goods and software, giving advice on health and broken hearts, marketing stock, and helping travelers book their trips. Many are interactive, seeking visitors' comments and appraisals. They present images, brand names, and, above all, information--thousands of pages of it.

WHAT'S IT DO?

In the anarchic world of the Web, there is little consensus, no official book of rules, and no established judges. But as companies seek to reach out and hold an impatient audience, it is possible to discern distinct categories. The trick for anyone designing a site, says Dave Farkas, who teaches Web theory and information design in the University of Washington's technical communications department, is to ask the questions: What kind of site is it? And what is the site intending to achieve?

One such category might be called general promotion and brand identity, because it uses all the tools of the media to attract and hold consumers. General Mills doesn't try to sell a direct image or even cake mix. Instead, its Betty Crocker site offers personalized weekly menu plans and household tips. Hearst doesn't hawk subscriptions for Redbook magazine at its Homearts site; it offers personal advice on sex and marriage, beauty and style, and even provides horoscopes.

This is, says Rare Medium partner Bob Stratton, a great strategy for allowing a company's brand to "bask in the glow of the information it is providing." If Procter & Gamble's Pampers site, Total Baby Care, is a family resource offering critical information on raising small children, the name of the product will become associated with the authority and credibility of the site, which in the case of Pampers, uses the advice and opinions of experts in pediatrics.

Such pages are clearly aimed at attracting women visitors, who are becoming a potent force in Web usage. According to a survey by Find/SVP, a New York research firm, nearly ten million women, about a third of all visitors, currently use the Internet in the U.S., more than three times the total at the end of 1995. And more than 40% of these women began browsing during the past year.

MAMA SAYS

Possibly because of this, many sites avoid any semblance of the hard sell, preferring a forthright and even whimsical approach to counteract any notion of a corporate association. Take Lipton's Ragu pasta products site--a creation of Fry Multimedia in Ann Arbor, Mich.--where there is not a hint of the corporation, but instead "Mama," offering everything from old world recipes to basic cooking instructions to lessons in Italian. And always with the imperative "don't forget your Mama." The Ragu brand identity, not the corporate parent (Unilever) is paramount. There is, says Web instructor Farkas, "a kind of ironic tension because you know this is a big corporation, but you participate in the game of letting it pretend it's Mama."

HEALTHY, WEALTHY & WISE

Women and families are also very much on the minds of American Express, with its Advisor site for financial planning, and Glaxo Wellcome, with its much-visited Healthy Lives. Advisor is largely a collection of user-friendly financial tools to help users plan for their investments, taxes, college education, and retirement. Healthy Lives offers detailed and literate information on health and disease. Its articles, on everything from depression to migraines, are models of precision and conciseness.

Most corporations believe the best gauge of a winning site is the number of visitors. For example, Betty Crocker's site had 300,000 visitors (or 7.4 million page views) in the first two months following its online inaugural in late July, and Pampers was receiving six million hits, or page views, a month at mid-year.

The true measure of success for companies in the transactional category is the bottom line. Retail sales on the Internet this year will be $2.6 billion, up well over 200% from 1996, and this figure will grow to $15.5 billion in 2000, according to Jupiter Communications, a New York research firm.

These billions will be spread all over the Web. Sabre Group's Travelocity lets you book airline tickets without visiting a travel agent. REI has put its entire store of outdoor gear at your command. And Lindner Funds will let you open an account and trade online in any of 400 non-proprietary stock funds. Just as versatile is discount broker Charles Schwab's e.Schwab, which allows customers to make trades of up to 1,000 shares for a fee of just $29.95.

But there are many sites that don't succeed as well as these, Web designers say, because they are too complex, overloaded with graphics, or erratically organized. Another problem in cyberspace is bad links--the so-called hyperlinks to other pages and Websites that don't work or fail to produce the advertised information. One too many trips down a dead end is sure to turn off even the most dedicated Web surfer.

Some sites don't sell; they give stuff away. One of the major reasons people look at over one million pages a day on Microsoft's mammoth site is not just for the reams of insights and issues, but also to download free software such as Web Publishing Wizard and Proxy Server. Microsoft is the clear leader in this category of marketing sites, which Farkas calls "deep, broad, and even cluttered" in their attempts to provide comprehensive product information.

Microsoft is probably the most voluminous corporate site on the Web, with a seemingly endless assemblage of detail. Seattle's Boiko, whose company Chase Bobko is one of the site's designers, calls it "more like an ant colony than a kingdom." The editor-in-chief of this behemoth, Tim Sinclair, says it is controlled by editors in all of Microsoft's bewildering array of business units, from product groups to customer segments to international operations. Eight times a day, every three hours, the site changes somewhere in this endless chain of information. So often does the site change, says Sinclair, that in order to calm customer complaints, Microsoft began publishing Web magazines a few months ago for certain areas, such as small business, games, and education, just to keep visitors up to date.

Other sites in this category, like Circuit City, Nike, and Revlon, appear to have resolved the tension among graphic designers, writers, and programmers to produce what Boiko calls "informational design." Two years ago the emphasis was on presentation and layout; now the aim is to give visitors easy access to vast wells of information.

TO THE POINT

Sun Microsystems was a pioneer in the plain vanilla field. Designer Nielsen, who led the company's Website project, found that the better the organization of a page, the more faith users have in the information it presents and in the sponsoring company. He also found that--because research shows reading speeds on a computer screen are 25% slower than on the written page--endless verbiage is self defeating. Concise, objective writing and key words that are highlighted are essential. "The Web is a cool, cognitive medium," says Nielsen. "It is exactly the opposite of television's emotional style."

The struggle between glitz and information is barely evident in the more broad-based, corporate site category. These sites--something akin to annual reports on the Web--attempt to impart a great deal: product and shareholder information, corporate mission statements, company history, and press releases. Instead, many large corporate sites appear so confused in their purpose that they present a picture of corporate bureaucracies tugging in many directions for a piece of the site.

If there is any attempt at whimsy in this category it is on the McDonald's site, with its bright colors and cheerful images, and its introductory animation of a man pulling out his ladder to clean the golden arches. The German photography group Agfa-Gevaert also attempts to bring color and vibrancy to its densely packed site, with the level of information that graphic artists and photographers would be hard put to find elsewhere. Sony's site is rich in detail, too. But AT&T is far more representative of this category, with its no-nonsense site opening up with the company's latest stock price and headlines from the AT&T newsroom. There are easy links to other parts of the site, such as AT&T Labs and WorldNet Internet service. The site is fast to load, simple to explore, and basic in its design.

Finally, there is the category of information media, a wide digression of news, features, and comment. Critics see the best sites as "cyber-oriented," which refers to the slickness and immediacy evident on Websites, such as the Discovery Channel's science and nature site for children and Disney's ESPN SportsZone. The designers of these sites know the Web surfer's attention span is increasingly short and contrive to capture fleeting seconds with a minimum of essential information.

Possibly the best example of a virtual magazine--or what Web people call an e-zine--is Salon Magazine, a tightly conceived site of social comment, politics, and book and movie reviews, none longer than 1,500 words, sponsored by Adobe Systems and Borders Books & Music. The e-zine produces eight new articles a day, and slick it certainly is: a sort of cyber-New Yorker, with the brittleness of a literary cocktail party.

The sheer anarchy of the Web, though, has allowed the intrusion of commercial objectives into editorial space. Ads exploding out of text, even the blurring of boundaries between editorial content and advertising, are just some of the problems that need to be addressed by the Web's inchoate structure. Last June, the American Society of Magazine Editors published guidelines in an attempt to bring the same distinction between editorial content and ads in print publications to Web magazines. It remains to be seen whether or not this will be successful in the electronic medium.

Such problems show the degree to which marketers are seizing on the Web as a future source of immense profit. And yet communication remains the main function of this vast new medium. "People are beyond the novelty of the Web," says Microsoft's Sinclair. "They just want answers to questions." The problem, for this generation of developers, is to make the answers accessible, concise, and, above all, honest.