That's what fashioning a good Web site is all about -- considered no light task by today's B-schools (see Table: A B-School Site Sampler). During the past few years, the Internet has evolved from a small academic forum into a wild frontier of new media. Web traffic is up, especially at B-schools, where, according to RelevantKnowledge, an Internet market research firm that measures Web site traffic and demographics, top school sites can generate upwards of 2 million visitors a month.

Today, a well-designed site can educate prospective students on the ins and outs of a program, generate an increase in worldwide recognition, and ultimately serve to bump up applications. You can understand why: For information-hungry MBA wannabes, the Internet provides an unlimited amount of information. But the mainstream acceptance of the Internet has forced schools to push the envelope. Unlimited content is no longer a differentiator among sites. Now, presentation is key. It's a tricky balancing act, and some schools carry it off better than others.

In a wide-ranging tour of B-school Web sites, this reporter found that most of them follow the same design rules: a front page of menu options that lead to more menu pages, and eventually to useful information. This setup gives a logical progression to the sites and to searches for specific information, but makes it difficult to move around a site without backtracking to the main index. At most sites, after clicking on a link entitled "alumni," for example, users must move back to a main index to locate information about the school's faculty. It's a bit clunky, to say the least. One site I found that avoids this problem is the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business (gsbwww.uchicago.edu), which separates information into broad categories and provides links to the same destinations from several menus.

Menus, however, can also make it hard to quickly get a sense of the differences between schools, especially when every site opens with a similar list of options (like "Academics," "Alumni," "Applicants," "Faculty," or "Students"). And as more B-schools move online (nearly all of the over 700 U.S. MBA programs now have their own sites), they have to work harder to show a unique presence on the Web. By weaving the links on their index page into paragraphs, providing what Ferguson terms an "editorialized site map," Stanford finds a way to stand out from the crowd, not just by writing sentences, but through the diversity of the links included within them.

While some schools concentrate on their site's structure or style of writing, others rely on more obvious ways to set their home pages apart. Harvard Business School's (www.hbs.edu) revamped site, which made its debut on July 1, has new graphics and features that highlight its international appeal. A news ticker and clocks displaying the local time in cities worldwide share space with photos of campus buildings and students lounging in the grass.

Of all the schools that strive to be different, one stands out not for attention-grabbing extras, but for cutting right to the chase -- MIT's Sloan School. Says Vincent Flanders, author of the Web design tutorial Web Pages that Suck -- Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design (www.webpagesthatsuck.com): "They're the only site that understands that the purpose of a Web site is to sell the customers on their product."

Referring to a chart on Sloan's homepage (web.mit.edu/sloan/www) that lists the average number of job offers, base salary, and total compensation for the class of '98, Flanders continues, "My first reaction is 'Let me get my checkbook out. I want to register.' That's the kind of reaction a Web site should elicit. MIT understands that it's in the business of making sure its graduates make lots of money." No other school features these statistics so prominently.

But even without innovative presentation or site design, "business schools have an advantage over most commercial sites," says Flanders. "No matter how crummy the site, people will still crawl through a sewer to get to them because these schools offer their students the chance to make big money." Even so, B-schools need to move beyond gimmicks to provide useful information if they want to hold the attention of students, applicants, and other visitors. Content dealing with program details and admissions and financial aid policies is key.

Hal Kirkwood, a faculty member at Purdue University, provides content-based ratings of many schools' pages at his site (www.bschool.com). Kirkwood's goal is to bring attention to excellent sites, rather than identify the single best business school homepage. He provides a table of the 13 sites he gives a five-star rating for meeting the majority of his criteria, which take into consideration items like electronic admission, student and faculty pages, and online publications.

Kirkwood started his site in 1994 to present research into the design and utility of Web sites and evaluate the information presented. He has witnessed the explosion of B-school sites from about a dozen to over 600, and his reviews have adapted to accommodate technical advances. For example, his site evaluations now take into account innovative and increasingly common special features like virtual tours or student profiles.

One change he has noticed is the increased use of password-protected online areas that provide information to students and faculty but are inaccessible to outsiders. This trend started in response to administrators' concerns about inappropriate material on student homepages and the possibility of online stalkers targeting students. Schools are "becoming more proactive by protecting the personal information of their students inside intranets," Kirkwood says.

While these protections may benefit students, they can also keep outsiders away from information provided by students, and that can be annoying, especially for applicants. Take the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School site (www.wharton.upenn.edu), which is beautifully crafted and loaded with information but keeps outsiders within the official site. Student clubs are listed, but no links are provided to the club homepages; student homepages aren't even alluded to.

A new Student2Student feature, created by a group of 40 volunteer Wharton student ambassadors working with the admissions office, compensates for this division with question-and-answer pages addressing topics like teamwork, admissions, and life in the city. But the impression remains that everything accessible from the outside was preapproved by a Wharton administrator.

Now that visiting B-school sites has clearly become a major pastime for MBA wannabes, those that stand out have a marketing tool that differentiates them from an increasingly competitive pack.


A B-SCHOOL SITE SAMPLER

Surf's Up:

Northwestern (Kellogg) -- The Kellogg Serial (get it?) is a slightly corny but effective part of the site with informal student-written content, providing the scoop on a variety of topics. (www.kellogg.nwu.edu)

USC (Marshall) -- Solid design make this site easy to navigate. A "navigation bar" whose graphics change depending on the current directory is a nice reminder that pages don't have to be identical to make a site coherent. (www.marshall.usc.edu)

University of Iowa (Pappajohn) -- The opening graphic mirrors the look of the new Pappajohn Building. The front page is a model of efficient and effective organization with a Quick Directory that makes menu pages obsolete. (www.biz.uiowa.edu)

Surf's Down:

Columbia -- The front page is stylish and informative but takes a long time to load. Java innovations like scrolling banners bring more life to pages but can be overused. (www.columbia.edu/cu/business)

UVA (Darden) -- The splashy page introducing its MBA overview is exciting but just wastes time. The program descriptions are simply online adaptations of a brochure and could make better use of the Internet. (www.darden.edu)