Setting Your Sites On The WebA guide to creating a home page that customers will turn to.

Even the smallest of businesses can cruise the information superhighway into the global marketplace. Ask Ann Giard-Chase, owner of Joan & Annie's Brownies in Williston, Vermont, who began selling brownies in 1988 from a pushcart at fairs and festivals and then entered the wholesale market in 1990.

In 1994, trying to regain the customer intimacy lost while using wholesale distributors as middlemen, Giard-Chase created a mail order catalog and a Web site (http://mmink.com/mmink/dossiers/jaa/brownies.html). Now her mailing list consists of over 3,000 names, and orders for her brownies come via mail and the Internet. And relations with customers have never been better. "At the carts, when the customers got the brownies, you could see the smiles on their faces," she says. Now she sees their "smiles" through their enthusiastic e-mail responses.