The Joost deal may improve things, depending largely on how user-friendly the site is.

This user-friendly site offers information contained in the Michelin Red Guides, including restaurants, hotels and points of interest.

A user-friendly site to learn classic napkin folds is Milliken & Company (www.millikentablelinen.com), a maker of commercial and home table linens.

"There is no question this was a really good year," said Donna Hoffman, co-director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at Vanderbilt University, who said that redesigned, user-friendly sites with more products have "removed the final barriers" to online purchases.

It is perhaps not surprising that his campaign has the most user-friendly site of all the major presidential candidates.

As for bulbs, Light Bulb Warehouse (www.lightbulbwarehouse.com) and Top Bulb (www.topbulb.com) have user-friendly sites, with helpful sketches to identify hard-to-find bulbs.

Beyond the obvious benefit of helping customers find answers to their questions without hitting the "help" button or typing key words into a search box, these technologies can help create much more user-friendly sites, so customers do not have problems in the first place, executives and analysts said.

In contrast, Hilton's user-friendly site requested specific reservation information, then noted that someone would telephone with a rate quote.

I hope that you will use this more up-to-date, user-friendly site to learn more about the issues that I am working on in our nation's capital.

At Myspace, Mike Macadaan worked to make the site cohesive and user-friendly.