A QUEENSLAND Web designer is building a global network which he believes will become the easiest way to travel around the Internet.

Scott Balson, managing director of Ipswich-based Global Web Builders has launched GLOBE (Global On-line Business Enterprises) and is franchising it around the world.

GLOBE is designed to be a directory to all Web sites in a country, with each country linked together.

"The Internet is becoming very cluttered. If you go into Lycos for example and put in "property" you will come up with about 1,000 different options" Mr Balson said.

"The problem is that Lycos and Yahoo, which are the traditional ways that people actually publicise their commercial Webs, are becoming irrelevant. There's just too much stuff in there."

The GLOBE project has some tough competition ahead of it with search tools like Lycos and Yahoo already established as some of the most popular places on the World Wide Web.

Mr Balson said the Internet was in a predicament with a glut of unmanageable but valuable information. And the situation was ironically caused by the success of the network. The more people who put interesting content on the network the harder it was to stumble around.

The idea of GLOBE is to promote the clients of Global Web Builders but at the same time include an extensive guide to as may other Web pages as possible. The success of this strategy is now being offered to carefully selected enterprise holders around the world.

"The whole thing is traffic. What's the use of having a beautiful Web if you've got no-one looking at it," Mr Balson said.

There are already franchised Web building companies in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Malaysia, three US states, Singapore, Russia, the Netherlands and India constructing national Web directories using the GLOBE graphics and structure.

Mr Balson predicts that GLOBE will grow rapidly.

"We're expecting that by the end of the year we will have at least six countries on-line", he said. New Zealand was the first outside Australia - being linked at Friday's launch.

"And we're expecting by the end of the first quarter of next year we'll probably have 20 countries on. My New Zealand partner and I are actually targeting to have every major Internet nation on by the end of next year.

"You see once we have a certain number of countries on it we're going to have people knocking down the door."

Using the GLOBE directory , Net surfers start with a map of the world and select a country. Then they are faced with a graphic offering links which include business Webs, event Webs, community Webs, private gems, corporate Webs and Global Heroes.

GLOBE has its roots in the Definitive LIFESTYLE Guide to (over 5,000) Australian Webs which already receives more than 200,000 Net visits a week.

Mr Balson said the GLOBE seed was sown by the initiative of the Ipswich City Council's Global Info-Links project which had introduced the community to an information-rich environment.

Global Web Builders and their New Zealand partner were selling branches of the Internet directory "like a McDonald's franchise" he said.

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