DATE: Thursday, October 23, 1997            TAG: 9710230512

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A19  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: DECISION 97

SOURCE: BY HOLLY A. HEYSER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   46 lines

WEB SITES OF GUBERNATIONAL CANDIDATES COMPARED

Glitzy. Wonk-ish. Low-budget.

Those words best describe the Web sites of Virginia's three candidates for governor.

Republican Jim Gilmore's site reaches the farthest, using the technology more fully than the other candidates.

Its glitzy features include:

An ``electronic bumper sticker'' people can download and put on their Web sites to support Gilmore for governor.

A form for contributing to the campaign, using a credit card.

A car tax information center where people can learn how much they would save under Gilmore's personal property tax plan, as long as they drive one of the four most popular vehicles in Virginia.

The glitches on the Gilmore site include:

Missing documents, most notably the complete text of Gilmore's economic development plan.

Out-of-date information, including a ``What's New'' section where much isn't new. As of Wednesday, the most recent poll results date back to Aug. 27 and video clips and texts of advertisements are no more recent than June 17.

Bells and whistles aside, Gilmore uses the site much as he uses campaign ads: Promoting the car-tax cut at every turn, illuminating his positions on various issues and bashing Beyer's ``negative'' ads and competing tax-cut plan.

While Beyer has waged a similar television advertising campaign, his Web site is a departure from Gilmore's.

It doesn't go out of the way to bash Gilmore, nor even to contrast Beyer's positions to Gilmore's, certainly not with big headlines on the main page, as Gilmore's site does.

It just sets forth Beyer's positions, his press releases, his endorsements and even a ``photo gallery'' of the candidate posing for grip-n-grins on the campaign trail.

In stark contrast to Beyer's and Gilmore's sites, Reform Party candidate Sue Harris DeBauche has a site that reflects the limited resources of her campaign: A single page elaborating her positions on several issues.

No bells. No bashing. But nonetheless more than most voters could have read about her in many newspapers. KEYWORDS: CANDIDATES GUBERNATORIAL RACE WEB SITES INTERNET

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