Eon's thermoplastic material looks and feels like wood and you can drill, cut and sand it - but it doesn't fade, split or rot, and you can clean it with a garden hose. Visitors to Walt Disney World's Wilderness Outdoor Lodge in Orlando, Fla., are already sitting on Eon benches and eating at Eon tables. And you can order the decking at most Home Depot stores in Ontario.

That's obviously good marketing - and Eon co-owners Michael Curry and Stephen Clark say their Web site at www.eonoutdoor.com has played a central role in getting the word out. "Product knowledge is the key to selling a new material," says Mr. Curry, "and there's no better way to make knowledge available than through the Internet."

Thanks to the work of a friend who built eonoutdoor.com as a demonstration site for his Web design business, Eon has spent just $15,000 on the site so far, although Mr. Curry says its value is about 10 times that. The site doesn't offer prices or direct sales to avoid conflicting with distributors and retailers, but it excels at its intended function: product education.

Eonoutdoor.com targets three audiences - contractors and installers; retailers and distributors; and consumers. Besides the expected product pages and dealership locator, visitors can download an installation guide, view detailed product-testing results or check out a photo library of installed deck designs.

"The main thing people want is the installation guide," Mr. Curry says, but the site sees plenty of other action. Distributors download marketing storyboards to show retailers what's coming for next season. Consumers print the test results to compare qualities such as tensile strength, span width or slip resistance to other products. Contractors check the packaging specifications to discover product dimensions and quantities per package, per skid and per truck.

The site will become more heavily travelled this year with Home Depot's agreement to display Eon's marketing materials. "Home Depot doesn't tell customers which product to buy," says Mr. Curry, "so consumers have to do the research. All the marketing materials will display the Web site's URL, and the site will become that much more critical."

Mr. Curry is convinced that marketing materials in other media should always lead customers to the Web site. An installation video, for instance, will soon appear in edited form on the Eon site.

"Anything you do should also be on the Web site," Mr. Curry maintains, "because you can get a double hit for it. You'd have to print a pretty big brochure to show all the products, all the details and all the beauty shots. And you can talk about the maintenance benefits, where you sell and the press coverage. You can show a lot more on the Web."