Marketing materials, product information, financial documents, management biographies and other information once found in outdated annual reports or Securities and Exchange Commission filings are now freely available online. But that doesn't mean pulling information off a Web site is necessarily easy, or even user-friendly.

Though high-speed Internet connections are gaining popularity, for now most visitors to a corporate Web site still get there via dial-up connection, which isn't fast enough to make the most of a live Webcast of a fourth-quarter conference call. While laptops and other portable devices with wireless Internet connections also are gaining steam, they're still not fast enough to conveniently download an annual report, for instance, in the form of a portable document format, or PDF. And it can be incredibly irritating when fat reports loaded with colorful charts and graphics clog up an office printer.

Indeed, sometimes there's nothing like a good old-fashioned hard copy, with space to make notes in the margins and actual text to highlight. That's why it's just as important that visitors be able to easily order documents off a Website and have them delivered via regular mail.

A sampling of the Web sites of five of the nation's most widely held stocks revealed a wide range of ease of use. All are equipped to take online orders for investor kits, but some are far easier to navigate than others. Content of the kits also varied, from very informative to quite sparse.Microsoft Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. received the highest marks overall, including most navigable sites, fastest delivery time and most informative investor packages. Compaq Computer Corp. came in as the most cumbersome site to get around, and both Compaq and Ford Motor Co. had disappointing investor kits. The least impressive kit came from was AOL Time Warner Inc. The media giant boasts an impressive Web site, chock full of information and it was easy to get around. But the investor kit offers precious little information about the newly combined company, which completed its merger last month.