Web site and design is primarily the work of college and university students. Students can be hired cheaply, they're handy, and more often than not, they're inventive. Sometimes they're too inventive.

Some educators critique their current dependence on students, hoping for influxes of moneys to pay for professional help.

An over-inventive or over-expressive student, they say, may not foresee problems created for folks who lack all but the most powerful browsers. Simpler designs reach larger audiences, these university administrators insist.

Worse for them, when intricate-design students move away, or graduate, the complexities of their designs remain suspended in cyberspace, and newly hired student-replacements face difficult maintenance problems.

Several schools, such as the University of Kansas, are famed for making students major contributors to departments on its Web site. Some department-sites are run altogether by students. Other departments, however, discourage student-design involvement.

GayToday sources say student involvement has been indispensable to Web page creations in colleges everywhere. Educational administrators often admit to knowing little or nothing about the Web and often complain to students that they don't have time to learn.

Among students, ad hoc committee meetings sometimes take place between Web page designers, principally to exchange information or to make suggestions. If less effective designs need improvement, these committees, acting on university-set standards, are empowered to critique their fellows and to offer advice.

The committee arrangement does not dictate, which it is not empowered to do. It is set up to help and to disseminate general knowledge. Members are free to accept or reject ideas, but if assistance is needed, the ad hoc committees provide it.

The tendency to rely on the expensive talents of professionals instead of on those of college-level youths may obliterate, some fear, the one place--the university-- where Web-designers are apt to develop their abilities best.