Julie Beeler of Second Story (U.S) doesn't seem like she has a lot of dirty little secrets, but sit her down on a couch, and they come spilling out.

First off, she likes to work with passionate people who call her up in the middle of the night. "If they're so excited that they get an idea at 11 p.m. and they just have to tell you, then that's great," she says.

She's got another secret. Second Story is coming out of the closet.

It's about time. For years, the people at Second Story have been telling everyone they design Web sites, but they have little in common with most folks who do. Second Story is a narrative company, a group of interactive documentary makers. They're carpenters, poets, painters, musicians, and, yes, storytellers, but they don't design squat.

The firm — an army of six, not counting dogs — occupies two airy rooms in a loft building in Portland, Oregon's trendy Pearl District. They dress in jeans and sneakers, and sit at tables hand-built by the firm's co-founder, Brad Johnson. One member of the firm has a fundamentalist Christian background; another once designed cookie boxes and milk cartons; and a third, Gabe Kean, runs a popular design and poetry site called Born Magazine (U.S), sponsored by Second Story. They smile incessantly and are about ten times as likely to ask you what books you've read lately as they are what kind of cell phone you use.

It's not easy these days to be so down to earth, and, according to the folks at Second Story, they've gone to some lengths to stay that way. When the dot-com rash broke out in San Francisco, Johnson and Beeler, who were operating the firm from a cottage in Berkeley, fled to Portland to find some breathing space.

For three years, they developed interactive projects for media companies like PBS, National Geographic, and Discovery. They filled up a handful of scrapbooks with Web design awards before they stopped counting, and have been featured in every magazine from Communication Arts to Wired.

"Occasionally we take on a project where we know we're going to be slaves to the client," says Beeler. "And then we realise why we should never do that."

At a recent creative meeting, they opened notebooks and the conversation wandered all around the world, looping out to take in what movies they've seen lately, and spinning back to the topic at hand. They brought up author Jorge Luis Borges, a documentary about Lewis and Clark, the old Discovery Channel show "Connections," and the short stories of Italo Calvino. At some point, someone mentioned they might need to gather some pictures, and everyone nodded. The visual was taking a back seat.

The stories of Borges, an Argentine whose fantastical narratives employed multiple layers, are about as close as it gets to what they do. Their sites are generally topic-driven and not linear; they have myriad entry points, forks and levels, rather than plots and subplots. They freely admit that it's a learning process, hemmed in on the one side by developing technology and bandwidth, and on the other by the need to moderate the level of control the user has over the story. The more freedom you give the visitor to explore, so they say, the less your control over the experience can be.

They've experimented with several ways of resolving such difficulties. The most successful involves timelines and maps, which give you distinct beginning and end points, while allowing large amounts of information to be accessed through a single interface. One of their more developed sites is for Ken Burns's film "Not for Ourselves Alone( U.S)." It uses both a timeline and a layered structure. Each point on the timeline tells a general story, but also contains links that allow you to dig deeper into the topic.

"Whenever we work on a film," says Johnson, "we start out with this little black thing that you put in the VCR. Films are so frustrating. We take lots of notes and try to figure out how to break them apart and retell the story."

Nowadays, the firm is branching out from client-driven projects to producing its own projects. Second Story's new business model centres on creating content that drives traffic, and licensing it to companies that want the viewers.

"With the Web," says Johnson, "every company becomes a media company, and they all need good content to drive traffic."

Whether that can be turned into dollar signs is another story, and that one is still waiting to be written. Or, er, turned into an interactive multimedia experience you can view over the Web.

Adobe.com Senior Editor Joe Shepter is just glad he hasn't been written off yet.