It has been shown that the effective titania-silica sol-gel catalysts can be obtained from a modified version of the two-stage, acid-base sol-gel procedure with tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) and ethyl silicate (ES) 40 used as silica precursors in the first and second step, respectively. Porous texture of these materials appeared to be similar or superior to those of the corresponding ones synthesized using TEOS or tetramethylorthosilicate (TMOS) and this plus excellent surface homogeneity positively affected their catalytic properties which proved to be very attractive in the oxidation of 2,3,6-trimethylphenol (TMP) to 2,3,5-trimethyl-1,4-benzoquinone (TMBQ) using aqueous H2O2. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.