Building a Cyberhome

(This article was published in the Economic Times on 6th August 1998)

The Internet today is the fastest growing and most `happening' media, and offers enormous opportunities. People are no longer only satisfied with being on the Net. They want to be in it. The solution? Your own personal homepage.Homepages really began as a start-up page to put all your favourite links on, so you could just click and be there. But now we have a `favourites' column where you can bookmark all the sites you want. So that leaves a lot of space to write about you and yours and yourself and whatever else you want to.

Getting started on your own homepage is much easier than one would imagine. There are a lot of web-sites just begging to give you 4-5MB of space, for FREE (that's the key word as far as I'm concerned). All you need to do is fill out the forms at http://www.geocities.com or http://www.angelfire.com or http://members.tripod.com. What's more you can make money on it by selling CDs or books from your page and getting a commission from sites like www.amazon.com.

The angelfire home-page builder gives you the option of using the `basic HTML-editor' where you just choose your style and enter your text, or the `advanced HTML-editor' where you can set your creative spirit free. HTML-tags are as easy to use as a television remote control. Easier, in fact. My mother doesn't know how to use the remote control, but she's got her own site! Once you know what everything means, there's nothing more to it. HTML typed within the `<' and `>' brackets can make your text whatever size, color and shape you want, you can even twist it around in 3-D animation style.

You can put your favourite photographs up, greet visitors in your own voice, or play your favourite song for anyone entering the page.Most of the sites will teach you basic HTML, and you can even download HTML-builders from the net and customise your site without wasting valuable time online. And when you're done (you're never done, believe me) you can go to the web-site garage and get a tune-up. For FREE, of course. They'll tell you exactly what's right with your page and what's not, and how to fix it. If you've got a dead link, if your text is unreadable, and even what other sites on the net have links to you. And if you want to get noticed, you can submit your site to the main search engines - Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, etc.

There's always someone out there bored enough to read about your dog, and your opinion on Godzilla. And then he'll write in your guestbook (available FREE, of course, at `http://www.lpage.com') and tell you to visit HIS home page. Now you know that you're moving uptown in Cybercity.¨
 
 

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