Pros And Cons Of Having Your Own Home Page
By Robert Moskowitz
With all the talk about the Internet, and particularly its graphic component--the World Wide Web--more than one hundred businesses and countless individuals per day are putting up their own Web "home page."
That's a small drop in the bucket, considering that every day several thousand people and businesses sign up to have their own Internet accounts. But it's significant because the Web presents an entirely new and very exciting channel for making contact, doing business, and presenting yourself to strangers. It may very well become the dominant channel for communications in a very few years.
As you probably know, the Internet is the worldwide collection of more than three million computers (many of which are mere links to large networks that don't get counted in this total) supporting as many as thirty million users for messaging, file transfer, real-time chats, database access, and other computer services.
The World Wide Web puts a graphical, or "Windows"-type interface in front of all that. Originally developed to aid scientists in their work, the Web is now the fastest growing lane along the Information Highway. Somewhere on the Web, you can almost certainly find anything you can think of: interesting characters, museums, galleries, schools, restaurants, and plenty of vendors. And once you find it, just click on it and your computer is quickly connected to the appropriate computer site on the Internet.
A home page can be any one of these sites. Most often, however, it's carefully designed (or at least intended) to function as a kind of table of contents or "index" for other pages and files. By scrolling through the home page, users can quickly and easily learn what information is available, and by clicking on "hyperlinks" to these other resources, they can send email, download a file, or review other information without typing a single computer command.
Costs are already very low, and dropping rapidly. Many vendors offer 5MB of disk space on their Internet-connected computers for as little as $25 or $30 per month. For this, you get the right to store your Web page files where they can be accessed twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week. You also get a complete list of the e-mail addresses of everyone who ever connects to your home page. For a onetime fee of another $100 or so, you can even create and register your own home page address, in the form of: http://my-own-name/ .
Neat, But Is It For You?
The Web's fantastic popularity is based on its tremendous ease of use, and its colorful graphics. What's more, the Web's use of hyperlinks, or connections to other computer resources, represents one of the first true applications of computer power to human reading, thinking, and understanding.
There are some drawbacks to having a home page on the Web, however. First, and most important, it's still not considered "safe" to spend money directly via the Internet. You can send someone your charge card number, and even split the number between two email messages for greater security. You can fax or email checks to people with the specialized software to receive them. There are even fledgling experiments with electronic money, often called "E-Cash," designed to be spent only on the Internet and backed by banks created for just this purpose. But because of most people's general reluctance to commit bucks via the Web, business is generally not as brisk as you might imagine.
Second, the Web requires vast quantities of information to be sent and received. Unless you're plugged into the Internet at a very high rate, 28,800 bits per second or faster, Web operations are far from instantaneous.
Statistics still show, in fact, that more than 90% of Internet users are operating at only 9600 or 14,400 bits per second, meaning that a Web page can take a minute or longer to appear on their computer screen.
Newer versions of the software for using the Web (called "browsers") try to address this problem by displaying text as soon as it appears, and letting you scroll through some of the Web page before all of its graphics are in place. Advanced compression technology is also increasingly popular, along with massive amounts of disk storage so you can download a particular page just once each session (or just once for all time if you like it enough to store it between sessions on your own computer's hard drive).
Since 28,800 bits per second is none too fast, and appears to be the practical maximum for dial-up technology over existing telephone wires, the Web probably won't take off toward its full business potential any time soon. Expect to wait until we're all connected through high-tech ISDN telephone lines, which offer much higher speeds for this sort of thing.
Web In Real Life
However, here are some examples of how the Web is already being utilized:
Jupiter Communications held its Online Marketplace '95 conference this past April at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago, featuring keynote speaker Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day advertising. Topics included online advertising, banking, shopping, and financial services. The conference was itself heavily promoted on the Web, and had its own Web home page. Attendance ran well ahead of expectations.
The 12th World Hot-Air Balloon Championship held a week-long contest in Battle Creek Michigan. All the news, gossip, and results were posted on a special Web page. The same was true of the America's Cup in San Diego earlier this year.
The American Red Cross has its own Web page. The address is: http://www.crossnet.org.
Insight Software Solutions is supporting a Web site where people can upload and download copies of crossword puzzles to be used with the company's proprietary software. Look for it at http://www.smartcode.com/puzzle .
Dozens or even hundreds of publications have Web sites established, or will soon. MicroTimes' home page is at: http://www/microtimes.com .
Infoseek Corp. has a service on the World Wide Web that allows users to search "more than one hundred computer publications, ten thousand Internet newsgroups, and two hundred thousand World Wide Web pages" much faster and more easily than ever before. The company will also make available information from Business Wire, CW Publishing Inc., Information Access Co., InfoWorld Publishing Co., Newsbytes News Network, PR Newswire, and The Reference Press, to name but a few. Check it all out at: http://www.infoseek.com .
The IRS has shifted to the Web, too. This tax season, everyone's favorite government agency offered tax forms and tax advice at several sites on the Web . Hundreds of thousands of taxpayers tuned in and got the information they wanted, without tying up the time of expensive IRS clerks.
The Los Angeles-based CPA firm Hargrave & Hargrave climbed on the bandwagon with its Tax Wizard on the Web. To see it, point your browser at: http://taxwizard.com .
Everyone's other favorite government institution, the US Congress, is going onto the Web at a rapid pace. Some Web sites include: http://thomas.loc.gov, which has points to lots of other government sites; http://www.house.gov, the official Web page of the US House of Reps; and http://ast1.spa.umn.edu/juan/congress.html, a Web page with pointers to email, phone, and fax for just about any US congressperson.
Multimedia catalogs of products from over forty of the world's leading merchants, including Tower Records, are available at http://www.shopping2000.com/ .
Dialog Information Services, Inc. has a Web home page at http://www.dialog.com . It provides a quick, convenient way to find information about DIALOG, and other resources linked to the page.
Compaq Computers now has a Web page for service and information. Check it out at: http://www.compaq.com .
And finally.... Now you can buy condoms via the Internet. For more details, point your browser at http://www.ag.com/condom/country .
Planning Issues
Clearly, it's not very difficult to put up a home page--it can be done passably well in less than a day. But just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. Before you touch that first HTML key, step back and ask yourself at least a few important questions:
Why do I want a home page? What will I do with it when I have one?
Who am I trying to reach with my home page? What can I offer them on it? In return, what do I want them to do?
Many people believe that home pages should be designed with full awareness of established marketing communication principles, including positioning, strategic planning, and audience segmentation. They claim home pages that don't make use of what we've learned in these areas start looking a lot like "information dumps," with little or no indication that the author has ever tried to consider the needs of those who will be viewing and using the page.
Generally, the best home pages are the simplest. Very elaborate or garish ones not only take a lot of time to download--discouraging some people from waiting--they're more difficult for you to keep up to date. And what can be more embarrassing than to have your Web page fall out of date?
Many successful home pages are organized quite simply, with a title, a small graphic, and an introductory paragraph near the top, all followed by a list of topics or--if you're posting a great deal of information--several separate lists, each containing fairly homogeneous or strongly related topics.
One rule to remember is that "negative space"--the absence of any graphics or text--is just as important as "positive space." Crowding too much into too little home page real estate makes for a messy looking, uninviting vista.
Programming Your Home Page
Once you've done the necessary thinking, questioning, and doodling, you can begin to convert your ideas into actual computer files.
Fortunately, the same person who originally developed the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) also came up with a simple programming method that lets almost anyone who can write a page of text convert that text into a Web page, complete with hyperlinks to other pages on other computers. It's an authoring system called HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
One nice thing about HTML documents is that carriage returns and extra spaces don't mess up your formatting. The HTML display software just does its own formatting on the text it recognizes, using the commands it knows. Almost everything else in your file gets ignored.
The software to do this type of authoring already exists, and has also been established for use with popular word processors you probably already know how to operate.
One of the simplest to use is an add-in for Word for Windows. Called the "InternetWorks Internet Assistant," it's nearly a megabyte of code that adds new menu items and buttons to the basic Word screen. Once you run the setup program, your original copy of Word is suitably modified, and you can convert between ordinary documents and HTML documents with a mouse click.
When you open an HTML document with the modified Word software, it automatically switches itself to properly display what the page will look like when viewed via the Web. You can also view (but not create) Web pages with your Web browser by pointing it at a file name instead of a real Web address.
There's another nice pair of programs called HTML Assistant, and HTML Assistant Pro, both from Brooklyn North Software Works. They enable you to write text and insert appropriate HTML code quite easily. They also allow you to check details of your code (such as references to other resources and so forth) before you commit your Web page to the Internet.
More programs are regularly reaching the market. For example, there's one called HoTMetaL for Sun Sparcstations, and one called HTML Edit for the Macintosh environment.
If you don't have HTML authoring software, you can still start with an ASCII file containing the text you want on your page. Modify it with any text editor simply by adding the codes to make that text display the way you want it to. But this is a difficult and tedious process not for the faint of heart.
Next time, we'll discuss what you do after you fire up your "Web Page Authoring Software."
Copyright 1995 by Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.
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Robert Moskowitz
Box 6375, Woodland Hills, CA 91365
818-224-4224 fax: 818-224-4343
email: Robertam@ix.netcom.com
Available world-wide for consulting, speaking, and strategic planning on a wide variety of white-collar productivity and technology issues.