Surfing & Cruising

Make your own homo pages

if you are accessing the Web with a dial up account, chances are your
Internet Service Provider ISP provides at least l MB’s of free personal
Web storage Globalserve. as an example. offers 2 MBs or space and an
additional 30OMBs of transfer per month. Not many seem to take advan—
rage of this mostly I think. for lack of knowledge and/or interest. If you
have a creative side and need some exposure prehaps a little cash) why
not take a little time and get noticed?

A great place to learn about Web page design is Web Pages that Suck
lwww.wel7pagesthalsuck.coml, created by the author  the same book.
The site offers tips on what and what not to do when building web pages.
especially useful to novice Web designers.

ISP‘s supply a  tutorial and guidelines for loading pages to their
servers ie-mail them if you Can’t find it). Globalserve’s is located at
www.Globalserve.net/help/web/. AOL subscribers use Hometown [home—
own.aol.coml ~ free space and site building tools are offered to their
users.

If for some reason your ISP doesn’t offer Will space. GeoCities
www.geocities.com) will host your site for free. The West Hollywood sec-
ion is dedicated to gay home pages. it’s divided into seven forums with
thousands of personal sites per block. All the details on how to sign up and
and pages are available from the site. Follow your servers guidelines,
;eocities will not accept any pages that contain hate literature or nudity.
iyour ISP does accept explicit content. it may end up costing extra. The
eason is because of bandwidth — sites with nudity generate a lot of tral—
lc and the server may not be able to handle the amount of visitors.

Free Sites Network and Dick City are similar to Geocities except they will only host your site if it does contain nudity  in exchange for tree hosting you are required to post their
tanners. ceocitles has the sarrie practice. except with pop up advertise
nents.

You‘ve learned how to make a web page and how to upload to the serv—
:r— whats next? Getting people to visit. As usual. Planet out is the best
  to get noticed. The Net Queery section
www.planetout com/netqueery/l has a listing of personal home pages
Slick on “Add a Link”and fill out the information as requested. New lI$t—
ings are posted every couple or days.

Gayzoo (wwt\l.gayzoocoml IS a simple listing or sites modeled on a
Yahoo style design. The Rainbow Query iwww.rainbowqueiy.coml list is
divided by Bears, Bisexual. Couples, Leather. Men’s and Women’s person-
al pages. Smaq and MenontheNet
.MenontheNet.com will link to your site provided there is partial
nudity.

Once you’ve generated a hit of trariic to your site. turn your home page
into a money maker. Amazon books iwww.amazon.com) has an associate
program. Sign up. insert the proper HTML code. add a banner and get
people to click on it. Ha visitor to your site clicks on the banner and
makes a purchase, you can receive as much as a 15 percent Commission.
The Link Exchange (w\t.w.|inl<exchange.coml explains how to generate
traffic and make revenue from your Web site. .lust be careful not to place
an excessive amount of banners on your site.

Lastly be very aware or copyright law. A lot home pages are comprised
of images stolen from other sites or scanned magazines. The photos and
content on your Web pages should be yours or public domain well Posse
twww.a—w.orgl is an organization that attempts to tackle this on going
problem. They offer advice on how to protect your site and how to copy
right photos, stories or designs.

What do i do with my personal Web space? Starting this issue — I’ll be
posting Surfing & Cruising every two weeks I‘ll try and add back issues.
once I find them.