This week webDotWiz has got some more sites for you to visit to help you start creating an online presence for your business. At a practical level, join Bravenet.com (www.bravenet.com) to use their free services. All you need is an email address and password to become a member.

It's easy to try out Bravenet's estore builder to put together some pages for your business site. All you need do is follow the steps that the online wizard takes you through. Before you start, you'll need to think about what you want to call your site because your site's web address will be in the form of yourname.golinq.com.

You'll be asked for the business name for your site, you can choose your site's style from eight templates, and you'll be asked to type in some text for each of the five pages that the estore builder automatically produces for you. After these steps, you still have the chance to make more changes, now or later, using the site wizard.

Have some fun with the estore builder - after all, it's a free service. Also in the list of sites for this week you'll find some reading and a link to webDotWiz's demonstration site at http://webdotlearn.golinq.com built with the Bravenet estore builder.

Remember those red and green striped canvas outside blinds? One street in a small town many years ago was left with all its houses having just the red stripes to keep out the sun after locusts swarmed through.

In this day and age, the Federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is hosting the Australian Plague Locust Commission web site. Here there's a locust bulletin and current news, current research reports, links to related sites, and, most importantly, a facility to report locust outbreaks.

AGWest at their web site is running the Locust Outbreak 2000 project to inform W.A. farmers and receive notification of outbreaks.

It will be all too easy to forget that the Paralymic Games will be held in Sydney over 11 days from 18th October. More than 4000 athletes will be participating and coverage will be on ABC TV and ABC Radio. As well, webDotWiz Online's companion site, Everything at the Sydney Olympics, will keep you informed with the schedule and a daily update of results.

"Every child has the right to play" is the theme of Olympic Aid, a site with strong support from athletes. It's purpose is to raise funds for disadvantaged children in Australia and refugee children around the world.

webDotWiz has on several occasions mentioned various sites where you'll find free graphics images. One you might like to browse is www.artgallery.com for good quality clipart and images for your site. There are links from Art Gallery to other sites which offer animated images, for example.

Cooltext is an online site you can use to create a text banner, logo or button. There's also 3DTextMaker where you can create a text banner in 3D with features such as rotation if you want. It only takes a few minutes to produce your work of art. You can make your task a little easier at both these sites if you have some idea of the type of font you'd like for your text because of so many options available online.

Don't worry if you haven't one of the feature-packed graphics applications because MyImager provides many of these online for no cost. Upload your file (there's a limit of 200Kb in size) and work on it to your heart's content - rotate, flip, blur, and so on.

You've probably come across sites that use the Shockwave player for multimedia presentations. Well, there are also a collection of games which you can play online or download and play offline with the Shockmachine at www.shockwave.com.

When webDotWiz visited, the top five games included Real Pool 3D, the daily jigsaw and Tank Wars. Note that the shock machine download in basic form is about 2Mb and requires a fairly fast processor running Windows 98.

Windows ME (millenium edition) was released on September 14 and you may be wondering whether it's worthwhile spending money to upgrade from Windows 98. Refer to this week's list of sites for reviews. The technically-minded might like to note that it's not possible to boot Windows ME into a DOS prompt at startup. As well, Win ME doesn't allow use of any real-mode drivers and will change the autoexec file if it finds any there on bootup.

Junk or spam mail is an almost daily problem. One tip is to not reply to that kind-looking offer to be removed from the sender's list. All that does is to confirm to the spam sender that your email address is alive and you've received the spam.

Another tip that may work in some situations is to create a folder in your email application for each person at home who receives mail. Then create filters so that each person's mail goes to their own folder. Then what's left in the inbox can more easily be deleted if it's spam. Another option is to use the SpamEater program, available for download from www.hms.com.

Looking for a different screensaver? Try something out of space, available from SoftwareBlast at www.softwareblast.com.

And if you want another site for free or shareware downloads, try Jumbo at www.jumbo.com where there are more than 300,000 to choose from. The site has a program of the day, a featured game and a weekly screensaver to help you choose from such a large collection.

If you're looking for relief from the Olympics and just want to put some humour into all the pressure that's built up, visit www.silly2000.com for Olympics silliness - it's plain good fun.

What about watching movies on your Palm personal assistant? A company appropriately named pocketCinema is developing short movies for your PDA. Meanwhile there is the 10-button remote being produced for all appliances in the household, there's the "no-look" remote and another company is working hard to bring digital TV to our PCs.

There's been much talk about government services being available on the Web. The US Government has just announced the opening of FirstGov from which all services are accessible. FirstGov brings together 2000 different government web sites consisting of about 27 million web pages. The US Government has also started to assign an email address to each US citizen - this process will occur over the next couple of years.