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Welcome to the 10-Feb-2000 Column
The inaugural issue! webDotWiz aims to give you hints, tips and ideas, from browsing the Web, making your own Web pages, joining a mailing list, or finding a web host for your site, to the latest buzzword and technology.
Look through the topics being covered this week and you'll certainly find something of interest. Have fun!
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| Start Browsing |
You've just signed up with an ISP and you've successfully logged on to the Internet for the first time. Where to start? With so many sites available, it's difficult to decide just which site to browse first. As a suggestion, choose one of the so-called portal sites - these sites have news, weather, chat areas, shopping, music, movies and more.
Once you've visited one of these portal sites, you can begin to branch out to areas you're particularly interested in, whether it be entertainment, news or just information. Some of the more well-known portals include ninemsn, Aunty ABC, Excite, Yahoo, Disney, and ZDNet.
You'll find links to these sites on the sites page. |
| Your Homepage |
Many of us make our own homepage and one of the favourite types of content is a photo gallery. You might have scanned photos from your albums or used your digital camera. A point often missed by many, though, is that for your homepage on the Web, you only need your photo image to have a resolution of 72 dpi (dots per inch). Why? Because that's the resolution of most monitors and any higher resolution won't make any difference to the quality of the image seen by visitors to your site.
So make a working copy of your original scanned or digital photo and use your photo editing software to reduce the resolution according to your requirements - 72dpi if you're putting photos on the Web. This also helps reduce the size of the file, and consequently, the download time.
You might also think about reducing the photo's dimensions - let visitors see a thumbnail of your photo and offer them the choice of viewing an enlarged version. |
| Buzzwords |
| We've become accustomed to using terms such as e-mail, Internet, e-commerce, the Web and so on. Have you noticed the new buzzword, e-tailer, that the print media are putting in their headlines? It appears that a retailer carrying out business on the Internet is transformed into an e-tailer. And what about e-zine and WAP? |
| Making Web Pages |
| More and more of us are making web pages and building sites. If you just want to put up a homepage on your ISP's server because, well, you've been given the space, or you're aiming a building a web site, you don't have to go out and spend lots of money to have a web page builder software package. The best free comprehensive HTML editor I've come across is 1st Page 2000. One of its features (apart from being free) is it has three different levels of expertise to work in. You can download it from http://www.evrsoft.com/. As well both Netscape and Internet Explorer have their own HTML editors, albeit fairly basic. But I would certainly recommended 1st Page 2000. |
| Not the Usual News |
Dot.com everywhere? A small town in Oregon in the USA, formerly called Halfway, officially changed its name to Half.com a couple of weeks ago. You can read about Half.com and why the townspeople changed their town's name by clicking here or follow the link on this week's sites page.
Oh, and there's (or that should be, there was) a gentleman named Mitch Maddox who has officially changed his name to DotComGuy. He's aiming to purchase all his daily needs by shopping online until January 1 next year. You can even see how he's spending his time when you visit his website, obviously named www.dotcomguy.com.
We're often overwhelmed with all the technological gizmos and gadgetry that we hear about. Here's one application of technology that's truly amazing whereby a computer has helped a blind man "see" - read about the Dobelle Eye by following the link from this week's sites page. |
| Headline Spotting |
webDotWiz wonders what stories these headlines could be announcing:
- PCs for workers: global trend?
- Ford winning cybersquatting battle
- Gates enters UK lottery bid
- AOL may want all of AOL Europe
- The truths about online shopping
- DOJ looks at eBay efforts to bar bots
- Big ears listen for signals from Mars
- Bug of the day
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