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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