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GeoCities.com

Review by Judy Richards
El Paso Macintosh Users Group
www.epmug.org

I could not pass up the opportunity to write about this site! I ran across this great website while surfing the "net" one night. The site is called Geocities.com and they offer 2MB of free web space to anyone willing to build a home page. Geocities is offering the space free because of the funding coming in from advertisers. The only catch is that it has to be a personal home page for hobbies, favorite pastimes or whatever your "thing" is. No businesses.

Geocities is set up just like a virtual city with up to thirty four virtual neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are put together according to interests such as Hollywood would reflect entertainment, Area 51 (science fiction/fantasy), College Park (college), Enchanted Forest (a site for kids) etc. The neighborhood I chose since my interest is art was SoHo.

Once you have chosen your neighborhood, you then have to pick an available address. This would be depicted as a picture of a house under construction and a notice of that address being available. While scrolling down the page for neighborhoods, you can also see the occupied addresses and "who" lives there. In my neighborhood, I noticed that I had a few artists up the "street" from me and a couple of writers down the "street. The whole feeling is that you literally are in a cyber neighborhood. Another thing to note, once you have selected your address, you have two weeks to get something on your site. If nothing is up, the address will be made available again.

Now to set up your webpage, you do not need any web authoring programs because you can use Geocities HTML Editor software located on their Members Utilities page. This is my first shot a designing a web page and I'm finding that its not as hard as it sounds. On the Utilities page they have three levels of the HTML program. Basic, Intermediate and Enhanced. There is also a page where you can copy buttons, bars and clipart for your page. And if you get stuck, you can go to various links on the Members Utilities page for help. You can also use your own editor and upload your design by FTP. I haven't tried any of that yet but the information is there. I did upload a few .gifs and .jpgs to my page and they seem to be working fine with no problems. I noticed a couple of other features that they have available such as forms and scripting but I haven't had the chance to "play" with those items yet. You can also add sound and animation to your site just as long as you keep it at 2 MB total space.

Once you have your page up and running, you can have your site listed in the WhoWhere e-mail directory, have your site picked as "Today's Cool Site or you can enter your site in the monthly Georewards Sweepstakes. You can enter the Sweepstakes by linking your banner with other "homesteader" banners. This link will pop up your banner on another Geocitizens home page which gives your site some advertising. You earn points by how many visits you have to your site. The points are entered into a drawing for a prize at the end of the month.

So if you've been riding the fence post on deciding wether to make your own homepage or not, give this site a try. It doesn't cost anything but you still need to have an internet account in order to get to this site. But from there, its FREE!

Editors: If you use this article, please send a copy of your newsletter to:
Editor, Amigo Border Connection
P.O. Box 220583
El Paso, Texas
79913-0583

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