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The advertising industry is on the verge of being shattered into a thousand fragments due to the knowledge explosion and the proliferation of new technologies. There are no more grand theories that hold sway over the entire industry. Michael Strangelove
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Click OK to receive our occasional Newsletter Sling ShotAs Internet Service Providers offering "dial-up" service tend to conglomerate on the West Coast, there seems to be a concomitant dilution of service. For example, when the Well combined with Hooked.net, dial-up consumers tended to suffer busy signals and a general decline in service. If you are a business, this kind of thing can mean the difference between life and death. There's a temptation - undersatandable - to go for a "business-only" server. These guys don't offer dial-up. Instead, they simply pump out your message to the universe. This tends to make your "signal" cleaner and more accessible. In general, they charge between $25 and $40 per month for a basic service, comprising around 10Mb of server space and 3-7 eMail addresses. About a year ago, a colleague of mine found Catapult.net. [Note: no list of "satisfied clients"...]. Sounded good. And was. Until recently. Catapult wanted to up the price for basic service. My colleague demurred. He wanted to change Domain Name Servers. In my experience, this kind of thing can be accomplished in about 48 hours. My colleague has been waiting for over a week now. The ISP he wants to move to has completed all the paperwork. He's waiting for Catapult to complete the transaction. Sounds like sour grapes to me - "Don't want my service? I'll stop you getting anyone else's." In the meantime, he's out of business, essentially. Moral: Sign up with a reputable "business-only" server - not Catapult. --John Blower
The Other 51%...As more and more women take to the Web, as a group, they are becoming a more tempting audience for online marketers. If this is a demographic for whom your product or service is appropriate, it's probably worth checking out a few sites which are aimed at women. Robin Nobles has compiled a comprehensive list of female-oriented sites, which I partially reproduce here. Admittedly, the selection tends towards the mainstream. But there again, the majority of women aren't "geeks" (or even "geekettes"...). The descriptive comments are those of Robin Nobles. 321.Women is a wonderful site with links to pages such as Cybermom, the Fashion Net, Relationships, and Her-Space, which "could be the best women's page on the net." You'll also find links to online magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Elle. Women's Pages is a network of resources, information, and articles of interest to women of all ages. They provide free information for entrepreneurs as well as articles by professionals. Women's Resources is divided into categories such as health, literature, music, and parenting. Women Homepage is a comprehensive web site featuring online writings by and about women, health and medical links, women's study programs, and sites for women in computer science, engineering, academics, and industry. Discover the latest styles and trends in fashion at Style Front, the Paris capital of fashion. The Cosmetic Report is a weekly report that brings you up-to-date information about cosmetic trends so you can make educated cosmetics decisions. The Fragrance Foundation was established by industry leaders in affiliation with fragrance companies such as Elizabeth Arden and Guerlain, to develop educational programs about the importance and pleasures of fragrance for the American public. Women's Bookshelf is the "cyberplace for women's writing." Shatter the Glass Ceiling is a webzine for women published biweekly. At this site, you'll find articles, book reviews, biographies, humor, health tips, information on home repair, recipes, and other links of interest to women. WWWomen! is the Premier Search Directory for Women Online. You'll find topics such as women in sports, women throughout history, health and safety issues, and shopping. I'm indebted to Philippe Scheimann for forwarding this research. --John Blower
We Wuz Framed!
Some site designers, having realized that frames reduce one's
viewing area by a considerable percentage, have now discovered - and are
using - the
The net effect of this nifty little command is to make your page look as if
it is UNframed. All the disadvantages of frames - slow and jerky
loading, inaccessibility for some browsers, possibility of crashes,
inability to bookmark etc. - with none of the advantages when used
properly.
Such a site is the somewhat grandiosely titled Web World Internet
Directory. I clicked on their Site
Promotion button. The frame - which was too wide for my meager
monitor - took ages to load, and was simply a further link to a list of
search engines and directories.
I mean, what's the point?
A better bet is Hal Pawluk's
site, which has plenty of advice on marketing and promotion online, and
inevitably spills over into design. The site opens - annoyingly - with an
.au file of a drum roll, which is a bit much at 5:30 am on only my
first cup of coffee. Some of Hal's advice is a bit contentious, like his
inexplicable enthusiasm for Adobe PageMill (yuk!), but, on the whole
is a useful resource in quite a clean and attractive site.
--John Blower
is the title of a
site put together by Vincent Flanders, who works for an ISP and also
teaches HTML coding.
"One of the ways to learn good design is by studying bad design" is
his core maxim, and his site takes us through the gamut of horrors: First
Impressions, Content, Graphics, Text, Java /JavaScript/Plug-Ins /Stuff Like
That, Editing Tools and so on, each morsel accompanied by pungent,
sensible commentary.
The site is updated regularly with new horrors and, apart from being witty
and amusing, makes commonsensical points about what differentiates good
from bad design in the New Medium. This site is one of the few which
uses frames wisely and with good reason.
I spent an hour there - looking for a reference to one of my pages...
Of course, some site designers seem to think that everyone views the world
through a 21" monitor. One of them is Andromedia, who "make ARIA,
the industry's only live, easy, turnkey and scaleable website tracking
software!" (their exclamation).
It sounded way kewl (despite my having to scroll right for
about half a mile). And it is. This software tracks everything for you -
names, addresses, SS#'s, the works.
Great if you have a large corporate site, and your department needs to
justify its demands for an ever-increasing Web budget.
Aria Bronze, which covers sites with 1K-25K/day has a suggested retail
price of a tad under $7,000 - which, in the realm of things is not so much
for a comprehensive site visitor tracking program.
Oh, yeah - I liked the name "Andromedia". Kinda catchy. Reminded me
of something, but I couldn't pin down quite what... --John Blower
Getting more bandwidth isn't realistically on anyone's agenda any
time soon. But preserving what we've got should be on everyone's.
The Bandwidth
Conservation Society has heaps of handy hints on how to slim down
your page so as to minimize download time.
I first came across this site about a year ago, and, it being a part-time
labor of love for its creators, updates are irregular to say the least.
Nonetheless, some of the points it makes - like "Do all my images need to
be 8 bits/pixel?" - remain valid. Full of practical examples and hands-on
advice, this is a useful resource for page designers.
Got those Domain Name Blues? The proposal by IAHC to introduce another SEVEN top
level domains is, IMHO, a recipe for fattening the legal profession while
pauperizing the rest of us.
There's an alternative. name.space can make your
company name your domain name, without any annoying suffixes. Douglas
Rushkoff says "...What had been a fairly limited range
of .coms and .edus now becomes as diverse as language itself, transforming
a limited resource into an inexhaustible one."
You need to download some software and fiddle with your TCP settings, but
Internic is cooperating, and, if enough people participate, this
could spell an end to those "Domain Name Blues". -- John Blower
Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.
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