A bit of Web history was made at exactly 6 p.m. (Pacific Time) on October 2nd last year. A 16year-old schoolgirl from St John in New Brunswick, Canada, began the construction of her own personal home page.
When the unnamed young Webmaster logged on to http://www.geocities.com and registered for free Web space, she became the one millionth "homesteader" at GeoCities.
If Yahoo is the king of Web directories, GeoCities is the emperor of "free" Web space. It makes its money largely from advertising, and has one of the four busiest sites on the Net. According to a report by Media Metrix last November, more than one in five Internet users visit its pages every month, and it receives over 500 million "page-views" and an estimated 90 million individual visits a month.
Even before Yahoo's move last week to invest in GeoCities (see story below), the site had quickly become a strategic crossroads in cyberspace. The Santa Monicabased company opened its doors in June 1995 and soon grew into the largest "community" of free home pages on the Web, with more than 1.3 million homesteaders. Its rapidly expanding rival Tripod (www.tripod.com) has 845,000 members with over 1.4 million pages (which implies that well over half the users have only one Web page!)
Basically GeoCities and Tripod give away Web space for free, in order to generate large audiences for their online advertisers. Commercial sites are also allowed, but unlike the free personal pages you have to pay for them.
Registration
Signing up for a new account at GeoCities takes about 10 minutes.
Step 1: Go to its site at http://www.geocities.com
Step 2: Decide which one of the 30 or so "neighbourhoods" would best suit your Web pages. These neighbourhoods are clustered into themes. So sci-fi fans are found in "Area 51"; "Athens" caters for sites about "education, literature, poetry, philosophy"; pages about showbiz and theatre are in "Broadway"; people interested in "science, mathematics and aviation" are bunched into "CapeCanaveral"; "WestHollywood" is for people who are "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered", while "Paris" caters for - you guessed it - "romance, poetry, the arts". Yes folks, GeoCities has quite an Americentric view of its "homesteading" universe, but it has plenty of users from outside the US, so try not to let those names get you down.
Step 3: After picking your neighbourhood, you have to select a "vacant lot" or unused address.
Step 4: Next, a fairly simple online registration procedure asks you for a few personal details, and you're up and running. Now you have three megabytes of free space to play around with - plus, as the welcoming page puts it, "a full set of tools, technical support and the finest sense of community in cyberspace".
Step 5: What's the next step in becoming a Webmaster? Writing and testing your pages. In sites such as GeoCities and Tripod, there are several ways to construct your site:
if you can afford to, you can build your pages while you're online, using an online HTML editor;
or, more likely you can write the pages offline, tweaking and testing them until you're ready to add them to your site. Then go online, go to the same HTML page-building facility, create a new page and copy and paste in the contents of the page you've already written.
or you can use FTP (file transfer protocol) to zoom your finished pages from your computer over to the GeoCities or Tripod server. Once you get the hang of using FTP software, you'll probably find it to be the quickest and cheapest way to transfer large numbers of files.
Step 6: And if you have been turned off so far by the idea of writing HTML code, there's another option (besides buying specialised software for Web page construction). Sites like GeoCities and Tripod also provide more crude, almost idiot-proof Web page editors, of the "click this button if you want a blue background" variety. You might not get the most elaborate pages in the world, but the facilities are dead easy to use. Mind you, GeoCities isn't the only service giving away free Web space, and some users complain of download bottlenecks. For alternatives, try the very good directory (and it's Irish too) which has loads of links at: http://www.clubi.ie/cian/ freestuff//fastsite/homepage.html